Technology for the Web Marketplace
Daniel
W. Connolly
W3C/MIT
LCS
$Id: ww9510.htm,v 1.1 1995/11/01 22:54:44 connolly Exp $
(speaker's notes)
Technology for the Web Marketplace
There are few novel technologies in the World-Wide Web. It is simply
an effective application of ideas that have been tested and proven:
- Sharing information makes people more effective
- HyperText and HyperMedia are an effective way to represent human knowledge
- A direct manipulation interface (i.e. "point and click") is easy to use
- The Web Architecture is Extensible
The result: The web is now a vital, global information system,
and an exploding marketplace.
- Ubiquity, Reliability, Security
- Directory Services, Navigational Aids, and Reliable Links
- Performance, Availability
- Parity between HTML and Desktop Publishing
How Do We Increase the Quality of Service and Security, increase
Performance, and foster Knowledge Sharing?
Maintaining Confidence in the Technology
- People resist change
- Mistakes are costly
- Consumers demand quality software products
- Mission critical applications must not be compromised
- Founded in September of 1994 at MIT (some ARPA funding)
- INRIA joined as European Host in 1995 (some EC funding)
- Tim Berners-Lee came from CERN to be Director
- 12 Full-Time Staff joined since March
- Funded by Industry, with help from ARPA
- 80
Members and Growing: hardware/software vendors, content providers, service
providers.
See: The World Wide Web Consortium at
http://www.w3.org/
- Ensure Interoperability and Market Growth
- Bring together Critical Mass of Industry Players
- Balance Short-Term Needs with Long-Term Evolution
- Coordinate Development Resources
- Balance "Open" with "Rapid Evolution"
- Develop technology to increase Reliability, Security, and Automation
- Maintain Interoperablility
- Increase Ubiquity
- Primary Market: Technology
- Clients, Servers, Tools, Systems
- Working Closely with
IETF,
CommerceNet,
FSTC etc. in other Markets
- Consumer Market: Flowers and CDs
- Inter-Enterprise Markets: Business-to-Business Commerce
- Intra-Enterprise Markets: Internal Information Management and Commerce
- Coordination and Liason Activity
- W3C Security working group meetings are attended by major software
vendors as well as large potential consumers of the technology
- Protocol Review and Development
- SSL, S-HTTP
- Integration of security extensions with other HTTP extensions
- Code Development and Integration
- Export control, Intellectual Property issues are holding up development
of freely available security technology.
- Public Key Infrastructure
- Integration of Certificate infrastructure with the web
-
- Legal Issues are without precedent. ABA has recently released digital
signature guidelines for review.
- Netscape, Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, Time-Warner, and others
met to put technology in place to allow parents and teachers to control what
children see on the net.
- 1st Party Rating: Voluntary Access Control
- 3rd Party Ratings: Independent Rating Services
- Technology put in place to meet this need is extensible, and may apply
to:
- Copyright, Payment information
- Data Authenticity
- Reviews, Nominations, SOAPs
- "Meta-Information," URCs, etc.
- What comes after HTML forms and CGI? CORBA , Java, and VRML.
- Integration of W3 with CORBA and Desktop Message Bus technologies
- Workshop likely next spring
- Investigating vendor-neutral APIs and class libraries for web clients
(ala CCI) and web servers (ala CGI)
- Multi-party Transaction Services
See: Demographic feedback: Overview of Resources at
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Demographics/
- Standards for Hit Counts and other Advertising Metrics
- Need to Gather Demographics vs. Privacy Rights of Consumers
- Need to Conduct Dialogs with Users
See: HTML Working and Background Materials at
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/.
- HTML 2.0 is now a an IETF Proposed Standard
- Conformance Testing
and Certification
- Proposals for Applets and Embedded Objects are being unified
- Enhancements to support Security, Payment, and Copyright policies
- Style Sheets
for parity with Desktop Publishing Systems --
workshop in
November.
- Internationalization