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The State of Web Standards Larry Masinter Xerox Palo Alto Research Center May 1996 Purpose of this talk Describe the standards process Survey current Web-related standards Introduce acronyms and buzzwords Describe

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The State of Web Standards

Larry Masinter Xerox Palo Alto Research Center May 1996

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Purpose of this talk

  • Describe the standards process
  • Survey current Web-related standards
  • Introduce acronyms and buzzwords
  • Describe relation to other activities

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 3

Organization of talk

  • Part 1: Current State

– Standards organizations – Overview of web-related standards

  • Part 2: Recent activities

– What's the latest news? – What are the hard problems?

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 4

Vision for the “World Wide Web”…

  • One network, everyone on it

– Interoperability across the world

  • Merged modes of communication

– Retrieve, mail, broadcast, collaborate

  • All media

– Text, sound, video, animation

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 5

Three categories of web standards

  • Content

– what are the objects we’re moving around?

  • Protocols

– how do they get moved?

  • Naming

– how to reference something not in hand?

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 6

But first, some words about …

  • Standards
  • Organizations
  • Politics

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 7

The nice thing about standards...

7 There are so many of them to choose from. 7 By the time things become standards, they're obsolete. 7 Real standards are set by the market, not committees. but... 4 Standards promote interoperability.

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 8

Standards follow rather than lead innovation in the cycle

Innovation, Divergence Standardization, Convergence

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 9

Who makes standards?

  • Standards organizations
  • Consortia
  • Companies
  • Individuals

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 10

Some Standards Organizations

  • Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
  • International Organization for

Standardization (ISO)

  • And many others: ANSI, AFNOR, IEEE, etc.

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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Internet Engineering Task Force

  • Defines standards for the Internet
  • Different rules, structure than most other

standards organizations

  • Formal relationship with ISO

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 12

Internet Society

  • Non-governmental organization created to

coordinate Internet activities

  • Umbrella organization for IETF

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 13

IETF structure

HTTP HTML URC ...12 WG Applicatons WTS PKIX ...6 WG Security ...6 WG Transport ...7 WG User Services ... 9 areas Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) Internet Architecture Board (IAB)

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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IETF Working Groups

  • Open organizations

– no formal membership, all volunteer

  • Most work happens via email

– may meet at IETF meetings (3 a year)

  • Small focused efforts

– published goals and milestones

  • No formal voting

– “Rough consensus and running code”

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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IETF Documents

  • Internet-Drafts

– works in progress, no formal status – deleted after 6 months

  • RFCs (Request For Comments)

– Archived series of documents – RFC 1796: “Not all RFCs are Standards”

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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IETF RFC Categories and Process

Standards Track Other Categories

Proposed Standard

complete, credible specification demonstrated utility

Draft Standard

multiple independent interoperable implementations

6 months - 2 years 4 months - 2 years

Experimental

not ready for standards track

Informational

Important but not standards track

Standard

  • perational stability

Historic

superseded or otherwise unused

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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IETF Scope

  • Internet Standards:

– Protocols – Data formats used in protocols

  • Not appropriate:

– Technology not directly related to protocols – Application Program Interfaces (API)

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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World Wide Web Consortium

  • Members are vendors and users
  • Paid staff
  • Develops web protocols
  • Hosts conferences

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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W3C and IETF relationship

  • W3C develops new proposals
  • IETF reviews proposals, resolves

disagreements

  • Not much overlap
  • Cooperation when there is overlap

– W3C staff participate actively in IETF

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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CommerceNet

  • Consortium with focus on use of Internet for

electronic commerce

– Develop mechanisms

  • security, catalogs, EDI, connectivity

– Education and training – Public policy issues

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 21

σ Standards & Organizations

  • Lots of players
  • a common goal:

Interoperability Interoperability

  • a frequent goal:

Market Domination Market Domination

  • Avoid the “tragedy of the commons”

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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〈 Standards for Web Content

  • HTML
  • MIME and Internet Media Types
  • Survey of other web content

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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Short diversion: What's SGML?

  • Standard Generalized Markup Language
  • An ISO standard (ISO8879:1986)
  • A way of writing

(ways of writing documents)

  • DTD (Document Type Definition)

defines elements and rules about them

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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Markup: saying things about parts

  • Semantic markup

<part-no>N1025B</part-no>

  • Structural markup

<H1>N1025B</H1>

  • Presentation markup

<font face=aslan>N1025B</font>

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

  • An application of SGML (more or less)
  • A way of writing text

that includes links and (mainly) structural markup with some other things (like images) embedded.

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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HTML design goals

  • lingua franca for the web
  • Hypertext views of existing documents
  • Simple, scaleable
  • Platform independent
  • Support for visually impaired
  • Interoperability with common editors

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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Why HTML isn’t just an application of SGML

It’s defined by an SGML DTD... … plus a description of what the tags mean … plus some rules about how to display things …plus some rules about interaction with forms and URLs … plus some rules about what to do if you see a tag you don't know

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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HTML 2.0

  • RFC 1866: IETF Proposed Standard
  • Lots of HTML (as of 1994)...

– structure, headings, paragraphs, forms, menu, lists, hyperlinks, embedded images

  • … but not all.

– no tables, fonts, colored backgrounds, or Java

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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HTML 2.0 elements

  • Document attributes in header

– title, base, links

  • Structure

– headings (H1 … H6), paragraph, address, block

  • Lists, Forms

– bullet, numbered, definition, menu

  • Hyperlinks
  • Embedded images

– simple, image map, image in form

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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… more HTML 2.0 elements

  • Phrase markup

– emphasized, strong – citation, variable, sample, keyboard

  • Limited typographical elements

– bold, italic, monospace

  • Forms

– small and large text input, select one-of-many, “radio buttons” – submit, reset, clear, with URL for action

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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σ Summary: HTML 2.0

  • HTML 2.0 Proposed Standard

has many features

  • It only has a subset of the HTML that is

now in common use

  • Standardization has been difficult

current activities & future in Part II

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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Other data on the Internet: MIME

  • Multi-Purpose Internet Mail Exchange
  • RFC 1521, 1522 and follow-ons
  • headers in messages to describe body
  • media types for registering formats
  • encodings for transfer
  • character sets

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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Internet Media Types (“MIME types”)

  • Standard way of naming data formats
  • Hierarchical structure with parameters
  • web, email, netnews applications

use MIME to decide how to interpret data

  • use instead of file extension (logo.gif)
  • text, image, audio, video,

multipart, application

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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Images on the Web

  • gif: Graphics Interchange Format

– 8-bit color, transparent areas; patent cloud

  • jpeg: Joint Photographic Expert Group

– lossy compression for photos, not line art

  • tiff: Tagged Image File Format

– issues over tag standardization

  • png: Portable Network Graphics

– calibration, hypertext links

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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Other content on the web

  • Full SGML

– catalogs, encapsulation

  • Page layout

– Postscript, Portable Document Format (PDF)

  • Video

– MPEG, QuickTime, AVI

  • Audio

– Basic, RealAudio

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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Other content on the web

  • Desktop applications

– Word, Excel, etc.

  • 3D graphics

– VRML and follow-ons

  • Interactive applications

– Java and others

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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σ Content on the web

  • Lots of innovation
  • Much of it outside of standardization
  • For now, that’s OK
  • Ultimately, it isn’t

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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σ Content needs standards

  • Benefits from open standards:

– Interoperability, more platforms & tools – Preservation – Cost

  • Vendors prefer lock-in

– sell more tools, software libraries, training, etc.

  • Demand open formats

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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〈 Network Protocols for the Web

  • There are mainly three things people do on

the net

– send (email) – get (web) – broadcast (news)

Of course, there’s more:

real time interaction, pay for things, share secrets, query databases, etc.

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

  • Started as a simple protocol, designed for the

1990 vision of the World Wide Web

  • http://widget.com/product.html

– open connection to widget.com – send “GET /product.html” – read headers – read body – close connection

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HTTP/1.0 added features

  • Multiple content-types

– Accept, language, charset, content-type

  • More information

– User-Agent, From, error codes

  • Simple caching

– last-modified, if-modified-since

  • Basic Authorization

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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HTTP/1.0 specification

  • IETF Informational RFC

(Approved March 28, but RFC not assigned as of April 27)

  • HTTP as it was practiced in 1995
  • Many features “listed but not described”

Current implementations differed in interpretation too much

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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σ HTTP standard

  • HTTP/1.1: Proposed Standard soon

– Clarify ambiguities in HTTP/1.0 – Improve performance and load on Internet

  • HTTP/1.2

– things that didn’t make 1.1

  • HTTP-NG

– redesign rather than incremental – distributed object systems ?

… more in part II

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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Other related protocol work

  • Secure HTTP (S-HTTP)

– proposed standard soon

  • Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

– and variations

  • Internet Payment

– no standards yet

  • Voluntary Access Control

– charter, but no proposal forwarded yet

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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〈 Identifiers in the Web

  • URL: locations

– New York Public Library, second floor, third aisle, second shelf, third book from left

  • URN: location-independent names

– QP:475.L95; ISBN:0-19-854529-0

  • URC: descriptions

– genre: book, title: The Ecology of Vision; author: J.N.Lythgoe; Date: 1979; Publisher: Clarendon Press, Oxford

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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Uniform Resource Locators

  • RFC 1630: Uniform Resource Identifiers in

the World Wide Web

  • RFC 1736: Functional Recommendations for

Internet Resource Locators

  • RFC 1738: Uniform Resource Locators

– Proposed Standard

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 47

URL Requirements

An object that describes the location of a resource

  • Global scope
  • parsable
  • transportable in many contexts
  • extensible
  • not loaded with other information

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URL Proposed Standard

  • limited repertoire of characters

– not all of ASCII – encoding for bytes that can’t be directly represented as one of those characters

phrase%20with%20spaces

  • scheme:scheme-specific-part

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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Some URL schemes

  • http://host.dom/path
  • ftp://host.dom/path
  • gopher://host.dom/selector
  • news:group.name
  • news:article-id
  • mailto:email-name@host.dom
  • file:///C:/dos/path
  • telnet://host.dom

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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URLs in plain text

  • Recommendations

– <URL:http://host.dom/path/part> – no hyphens when line breaks

  • Does a name need a name?

– is "tel:" part of your telephone number?

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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Relative URLs

  • RFC 1808: Relative Uniform Resource

Locators

../image.gif ./dir1/dir2/sample

  • “base” + “relative URL”

=> “absolute URL”

  • Defines what “base” is for various contexts
  • Not defined in terms of scheme

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Uniform Resource Names

  • RFC 1737: Functional Requirements for

Uniform Resource Names

  • location-independent designators
  • Requirements

– global scope, persistent, scaleable

…more in Part II

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 53

URC: Uniform Resource Characteristics

  • Syntax for carrying metadata

– Title

  • A standard set of tags useful for describing

Internet resources

  • Standards work:

– URC working group forming

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 54

σ References on the Web

  • URLs are used widely

– some minor issues with new URL schemes

  • URN and URC work has been slow

– innovation before standardization

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σ Summary, Part I

  • Many organizations and people are involved

in producing standards

  • Standards are progressing for

– data: HTML – protocols: HTTP – references: URL

Part II will cover more about current activities and difficult problems

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 56

The State of Web Standards Part II

Larry Masinter Xerox Palo Alto Research Center May 1996

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SLIDE 57

Overview of Part II

Recent events and current activities

  • Content

– beyond HTML 2.0

  • Protocols

– HTTP and follow-ons

  • References

– URLs, URNs, URCs

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 58

HTML Working Group activity

  • Tables
  • File Upload
  • Internationalization
  • Embedded objects
  • Extensions

… but HTML-WG to finish current work and close, W3C will continue activities

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 59

HTML Tables

  • February 1, 1996 draft

draft-ietf-html-tables-06.txt

  • Recent changes include:

– more formatting control – incremental display – compatibility with popular browsers – compatibility with CALS

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 60

File Upload

  • RFC 1867 (Experimental)
  • Add a way that a form can ask a user for a

file as well as data to be typed in

<INPUT TYPE=FILE>

  • A better encoding for data returned from

filling out forms (multipart/form-data)

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 61

HTML Internationalization

  • Extended character sets

– SGML numeric character references &#1234; always refer to ISO 10646 – MIME charset specifies encoding

  • LANG attribute for noting language of

sections in multi-lingual text

  • Form submission
  • Minor extra enhancements

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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Internationalization problems:

  • Non-ASCII characters in URLs
  • Non-ASCII simple query forms
  • Interaction with <FONT> and style sheets

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 63

HTML Style and Style Sheets

  • Presentation descriptions

– In a separate resource – In the HTML head – Inline on each element

  • How are styles described?

– Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – Other proposals?

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 64

The debate over inline style (<FONT> or equivalent)

4 People want it 8 They’ll misuse it 4 Inline style displays faster incrementally 8 Precomputed styles 4 It’s easier to enter inline markup 8 Automated tools make styles just as easy 4 “Give them rope” 8 “They’ll hang themselves”

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Compound Documents in HTML

  • Many tags with similar purpose

– EMBED, FIG, IMG, OBJECT, APPLET

  • Can these be merged?

– several proposals made – convergence is elusive

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SLIDE 66

HTML Link model

  • Beyond <A HREF="…">
  • Showing relationships internally

REL=MADE, REL=PREVIOUS

  • Redefining button-bar elements

<LINK REL=xxx HREF="…">

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 67

HTML Feature identification

  • Some mechanism of registering HTML

extensions

  • Some mechanism of delivering HTML with

conditional features “if you do 12-dimensional tables, use this; if not, use this instead”

  • Possibly some mechanism of client/server

negotiation for conditional features

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 68

HTML and IETF

  • IETF usually does protocols,

not data formats

  • HTML/2.0 was important enough to be taken

up by IETF

  • HTML-WG was behind schedule and not

making good progress

  • Industry was going different directions

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SLIDE 69

σ HTML Standards status

  • Standardization has been hard
  • Probably won’t be a HTML 3.0 standard
  • IETF HTML-WG to close

– finish current activities; extensions registration

  • W3C and others to develop features
  • Standardization to lag innovation

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SLIDE 70

Other media standards

  • MIME revision in progress

New hierarchical name space for vendor-defined data types

application/vnd.ms-excel

  • New (patent-free) compression mechanisms
  • Much activity in multimedia, outside

standard organizations

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σ Content: Registration vs. Standardization

  • Meta-standard: a standard way of saying

which non-standard thing you did

  • A way to solve impasse when standardization

is not possible

  • Register your types!
  • Not a substitute for convergence

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〈 The problems with HTTP

  • HTTP traffic clogs Internet
  • TCP/IP designed for “congestion control”
  • Some trans-ocean links are always congested
  • Internet routing caches not useful:

too many short connections

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 73

Things are more complex now

  • Multiple objects per click
  • Many more users: HTTP dominates traffic
  • Multiple connections: self-congestion
  • Spiders and search engines
  • Proxies, caches, shopping baskets

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 74

Prospective growth

  • To meet projected demand, web capacity

needs to increase 10,000-fold.

  • Improvements in infrastructure will result in

at most 100 times more capacity.  Protocols and use of network need to be 100 times more efficient.

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 75

Toward better web performance

  • Persistent connections
  • Multiplexed connections
  • Protocol improvements to allow caching

reliably

  • Deployment of caches by national networks,

Internet Service Providers

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 76

HTTP/1.1 Highlights

  • HOST header
  • caching
  • content negotiation
  • byte ranges
  • state and sessions
  • persistent connections

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 77

Other HTTP work

  • extensions, demographics
  • feature negotiation

– Media type parameters – Display size, color

  • beyond access

– version management – search

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 78

HTTP-NG

  • “Next Generation” design
  • Not required to be compatible
  • Design goals:

– simple – performance – asynchronous operation – mandatory display

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 79

HTTP and distributed objects

  • Specify protocol with formal specification

language

  • Tune transport for situation
  • Allow multiple transports
  • ILU: Inter-Language Unification

– Distributed object technology – Freely available from Xerox – CORBA compatible

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 80

Web Security

  • WTS working group

– S-HTTP to be Proposed Standard

  • Connection-based security

– SSL

  • Digest Authentication
  • Payment on the Internet

– IPAY-WG?

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 81

Access control and ratings

  • Rating of entertainment content for adult

themes

  • How to deal with cultural differences
  • Multiple rating services
  • Voluntary Access Control working group

didn’t start

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 82

σ Web network protocols

  • Save the Internet from the Web!

– Local decisions can have global impact

  • Many features still needed
  • The “tragedy of the commons” is

still a threat

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 83

〈 References in the Internet

  • New URL schemes
  • URNs in development
  • URC syntax developments
  • Unsolved problems

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 84

New URL schemes

  • nttp://host/article-id
  • z39.50 URL schemes
  • ldap: for Light-Weight Directory Access

Protocol

  • data:image/gif,,bbacd01xyz
  • non-standard URLs

– about:mozilla, aol:word, palace://host.dom

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 85

Uniform Resource Names (URN)

  • name independent of location; allows for

replication, migration

  • separate problems of

naming authority and name assignment resolution mechanism: finding information about the thing named

– location(s) – metadata – content

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 86

URN naming mechanisms

  • A common syntax

urn:hdl:cnri.dlib/august95 urn:lifn:some.domain:anything-goes-here urn:path:/A/B/C/doc.html urn:inet:library.bigstate.edu:aj17-mcc

  • Several different experimental resolution

mechanisms Still experimental

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 87

Uniform Resource Characteristics (URCs)

  • describe attributes (title, author, data)
  • useful for making a citation
  • URC working group developing charter

– structure of resource descriptions – at least two external syntax representations

Many previous standards to choose from

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 88

Some unsolved problems

  • stuff goes away

– Material behind URLs disappears

  • pimples.com

– vanity domains for billboard use

  • Apple Computer and Apple Music

– conflicts over short names

  • urn:hdl:MTV/I_quit

– how does authority migrate?

  • http://www.métro.paris.fr/métro

– Non-ASCII names

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 89

σ Current Web Standards

  • Lots of activity
  • Lots of innovation
  • Lots of bad ideas as well as good ones
  • Shake-out will take a long time

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 90

σ The Future

  • Innovation leads, standards follow

– This will not end

  • Organizations adapt too

– IETF, ISO are changing, albeit slowly

  • Convergence is not inevitable

– Things could worse instead of better – You can help

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May 1996 Larry Masinter The State of Web Standards

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SLIDE 91

The State of Web Standards

Larry Masinter Xerox Palo Alto Research Center May 1996