The Consortium is pleased to have received this specification as a submission, and acknowledges the interest in such a mechanism indicated by several Member companies.
The proposal will be discussed at the W3C workshop on "push" technology in September.
That workshop will give participants a chance to comment on the path the consortium should take. At this time we are not promising any allocation of further W3C resources to this proposal after the Push Workshop.
This technology impacts URI specifications, HTTP, and includes anew XML mime type. Much of the functionality should be able to be provided by the Resource Description Framework currently being developed in the metadata activity. There are other components of the DRP proposal that have requirements in common with other W3C and IETF activities(notably DSig Manifests and WEBDAV versioning) and should this proposal be actively considered, W3C will work to insure the harmonization of the related activities.
On 1997 August 27, I received a message from Albion Fitzgerald of Novadigm Inc, asserting that Novadigm may have patent rights in this area, and revealing in their enclosed press release made the same day, that Novadigm sued Marimba in March 1997. I bring this to your attention.