At the International World Wide Web conferences, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) gives a series of presentations in which they review new developments to web standards. Brian Kelly attended the WWW8 conference and, in this article, reports on XML developments described at the W3C track.
The Eighth International World Wide Web conference took place in Toronto from 11-14th May 1999. I attended the conference, together with the W3C Advisory Committee meeting which preceded the conference, as described in the Trip Report published in the Ariadne web magazine [1]. This article reviews news of recent developments to XML which were described in the W3C Track at the conference. Note that the slides given by W3C members of staff are available on the W3C web site [2].
Tim Berners-Lee's Keynote talk, entitled Challenges of the Second Decade, reviewed developments to the web since it began, 10 years ago. Although the web has, of course, proved to be tremendously popular, there are still some parts of the original dream which have not yet materialised - in particular universal writing and annotations of web documents. Although much research has been carried out in the area of collaborative editing and prototypes have been developed (such as W3C's Jigsaw server and the Amaya browser / editor), there is little evidence of mainstream solutions. This is due partly to the need to address authentication issues within the web protocols, but also due to the complexity of the software needed to implement application-independent collaborative authoring.
There is arguably a need for a slowing-down in the development of web standards in order to get things right. The growth in the numbers of web protocols and data formats, and their inevitable inter-dependencies is resulting in new technologies being developed at a slower pace than in the past. (A concrete example can be seen with XML and RDF schemas, which were developed independently of each other).
The slowing down in developments (and it was noticeable that, unlike WWW6 - which saw the introduction and XML - and WWW7 - which saw the introduction of RDF - this year there were no new significant new protocols revealed at the conference) is made worse by patent concerns. As described in Ariadne [1] there are a number of patent claims which cover W3C standards. Software vendors may be reluctant to deploy new technologies for fear that they will face large legal claims for implementing patented ideas.
Tim concluded his keynote talk by describing the semantic web - an idea he originally proposed at the WWW7 conference [3]. The current web uses HTML as a format for providing access to human-readable information. The semantic web will use XML and RDF to provide machine-readable information, enabling well-defined data documents to be used as the basis for automated transactions.
From Tim Berners-Lee's keynote talk it can be seen that XML has a key role to play in the development of the semantic web. The W3C track on XML reviewed developments with XML and associated standards.
Dan Connolly's XML Update [4] gave an overview of XML developments. XML (which has been described as the ASCII of the future) will enable data to be reused. XML 1.0 became a recommendation in February 1998. Since then work has begun on several related areas, including Linking, Stylesheets, DOM, Fragments, Namespaces, Schemas, Query Languages and Signatures.
Although many of the XML working groups have been producing requirements documents, working drafts, etc. there is an awareness that there are many interdependencies in the work of the groups and with other W3C working groups such as SMIL, MathML, SVG, P3P, RDF, etc.
The challenge facing the XML community is the application diversity. HTML is the mainstream language of the web, easy to use and widely deployed. XML will enable novel applications to be deployed. Getting the balance between XML and HTML right will be a major challenge.
Dave Raggett gave a report on W3C's HTML Activity [5].
Although HTML has played a central role in the web, HTML must develop in order to cope with the growth in new ways of accessing the web (including digital TVs, PDAs, mobile phones, etc.). HTML faces several challenges: the prevalence of poor HTML quality resources; pressures to develop a subset of HTML (to support simple clients); pressures to develop a superset of HTML (to support richer clients) and the need to integrate HTML with other XML applications e.g. Maths, graphics, metadata, etc.
One of the developments we have seen recently is XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language). XHTML is a reformulation of HTML in XML. As part of the transition to XML, XHTML has the following requirements:
W3C's tidy utility [6] has been developed to help fix HTML errors and convert HTML documents to XHTML.
Other related developments include modularisation of HTML and development of document profiles. HTML modules are designed to enable subsets of HTML to be deployed, for example for use in thin clients. Document profiles will provide a set of machine understandable assertions which will provide the basis for interoperability. This may include details of the content types and formats supported by the browser and details about the browser capabilities.
The provision of machine understandable definitions of the browser is likely to result in the use of servers which can select a document variant matching the browser's capabilities. or apply a transformation to generate a suitable variant. The transformation may also be applied by a proxy server or within the browser itself (e.g. using a client-side scripting language such as JavaScript, or through the transformation capabilities of a style sheet language).
W3C are involved in the development of several applications which are based on XML and RDF. Daniel J. Weitzner gave a review of developments with P3P in the W3C track on Web Technologies Service Society [7].
A trust infrastructure is needed on the web in order to implement applications in areas such as ecommerce. W3C are developing a metadata architecture to provide richer context for web-based interactions. This includes privacy and authentication.
The privacy work, P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences), enables a web service's privacy practices to be defined in a machine readable format. This enables negotiations related to privacy preferences to be carried out between a browser and server. For example a browser may be configured to automatically upload personal information (e.g. email and postal address) to services which use the information to carry out the business function (e.g. deliver goods), but require user agreement if additional uses of the information are to be provided (e.g. notification of new services).
The P3P work aims to develop consumer trust, which will build confidence between users and ecommerce services. Once the trust has been established P3P will provide the seamless exchange of personal information, subject to the diversity of privacy policies around the world.
Several other talks were given in the W3C Track which are not reported in this article. These include:
In addition, on the Developer's Day (held on Friday, 14 May, after the conference itself had finished) the following W3C sessions were held:
If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
Tel: +44 1225 323943
Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
Address:
UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY
 Brian Kelly is employed as UK Web Focus, at UKOLN (UK Office for Library and Information Networking) at the University of Bath, England. Brian's responsibilities include keeping the UK Higher Education community informed of web developments. |
For
citation purposes:
Brian Kelly, "Report on
the W3C Track at WWW8," Exploit Interactive, issue 2, 20 July 1999
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue2/web/>
|
Issue Home | Editorial | Features | Regular Columns | News and Events | Et cetera | ||
|
| ||
| Go to Top |
A UKOLN Service. Contact Us. Copyright © 1999-2006 
|
Last Updated: 20 July 1999 |