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⟶ CISD and DCI ⟶ Literature ⟶ W3C UK News (1998-2006)
⟶ CISD and DCI ⟶ Literature ⟶ W3C UK News (1998-2006)
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□ Overview
1998
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1999
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Issue 19: July 1999

HTTP1.1 approved as IETF Draft Standard

HTTP is the primary protocol of the Web, originally proposed by Tim Berners-Lee while he was at CERN. HTTP 1.0 was the first version of HTTP that was widely used on the Internet. Although extremely popular, it had several significant performance issues that, combined with increased use of the Web, caused severe load problems on many parts of the Internet.

The purpose of HTTP/1.1, first proposed by Roy Fielding while at ICS/University of California at Irvine, was to provide higher end-user performance while preserving the integrity and stability of the Internet using features including persistent connections, pipelining, caching, and IP address preservation.

Jim Gettys, a visiting scientist at W3C from Compaq, was the HTTP 1.1 Editor. The W3C libwww and Jigsaw implementations have played key roles in discovering errors in the proposed standard.

Draft Standard is the second of the three step IETF standardisation process; it recognises that that HTTP/1.1 is stable, and has multiple interoperable implementations (26 so far), and that all known technical issues have been resolved in the specification. A Draft Standard is considered to be very close to a final specification, and changes are likely to be made only to solve specific problems encountered. The RFC, based on draft 6 of the specification revision with some minor final editorial changes, is available as RFC 2616. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt.

Apache, Microsoft, Netscape, IBM, Raptor, and Spyglass all have implementations (servers, proxies, caches, firewalls etc).

MathML 1.01:a new W3C Recommendation

Version 1.01 is a revised version of the original MathML, an XML DTD, released in April 1998 and featured in the April 1998 UK Newsletter. There are a number of minor editorial changes. Probably the major change is a MathML DTD as an Annex to the Recommendation.

http://www.w3.org/1999/07/REC-MathML-19990707/

The MathML Working Group is working on further improvements of MathML including dynamic interaction with mathematical expressions, being able to understand the mathematics so that it can act as a mathematician's assistant, and providing speech output.

Associating Style Sheets with XML

On 29 June 1999, Associating Style Sheets with XML 1.0 was approved as a W3C Recommendation. There was an urgent requirement for a specification for style sheet linking that could be completed in time for the next release from the major browser vendors. In consequence, a simple mechanism based on processing instructions in XML has been defined. A Processing Instruction in XML is a special instruction that is interpreted by the receiving application for information not expressed in XML. An example of a processing instruction might be:

<?RALPrintSys OUTPUT:PAGE BREAK?>

which requests the RAL Print System to output a page break at this point in the processing of the XML document. Another example is the XML declaration at the head of each XML file that defines the version of XML in use.

Linking a CSS style sheet to an XML document can be achieved by a processing instruction like:

<?xml-stylesheet href="mystyle.css" type="text/css"?>

This links a stylesheet to the XML document in much the same way as the HTML LINK command links a style sheet to an HTML page. As with HTML, several processing instructions can be provided for the one document to allow more than one stylesheet to be linked. More information can be found at: http://www.w3.org/1999/06/REC-xml-stylesheet-19990629/.

Adobe, Microsoft, Netscape, Opera Software, and SoftQuad all have products that support the associating style sheet Recommendation.

In the long term, a more sophisticated linkage system will be developed to allow the link to be made outside the XML document.

New Release of Amaya

On 24 June 1999, a new release of W3C's Amaya browser was made available on a range of platforms. Version 2.1 provides a number of new features that improve the user interface. Full presentation support is provide for MathML including styling using CSS.

Further details can be found at: http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/BinDist.html.

W3C Joins ICAN's PSO

W3C has joined in the creation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Protocol Support Organisation (PSO). Other founder members are ETSI, ITU and IETF. The PSO will provide technical and architectural advice to ICANN on the management of the Domain Name System (DNS). W3C's main interest is in the Universal Resource Identifier (URI) addressing scheme for the Web which is dependent on DNS.

XML Signatures

W3C has just launched a joint activity with IETF to develop a Recommendation for attaching electronic signatures to XML documents. The aim is to define the syntax for representing the signature of a web resource and procedures for computing, verifying and encoding such digital signatures.

Further information is available at: http://www.w3.org/Signature/.

WWW9: Amsterdam: 15-19 May 2000

The World-Wide Web Conference returns to Europe in the Millennium year. It will take place at the main RAI Conference Centre on the outskirts of Amsterdam. The Conference is reverting back to its usual 5-day format with Tutorials and Workshops on the Monday, the Conference itself from Tuesday to Thursday and Developer's day on Friday.

The Technical Paper submission deadline is 22 November 1999. Tutorial and Workshop Proposals are needed by 10 September 1999.

For more details see: http://www9.org/.

New Members

The total number of members has risen to 342 with a breakdown:

Full Affiliate
Americas 44 155
Europe 31 67
Asia-Oceania 14 31

The new Members since June are:

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