Document Title: www94 Report by Henry Rzepa
THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON WORLD-WIDE-WEB
OVERVIEW
The conference was held on May 25-27 at CERN, Geneva, 1994 and organised along
the lines of parallel sessions of two concurrent talks and up to three
simultaneous workshops. This overview represents only those sessions I was able
to attend, and is therefore highly personal. However, all the talks, including
the plenary sessions will be made available via the cern web server. shortly.
In addition, the proceedings will be published by Elsevier in both a printed
and a Web form, the latter being freely available at no charge! In what
follows, I have not attempted to fully attribute to individuals all the points
made, but to try to draw themes out. Any errors of interpretation or fact are
entirely mine. I should also point out that these are not "formal" minutes.
Others who attended the same talk as me may have come to entirely different
conclusions.
MOST IMPORTANT FUTURE DIRECTIONS.
This panel discussion actually closed the conference, but in many ways nicely
summarises why we all met. The following points were offered by the main
speakers, and are arranged here in no particular order of preference or
priority.
* A Global Bill of Rights is needed to establish the rights and
limitations of all users of Electronic methods of information
delivery, and to recognise that Social Engineering in this
"Alternative World" is already occuring on as a result of
technologies such as the Web.
* The Web is currently mostly READ-ONLY, with great power vested in
"SysOps", who control the servers. Its original concept was of a
READ/WRITE system. We need to move into a more collaborative
environment with better tools. A Browser/Editor is a good start.
* The Web and the Net are now often thought of as synonymous.
* There are perceived but perhaps ill-founded concerns at the role that
industry and commerce play. All agreed that commercialisation is
inevitable and indeed necessary to allow the Internet to invest and
expand, but that the standards must not fall into the hands of a
single monolithic commercial organisation.
* Concepts such as "e-money", and evanescent digital signatures are
evolving. We can also expect messages such as "You have to pay for
this picture" to start popping up.
* Problems in areas such as "Deep Searching" and Persistent Naming need to
be solved urgently.
* Some felt that it would become more important for individuals to have
access to the Web than to printers!
* The enfranchisement of Windows users (via winsock 1.1 and shortly 2.0)
and maybe even Nintendo-Sega owners would on a very short timescale
increase Web availability by more than an order of magnitude.
* The Web is developing into 3D Cyberspace, with definitions such as VLML
(Virtual Reality Markup Language) being actively developed, and
standards such as HyTime being proposed to develop "timelines"
within the Web.
* The problem of network overload is a serious one. Perhaps developments
such as Prospero, and proxy requests from caching servers are the
way forward.
* Network agents and delegation are viewed with great interest, although
the interaction between General Magic and their "Telescript" and the
Web community is an unknown quantity.
CHEMICAL SPECIFICS
The www94 chemistry workshop was attended by 16 participants, two of whom were
chemists, and a number of moecular biologists. The diversity of interests made
for an interesting and highly productive discussion. The agenda was
approximately that mounted on
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/talks/www94_chemistry_workshop.html One point that
emerged during discussion was the cyclical and recursive nature of many
existing "chemical" servers. Only rarely if ever did a server indicate clearly
its "mission", and whether it was basically inward or outward looking. The
former existed as a departmental information server or window to the outside
world, and therefore consisted largely of links to external resources. Such a
server was unlikely to be of much interest to users outside the home
institution, since it would contain relatively little original material. There
would be little need for many external links to this server. The outward
looking server existed to "advertise" the department to the world, and should
therefore have a preponderance of original material. It was in the interests of
this server to have as many other servers as appropriate pointing to it.
Currently, there was almost no indication in most home pages of which of these
two any particular server aspired to.
The demonstrations of chemical MIME types and the use of programs such as
RasMol and XMol as 3D visualisers caused much interest, since such 3D
applications are not yet common outside molecular chemistry and biology. I was
particulary intersted in meeting with Mark Pesce (mpesce@netcom.com) who in his
own talk (and with Dave Raggett) propounded a three dimensional Cyberspace
defined by VTML (Virtual Reality Markup Language). The chemical applications of
this look immensely exciting. Mark also told me about a company called S3D
Corporation, who will shortly be bringing to market a set of "active" 3D
glasses designed to fit to the graphics board of Windows or Macintosh systems,
and costing in the region of $200, including the IR emitter. I will post more
details when the product is finally on sale in approximately 2 months time
Long talks with Phillip Hallam-Baker and Dave Raggett convinced us that an
attempt be made to incorporate at least some chemistry into the html
specifications. This would enable structures to be represented within html
documents as "active molecules" rather than as bitmaps as at present. In a
parallel strategy, the inclusion of cgi style graphics interfaces should lead
the way to ppm style conversions between the various chemical MIME types that
we had proposed in our Internet Draft.
FORTHCOMING SOFTWARE RELEASES
* Joseph Hardin of NCSA announced that the Mac Browser would appear
shortly and that NCSA were on course for NCSA Mosaic 2.5 this
summer, supporting Tables. The equation setting ability would come
later. The role of commercial providers was not yet apparent,
although some interesting comments circulated (not repeated here for
obvious reasons).
* NCSA are working on "Open NCSA Mosaic", including hyperlink passing to
other viewers, choreographing sequences of URLs, incorporating the
Z39.50 deep searching library standards, whois++ and integration
with NCSA Collage.
* An explosion of Commercial Web products can be expected in the next six
months if only a fraction of the rumours are true.
* Web Internet traffic has now overtaken Gopher traffic.
* Dave Raggett hoped to make his own html+ browser available later this
summer.
* A full WYSIWYG html editor, initially for X-windows/SUN, but within
weeks also for other Unix, and for Mac and Windows will be available
for free from NCSA. HTML+ support was not indicated.
* Web Browsers are moving towards integrating the http, nttp and smtp
protocols to support html, network news and mail in a single
interface.
* Real time incorporation of videoconferencing and virtual reality into
Web tools is on the horizon.
THE STATUS OF HTML
The partial uptake of the html and html+ standards as defined by Internet draft
documents has resulted in considerable confusion, and significant differences
in capabilities between different browsers, and even between different platform
versions of the same browser (ie NCSA). In an effort to rationalise this, it is
now proposed that the following versions of HTML be recognised
* html 1.3: The first stable version, incorporated into early CERN and
NCSA browsers
* html 2.0:This is defined principally by the capabilities of NCSA
Mosaic 2.4, supporting forms. Thus html 2.0 incoporates some
features of what was known as html+
* html 3.0: A new primary version number, including support for tables
and auto-sizing tables, text wrap-around for images, local
client based hot-spot image mapping, support for overlaying
multiple images and perhaps image scaling (ie recognition that
not all users have large monitors!), multiple submit buttons
for forms and background texture. Here, an attempt will be made
to rationalise "bad" html constructs. A suggestion was made
that version 3.0 compatible browsers do not support all "bad"
html, but that the user might have to "tidy" old html first.
The httpd servers would establish a dialog with browsers as to
what support the browser might have for specified html
documents. To assist this, it may be necessary for a new MIME
type such as text/html+; attribute=3 (for html 3 support) to be
created.
* html 3.1: This will include support for equation setting.
Future Requested Support for HTML
This represents an unordered list, with no attempt at priority assignment.
* Support for Proxy servers, to reduce network traffic (ie redirection
of URLs).
* Document toolbars, ie permanent non-scrolling tools to navigate
within a document, for example to go to a document home page
(as opposed to the browsers own home page).
* Guided tours and URL lists (ie choreographing a document),
incorporationg some way of printing an entire book or document
in a single command.
* Increased in-line support for other formats, starting with vector
graphics and JPEG, and perhaps even extending to MPEG.
* Local event processing (ie ISMAP).
* Tools for collaborative authoring of documents, perhaps within
combined browsers/editors and better handling of annotation.
* Better support for time-lines, as in multimedia, and perhaps via
adoption of the HyTime standards.
* Extending equation support to incorporate chemical structure
diagrams (that one from me!).
* The often requested remote file size attribute was generally agreed
belonged to the httpd protocol. It was noted that many people
remained confused by what was/should be handled by the httpd
end of things (ie the server) and what should be handled by the
browser (ie html).
* There was much discussion about better support for filters into html
from other markup dtds, and whether Microsoft would become
highly active in this whole area.
* Increasing semantic support in html. For example, the equation
definition should be capable of being parsed by a syntax
checker to see if the maths (or chemistry) is correct.
ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING
There appeared consensus that electronic publishing was not likely to result in
loss of subscription to existing printed formats. Many people still preferred
to have the latter, but wanted the speed and currency of the on-line versions.
In effect, on-line publications were selling a "service" rather than "content".
Much concern was expressed that html in particular could not express the
"look-and-feel" of a publication. Perhaps this might be handled in future with
"bootstrapping" documents that could establish a dialog between server and
browser such that a "look and feel" could be generated locally. There was a
length discussion on "filters" between favourite page setting and word
processing documents and html. The consensus was that html "pageless" documents
had their own style and artistic guidelines, that could not simply be created
from a printed paged dominated format. It is perhaps a sign of a maturing Web
that its own artistic requirements are finally being recognised. To some, the
issue of "filters" simply does not arise, it being more important to develop
better "native" tools.
Issues of copyright were generally recognised as being "difficult". Some
concern was also expressed at the lack of progress in long term archiving, and
how e.g. peer review would be handled. The presence of a large number of
publishers, and the general intense interest and extent of participation of
this sector seems most encouraging for the future, although few of the people
present were fully aware of where the publishing industry would make its money.
The recent messages that the NSF in the USA is intent on charging for traffic
is one sign of the times. Apparently, in the USA, the "real" cost of networking
is about 1$/mbyte, and in Europe it varies from 2-10$/mbyte. Imagine the cost
of downloading a few small MPEG movies!
NEXT WWW CONFERENCE: MOSAIC AND THE WEB
This is organised for 17-20 October 1994, in Ramada-Congress Hotel, Chicago,
USA. Contact http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/IT94/IT94Info.html for current
information. A call for papers is expected shortly. E-mail: lori@osf.org.
______________________________________________________________________________
rzepa@ic.ac.uk
Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY.
Tel: +44 71 225 8339. Fax: +44 71 589 3869. E-mail: rzepa@ic.ac.uk
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa.html. Sent via MacPPP/MacTCP using Eudora 2.02.
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