WWW7: W3C session stream day 1

general introduction:

jean-françois abramatic gave a short introduction to the activities and the organizational structures of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). the motivation of the W3C is to keep track of the development of the web and ensure open standards. it is hosted by MIT in the USA, INRIA in europe and Keio in japan.

the W3C will open local offices in different countries to get closer to its members.

benefits of membership:

• information: access to non-public information, e.g. development of new standards
• image: public relation
• involvement: help to set the strategy
• influence: submissions

news from the architecture domain:

goals:

• promote coherent web architecture
• automate information management
• stimulate promising developments

activities:

• HTTP-NG (Next Generation)
• Jigsaw, webserver written in Java
• XML
• SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language)

the future of HTTP:

HTTP V1.1 design goals:

1. provide a semantically well-defined caching model
2. support vanity names
3. limited numbers of TCP/IP connections

HTTP-NG is a generic application level protocol.

working groups:

• protocol design WG
• web characterization WG

the Web Characterization Group (WCG) tries to answer questions raised by the protocol group to improve the HTTP protocol based on todays experiences.

results from the WCG:

• 50% of all requests go to 1545 websites (there are more than 2'600'000 webservers world wide !)
• 5-7% of all requests go to broken links

work started july 1997, testbed should be available by end of june 1998.

Jigsaw: the webserver of the W3C:

• object oriented
• almost complete HTTP V1.1 webserver including proxy cache
• written in Java
• Jigedit is build on Jigsaw and provides a distributed authoring tool
• testbed for HTTP-NG

SMIL: Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language:

work started in february 1997 and is now in the state of a provisional recommendation.

basics of SMIL:

• declarative format
• human readable
• extensible
• XML-based

at present, there are at least 5 SMIL implementations available or at least announced.

referenced media objects can be embedded or external, referenced via an URI. objects can be showed or played in parallel or in sequence. they can be played only once or repeatedly, truncated or otherwise manipulated.

SMIL supports alternate behavior, such as various resolutions, with or without audio etc and hypermedia behavior.

provides multimedia support for people with disabilities or in environments where people can't watch or hear for some reason, e.g. while driving a car or in a noisy environment.

to the main page of this WWW7 trip report.

production note: these session notes were taken live on a SHARP HC-4500A running Windows CE with Pocket Word. they were then transfered to a notebook running Windows 95 and were slightly reformatted using HoTMetaL V4.0. this document is supposed to be HTML V4.0 compliant.

w3c_session_1.html / 15-apr-1998 (ra) / reto ambühler