W3C: World Wide Web Consortium
Updates on activities
ICANN/PSO meeting Genvea June 19th 2002
Daniel Dardailler, W3C Director for Europe.
Why W3C?
Mission: Interoperability by Consensus
- Growth of web protocols
- Threat of fragmentation
- Need for new features, while keeping universality
- Need for neutral party
What is W3C?
- ~500 members
- ~70 staff.
- Tim Berners-Lee Director (Inventor of the Web)
- MIT/INRIA/Keio, + Offices (Europe, Africa, Asia, etc)
- 5 domains: Architecture, Document Formats, Interaction, Technology
& Society, Accessibility
See our home page at http://www.w3.org
What does W3C do?
- Provide a neutral forum for meeting
- Technically coordination
- Achieving consensus
- Working Drafts and Recommendations (what we call our standards)
- Reference code where appropriate
How does W3C work?
- Identify need for a new area of standardization: workshops,
submissions
- Activity proposal submitted to membership
- Creation of working groups
- Development of specifications, tools, support materials
- Process:
W3C Web Technologies and Activities
- Hypertext Protocols (HTTP1.1) - with IETF: stable
- Extensible Markup Language: XML - Core, Schema, Query, Link, XSLT,
etc
- Web Services: just started (SOAP, WSDL, etc)
- Adressing (URL, URI, etc)
- Open source code: Jigsaw Java HTTP server
- Hypertext (XHTML, HTML4.0)
- Style Sheets (CSS2, XSL)
- Graphics (PNG, SVG)
- Document Object Model (DOM)
- Synchronized Multimedia: SMIL
- Math Markup (MathML)
- Voice Browser/Mobile Access/Television and the Web
- Internationalization (I18N)
- Open source code: Amaya browser/editor
- Metadata/Content Selection (RDF, Semantic Web)
- Privacy (P3P)
- Digital Signature (XSIG)
- Accessibility Guidelines for Web Content, Browser, AuthoringTools
- Accessibility Education & Outreach
- Quality Assurance: across the board
Semantic Web and Web Services
- Same goal: make the Web more intelligent
- Add richness to the data
- SW: use metadata like RDF that says things about data
- WS: provide a programmatic interface (API) to the Web data
- Machine-readable Web: allow for programming the
Web
W3C and the ICANN/PSO
- Co-drafter of ICANN PSO MoU and original signatory
- Official reps: Danny Weitzner and Martin Duerst
- Prime W3C Concerns:
- DNS at root of URIs: URI stability fundamental for stable Web
- Insure decentralized evolution of technical protocols for the
Web
- Use of URI for protocol identifiers
- Integration of Internationalized Domain Names and URIs/IRIs
- W3C to take over the PSO-PC Secretariat in the fall
- Amy van der Hiel <amy@w3.org>
will serve as PSO secretary
- Possible next General Assembly venues:
- March 2003 (W3C Technical Plenary in Boston) or
- May 2003 (WWW2003 conference in Budapest).
Public Resources