Submission request to W3C (W3C Team Comment)
We, W3C members Akamai Technologies, Inc., Art Technology Group, BEA Systems, Inc., Circadence Corporation, Digital Island, Inc., IBM Corporation, Interwoven, Inc., Oracle Corporation, Sun Microsystems and Vignette Corporation hereby submit to the Consortium the following specification, comprising the following documents attached hereto:
which collectively are referred to as "the submission". We request the submission be known as the "ESI" submission.
Edge Side Includes (ESI) is a language that makes assembling resources at the 'Edge' of the network possible. Together with the ESI Invalidation Protocol and the Edge Architecture Specification, these documents describe a new effort to allow Web servers, content generation engines and Web site operators to take advantage of Content Delivery Networks and Surrogates (also known as "reverse proxies").
Akamai expressly disclaims any and all warranties regarding this contribution including any warranty that this contribution does not violate the rights of others or is fit for a particular purpose.
ATG expressly disclaims any and all warranties regarding this contribution including any warranty that this contribution does not violate the rights of others or is fit for a particular purpose.
In the event BEA elects to make such rights available, such rights shall be subject to the condition that the grantee shall not assert patent rights against BEA or any other company for their implementation of the W3C recommendation, and shall be provided "AS IS." BEA HEREBY EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ANY AND ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, REGARDING ANY SUCH CONTRIBUTION, INCLUDING ANY WARRANTY THAT A CONTRIBUTION DOES NOT INFRINGE THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS OR IS FIT FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Circadence Corporation ("Circadence") may own patents or patent applications that apply to the ESI Specification being submitted to the W3C. If implementation of a W3C Recommendation based on the ESI Specification ("the Recommendation") requires the use of Circadence patents, Circadence will grant, upon written request, a non-exclusive license under such patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, but only for the purpose of complying with the Recommendation and provided that the licensee shall not assert patent rights against Circadence or any other company for their implementation of the Recommendation.
Circadence expressly reserves all other rights it may have in the material and subject matter of this contribution. The licensing commitments made hereunder do not include any license for implementation of other published specifications developed elsewhere but referred to in this contribution. Circadence expressly disclaims any and all warranties regarding this contribution including any warranty that this contribution does not violate the rights of others or is fit for a particular purpose.
Digital Island expressly disclaims any and all warranties regarding this contribution including any warranty that this contribution does not violate the rights of others or is fit for a particular purpose.
IBM expressly disclaims any and all warranties regarding this "Contribution" including any warranty that this "Contribution" does not violate the rights of others or is fit for a particular purpose.
In the unlikely event that we discover such an infringement in the future, we will at a minimum license the rights to develop necessarily conforming implementations of the specs on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.
Oracle expressly disclaims any and all warranties regarding this contribution including any warranty that this contribution does not violate the rights of others or is fit for a particular purpose.
Sun Microsystems, Inc. ("Sun") will negotiate Royalty-Free Licenses under any Essential Claims reading on any W3C Recommendation-track or Recommendation-level specifications relating to the ESI Submission to make, use, sell, offer for sale, or import implementations of the specifications. Sun expressly reserves all other rights it may have.
"Essential Claims" shall mean all claims in any patent or patent application, in any jurisdiction in the world, that a W3C Member (or a licensor or licensee, with reference to entities other than W3C Members) owns, or under which a W3C Member (or a licensor or licensee) has the right to grant licenses without obligation of payment or other consideration to an unrelated third party, that would necessarily be infringed by implementation of the Recommendation. A claim is necessarily infringed hereunder only when it is not possible to avoid infringing it because there is no non-infringing alternative for implementing the required portions of the Recommendation. Existence of a non-infringing alternative shall be judged based on the state-of-the-art at the time the specification becomes a Recommendation.
The following are expressly excluded from and shall not be deemed to constitute Essential Claims:
(1) any claims other than as set forth above even if contained in the same patent as Essential Claims; and
(2) claims which would be infringed only by
[a] portions of an implementation that are not required by the Recommendation, or
[b] enabling technologies that may be necessary to make or use any product or portion thereof that complies with the Recommendation but are not themselves expressly set forth in the Recommendation (e.g., semiconductor manufacturing technology, compiler technology, object oriented technology, basic operating system technology, and the like); or
[c] the implementation of technology developed elsewhere and merely incorporated by reference in the body of the specification.
For purposes of this definition, the specification shall be deemed to include only architectural and interoperability requirements and shall not include any implementation examples or any other material that merely illustrates the requirements of the specification.
(e) A RAND License shall mean a license that:
(i) shall be available to all implementers worldwide, whether or not W3C Members;
(ii) shall extend to all Essential Claims owned or controlled by the licensor and its affiliates;
(iii) may be limited in use to the extent used to implement what is required by the specification;
(iv) may be conditioned on a grant of a reciprocal license on these same terms to all Essential Claims owned or controlled by the licensee and its affiliates. For example, this reciprocal license must be available to all, and this reciprocal license may itself be conditioned on a further reciprocal license (from all, including the original licensee).
(v) may be conditioned on payment of reasonable, non-discriminatory royalties or fees;
(vi) may not impose any further conditions or restrictions on the use of any technology, intellectual property rights, or other restrictions on behavior of the licensee, but may include reasonable, customary terms relating to operation or maintenance of the license relationship such as the following: audit (when relevant to fees), choice of law, dispute resolution.
(f) A Royalty-Free License shall have the same characteristics as a RAND License, except that a Royalty-Free license:
(i) may not be conditioned on payment of royalties, fees or other consideration except for the conditions permitted in the other clauses of the definition of RAND License other than clause (v).
(ii) shall not be considered accepted by an implementer who manifests an intent NOT to accept the terms of the Royalty-free license as offered by the licensor.
Vignette expressly reserves all other rights it may have in the material and subject matter of its contribution. Vignette expressly disclaims any and all warranties regarding this contribution including any warranty that this contribution does not violate the rights of others or is fit for a particular purpose.
The following are registered marks refered to in this request or the submission:
IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation.
The submission may distributed within the membership of the W3C free of any fee. The submission may be distributed publicly free of any fee under the redistribution terms expressed in the W3C copyright statement.
The following points should be noted as regards licensable technology involved in any third party implementations of the technology specified in the submission: None
We suggest that the Consortium hold a workshop to discuss issues surrounding the Web's infrastructure, including those addressed by the submission.
Depending on the outcome of such a workshop, we suggest the Consortium initiate a Web Infrastructure Activity to address issues in distributing resources from Web servers to other network elements. The focus of the Activity would be the creation of technical reports, based in part on the submission documents.
As the Web grows and gains acceptance, there is an increasing need to maintain scalability, reduce user-perceived latency and enhance reliability. Surrogates (intermediaries acting on behalf of the Web server) are a recognized means of offering these benefits; whether deployed near the Web server (as a 'reverse proxy') or throughout the network (in a 'content delivery network'), surrogates are an efficient means of distributing resources in a controlled manner.
Although there is pre-existing and ongoing work regarding caching and content distribution in the IETF (including the WREC, WEBI, CDI and OPES working groups/BoFs), it has largely been driven by web cache vendors. As a result, the development of mechanisms for Web servers to communicate metadata to surrogates and conventions that surrogates can exploit have been neglected, because the Web server and content generation communities have not been well-represented.
We feel that the W3C Membership represents these interests more effectively, and offers opportunity for wide implementation of resulting recommendations. W3C's focus on data formats, metadata and semantics make it a natural place for such development. By initiating work in this area, we feel that the resulting interoperability and increased functionality will enable the Web to maintain its growth.
This submission represents first steps towards that goal; it consists of a framework for the relationship between surrogates and origin servers, an out-of-band invalidation protocol for coherence, and an in-markup language that is tailored to caching, reducing the granularity of resource cacheability. Two submitting Members have already implemented the specifications in their surrogates, and others have committed to supporting them in their application servers.
Initially, we expect that the scope of the Activity would be limited to further development of the submission, including natural extension of the mechanisms therein, and alignment with other W3C efforts, including the XML Activity. Further work may include coordination with Activities such as XML Protocol and Semantic Web to develop means of integrating them into the Web infrastructure. Additionally, a workshop may identify additional areas of work.
We also would expect such an Activity to liaise with the IETF working groups listed above.
To help with this work, we expect to be able to provide the following resources to the consortium:
Should any changes be required to the document, and the W3C takes on the submission as part of an Activity, we would expect future versions to be produced by W3C process. Otherwise, we may make changes and may re-submit the specification for acknowledgement.
Inquiries from the public or press about this submission should be directed to:
this 13th day of June, 2001,
Mark Nottingham, Akamai Technologies, mnot@akamai.com
Fumi Matsumoto, Art Technology Group, fm@atg.com
Daniel Frantz, BEA Systems, Inc., dan.frantz@bea.com
John Basso, Circadence Corporation, JBasso@circadence.com
Dave Farber, Digital Island, Inc., dave@digitalisland.net
Arnaud Le Hors, IBM Corporation, lehors@us.ibm.com
Ronald Daniel, Jr., Interwoven, Inc., rdaniel@interwoven.com
Donald Deutsch, Oracle Corporation, donald.deutsch@oracle.com
Eve Maler, Sun Microsystems, elm@east.sun.com
Conleth O'Connell, Vignette Corporation, cso-w3c@vignette.com