THE WEB STANDARDS PROJECT (WaSP) is a collective effort of web
developers, tool developers, and end users.
Their mission is to stop the fragmentation of the web,
by persuading the browser makers that common standards
are in everyone's best interest.
For a fairly standards-compliant browser, see
Opera -
a user-friendly, versatile, and fast Internet/intranet browser
that also offers a newsreader and an email program.
Currently only available for the Microsoft Windows environment,
Opera is very small (a little more than 1MB to download),
extremely fast on slow (386/8MB), as well as fast machines.
Opera is very close to the HTML 3.2 standard,
making it a useful reference browser for web designers tired of
adapting their pages to either of the competitive browsers.
Opera is a good choice for users with a handicap; it can be navigated
with the keyboard only, which plays a more integral role in surfing.
WDVL's master list of all XML-related specifications and proposals,
developed by or submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
This list also contains domain-specific XML vocabularies,
some of which have not yet been submitted to the W3C for consideration.
Addressing is one of the fundamental technologies in the web.
URIs, or Uniform Resouce Identifiers, are the technology for addressing
documents on the web. It is an extensible technology: there are a
number of existing addressing schemes, and more may be
incorporated over time.
For visions like the Web replacing television to become a reality,
several extensions to Web technology are required. The protocol used
on the Web today (http) is known to be unsuitable for transmitting data
with real-time constraints like audio and video.
An audio/video-enhanced Web should integrate RTP (Real Time Transport
Protocol), a protocol developed by the Internet standardisation body
(the
IETF),
with participation of INRIA's networking research group at
Sophia-Antipolis. Moreover, authors of Web-based multimedia
presentation must be able to express the notion of time and the
synchronization between different media. Finally, appropriate URL
schemes must be defined in order to be
able to establish hyperlinks to audio and video resources.
The emergence of the World Wide Web has made it possible for
individuals with appropriate computer and telecommunications equipment
to interact as never before. The Web is the stepping stone, the
infrastructure that will pave the way for next generations interfaces.
As with any new interface, challenges...sometimes barriers, are
presented to people with disabilities. This site is devoted by the W3C
to focus on the developments and issues as they relate to implementing
accessibility to the Web for people with disabilities.
W3C wants to ensure that graphical web clients have the necessary font
resources to make rich presentations in many languages. This document
contains some of their ideas and
information on this issue as well as relevant links.
The World-Wide Web is a multimedia information space. This means that
one of the design issues is dealing with various data formats.
In addition to HTML and other textual formats, since the widespread
availability of NCSA Mosaic and other visual interfaces
to the web, more and more of the web's information is represented or
augmented with data in any number of popular graphics formats.
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) has been in use by the World
Wide Web global information initiative since 1990. HTTP is an
application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia
information systems. It is a generic, object-oriented protocol
which can be used for many tasks, such as name servers and distributed
object management systems, through extension of its request methods
(commands). A feature of HTTP is the typing and negotiation of data
representation, allowing systems to be built independently
of the data being transferred.
Much has been learned about HTTP's performance, and also many problems
with its design have also been learned. While many of these problems
can be fixed within the context of the current MIME based protocol,
others are difficult or impossible to fix given the constraints of MIME.
W3C are working on a design to replace the HTTP 1.X family of
protocols; this currently is called HTTP-NG. It is part of a
larger problem of general web transport.
The World Wide Web currently has a severe bias toward English and the
western-european writing system. But modern business, research, and
interprersonal communication is increasingly conducted in other writing
systems and languages. The Web must be enhanced
to meet the needs of the global community.
Modern information systems tend toward distributed hypermedia
applications. The web is no exception. Distributed applications have a
few more wrinkles than conventional applications: they span address
spaces, hardware architectures, and even administrative domains.
Techniques for distributing applications across address spaces include
simple RPC systems, distributed object systems such as CORBA, and
hybrid systems such as DCE (not to mention session-oriented protocols
like NNTP, SMTP, and even HTTP to some extent).
This is an investigation of the integration of distributed object
technologies with the web, and the duality between application
programmers' interfaces (APIs) and network
protocols.
PICS is an infrastructure for associating labels with Internet content.
It was originally designed to help parents and teachers control what
children access on the Internet, but it also facilitates other uses
for labels, including code signing, privacy, and
intellectual property rights management.
W3C produces a set of Web applications in order to demonstrate and
experiment with the development of new Web recommendations and
specifications. All W3C software is released under the W3C rules
for software distribution which means that all W3C members have full
access to the release one month before it becomes publicly available.
The software, after public release,
is freely available for any use by anyone.
W3C's Team of experts works with its Members to advance the state of
the art in each of the three Domains: User Interface, Technology &
Society, and Architecture. Each Domain is responsible for investigating
and leading development in several Activity Areas which are critical
to the Web's global evolution and interoperability.
Specifications developed within W3C must be formally approved by the
Membership. Consensus is reached after a specification has proceeded
through the review stages of Working Draft, Proposed Recommendation, and
Recommendation.
As new issues arise from Members, resources are reallocated to new areas
to ensure that W3C remains focused on topics most critical to the Web's
interoperability and growth.
TOG award the
Open Brand to
products that conform to the standard specifications.
Established over ten years ago, the Open Brand ensures that products
fulfil all the criteria of open computing. Represented by the "X" mark,
the Open Brand provides the purchaser with a binding supplier guarantee
that each registered product not only conforms to open standards but
will continue to conform.
Their Network Computer Brand
is backed by an online test suite, now available for free public access.
(IETF) publishes specifications on Internet protocols
such at TCP/IP.
Its many specifications and RFC (Request for Comment) documents are
available via ftp at
ftp://ds.internic.net/std/ and
ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/
You can review the index.txt file in each of these directories to find
a specific spec.
is a non-governmental international organization for Internet
technologies and applications.
It provides Internet statistics, market research, public
information, and historical materials.
