In order to promote open communication channels within the consortium, the W3C plans to make available names and contact information of the official representatives of member organizations.
On October 15, 1995, the W3C would like to publish the following information for each member organization, on the membership list available to W3C members only:
If you do not wish to have the above information published, please contact Susan Hardy at <susan@w3.org> before October 15, 1995.
The W3C Development Team is proud to release to members an alpha version of the new design of the W3C Reference Library.
Extensive work has been put into producing a new architecture for the Library in order to support advanced features like multiplexed I/O, DNS cache, and persistent connections and, most important, to provide a well-defined API for easy use of the code base. We have now reached a landmark in this process and would like to present the result to the W3C members in order to get feedback and to initiate a running dialog for the future development. This release contains an extensive set of new features of which the highlights are:
You can get a "hands-on" overview of the Library by reading the new quick guide which explains step by step how to get started writing an application on top of the Library. We also have a separate mailing list called w3c-lib@w3.org for discussion of the W3C Reference Library. If you have not followed this list before then please have a look at the mailing list archive.
The main criteria behind the new design of the W3C Reference Library was to make it easily extendible as new Internet standards evolve for transportation and representation of data objects. It is based on the idea of being able to dynamically "plug-in" new modules without touching the inner parts of the Library. On platforms that support dynamic linking this can be used to change the functionality of an application completely at runtime. Eventually the Library can be extended to support some of the new concepts of mobile code, where new modules can be downloaded from the network at runtime as they are needed in the application. The goal has been achieved by dividing the Library into smaller parts that are tied together at runtime by a small core.
For more details on the Library and a complete list of new features, please take a look at our developer's area, where we keep all information about the latest versions of the Library, how to get the source code, documentation, release notes and future plans. Again, please note that this is an alpha version and that it might contain bugs and inconsistences.
The PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection) project had a successful public announcement on Monday September 11. Because of a leak to the Wall Street Journal on Friday September 8, a number of articles appeared over the weekend of the 9th and 10th, and several follow-up articles appeared in the subsequent week. In addition to the Journal article, there were articles in the New York Times, USA Today, LA Times, San Jose Mercury News, Investor's Business Daily, and the Boston Globe.
Members are welcome to track the work through the pointers available from http://www.w3.org/PICS. In addition, PICS is offering more direct involvement to individuals and companies. We are providing three mailing lists for this purpose:
A W3C working draft is now available for HTML3 tables.
This is the result of considerable further work and replaces the proposal published for the last IETF meeting in Stockholm.
The new specification is backwards compatible with the Netscape 1.1N implementation, and provides considerable improvements in the ability to specify table layout, and the ease in importing tables from other formats, e.g. the CALS table format.
Work on HTML3 is proceeding piecemeal with a number of separate working drafts in preparation. These include:
We intend to use the HTML3 work to pilot an interim W3C specification process. This process is intended to provide a formal mechanism for W3C to develop Web related standards. It will be refined by the new Steering and Process Definition Committee, chaired by Roxana Bradescu.
The call for nominations to the W3C HTML editorial review board is included in the announcement of the board. The board will review working drafts prior to forwarding them to the W3C Advisory Committee for ratification as W3C draft standards. Further information on the interim process will be given in the next newsletter.
The W3C is keen to find the most effective strategy to arrive at timely and high quality standards. In the area of security protocols (See earlier newsletter) an Editorial Review Board has been formed. Its aim was to provide frequent feedback from a small, consistent group of people that incorporates the experience of the entire community.
W3C is now calling for nominations for membership on a HTML Editorial Review Board. The board will consist of (at least) five members, chosen from the community at large. It acts on behalf of the entire HTML community, and part of its activity will be to ensure that the W3C is keeping that community informed of its plans, work, and progress. Neither the board itself nor any member of the board is empowered to act or speak on behalf of the W3C; this is reserved to the W3C staff and the Advisory Committee.
Members of the board must commit at least one hour each week to the activities of the board, with larger contributions welcomed and occasionally expected. Service on the board is expected to be one year. Members act as consultants to the W3C and do not represent their employer. They are effectively members of the W3C's staff and are expected to treat the proceedings confidentially until the board chooses to release them to a larger community. We foresee that the board will conduct its business partially on-line (either by a private Web area or electronic mail) and partially via weekly telephone conferences.
The process for becoming a member of the HTML Editorial Review Board will be based on that used for the Security ERB. Nominations may be made by employees of the member companies of the W3C. The nominees themselves need not work for consortium member companies. We are accepting nominations by electronic mail to html-erb-nom@w3.org until 11:59pm EDT on Sunday October 8, 1995; nominations must be accompanied by a short biography and a clear statement by the candidate that they are willing to serve under the conditions outlined above.
On or before Sunday October 15, the W3C staff will forward all of the nominations with their associated biographies to the W3C Advisory Committee. Each member of the advisory committee will then have one week to send back five votes. Nominations and, later, votes will be acknowledged by email, and it is the responsibility of the sender to check for that acknowledgement. The W3C will collect the votes and announce the results by the end of October.
The W3C Security Editorial Review Board had its first teleconference Friday, September 15th. W3C updated the Review Board on the status of its Modular Extension Mechanism & Security Protocol Module specification efforts. In the weeks to come, we expect to work closely with the ERB to design a secure solution within W3C's HTTP extension framework.
Only 11 weeks remain until the Fourth International World Wide Web Conference in Boston, December 11-14, 1995. There is still time to register on-line. Current details can be found on the conference home page at http://www.w3.org/pub/Conferences/WWW4/.
Proposals for Tutorials and Workshops are still being sought, as well as proposals for Panels. Details will be forthcoming on a planned Developers Day. There is also still opportunity to become a Sponsor. Please contact www4-help@w3.org for further information on these opportunities.
Welcome to new members who have joined the W3C since the last newsletter:
W3C team members at MIT are:
We are pleased to announce a new team member of W3C at INRIA:
Since July 1, Hakon W. Lie has been working for the W3 Consortium at INRIA in France. INRIA is the European host of the Consortium, and Lie is actively collaborating with the team in Boston on his fields of work. He is developing an experimental style sheet mechanism for HTML documents, and maintains the Arena HTML 3.0 testbed browser.
Lie was a graduate student in the MIT Media Laboratory and holds an MS in visual studies. Before joining W3C, he has been working for Norwegian Telecom Research and CERN.
For more information on individual team members and their work, please see People of the W3C.
Notice that other team members are being sought at W3C-MIT and at INRIA. If you are interested in working with W3C-MIT, see our recruiting information.
For INRIA issues please contact Jean Francois Abramatic of INRIA by email at
jean-francois.abramatic@inria.fr.A reminder: access to the W3C Member web site at "http://www.w3.org/member/WWW/Consortium/Member/" is restricted by IP address. If you are unable to access this site, please determine the IP address(es) from which you access the web, and email Karen MacArthur (kmm@w3.org) to request that this IP address be added to the access list.