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To: John F Beule who wrote (42)	6/1/2000 2:06:00 PM
From: John F Beule	Respond to of 102

STANDARDS Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of HTML and the founder and director of the standards body called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), enjoys nothing more than talking about the Web's next big thing. Right now, that's Extensible Markup Language (XML), a new standard that simplifies the process of defining data in any format on the Web. In contrast to HTML, a markup language that describes the presentation of a document, XML describes the data so that it can be stored, analyzed, and used by applications. For example, an XML file, in addition to describing how a person's name appears onscreen, might also tag the name with information like "PC owner" and "under age 25." Mr. Berners-Lee believes that XML will be as essential to the growth and expansion of the Web as the Web has been to the Internet. Last February, he and the W3C ratified the first official specifications for XML. The W3C spent mere months achieving consensus on it, even with the participation of technology industry adversaries like Microsoft, Netscape, and Sun Microsystems; by contrast, standards bodies like the International Standards Organization and the Internet Engineering Task Force generally take more than a year to complete projects of similar scope. Among the W3C's other credits are such essential protocols as HTML (now in version 4.0), HTTP (now a powerful distributed object system), and the establishment of standard approaches to Web addresses, graphics, and synchronized multimedia. From his office at MIT, Mr. Berners-Lee spoke to the Red Herring about XML, the Web, the standards process, and the W3C's controversial involvement in public policy. How will XML change the Web? Imagine a search engine that finds all merchandise or properties for sale and requests for purchase on the Web and matches them to potential buyers and sellers. Imagine asking your browser why you should trust the information on a Web page and having it check all the relevant digitally signed documents on the Web and give you an answer you can understand. If hypertext on the Web is like having one big book, then XML will enable the Web to become more or less like one big database. You've said that the Web hasn't lived up to your expectations. In what way? In general, that's not the case. I am thrilled with the way the Web has turned out. But I'd like to see more Web tools for enabling better communication between people and better communication between machines. My original idea was to have a browser that worked as a window to the Web and as an editor for Web-based documents. In this way, the browser would operate both as a collaborative tool in a group context and as a tool for personal creativity. But at the moment, we're stuck in a Web publishing model in which you write things, get them perfect, and upload them. The Web would also be much better if there were more material out there that machines could read and understand. In fact, we do have a lot of momentum toward a model of publishing data in a way that machines can comprehend, called metadata. Metadata is machine-understandable information on the Web. As you might guess, the term originally meant "data about data," but now we realize that metadata techniques can be used for machine-understandable processes about anything, not just other information. Is the Web the application for the Net, or will we see other major applications dominate the public network? The Web is sort of it by declaration. It is declared to be the universal information medium. Right now, the only format defined for such universal communication is HTML. But I imagine that in the future the Web will include all kinds of proprietary formats that exist alongside HTML. Some early examples are virtual reality standards, other graphic formats, and standards for streaming media. How do you achieve consensus from all the individual corporate interests ? It's a bit like steering a sailboat with all that wind and water. These pressures move it forward. The advancement of the Web operates similarly. A solitary proprietary standard will not go very far. But if something like HTML is made a totally open public standard, then all the developers in the world will be thinking about how to make it better. This produces the kind of healthy competition that both threatens a common standard and keeps it moving forward. The consortium has been criticized for overstepping its bounds. How do you draw the line between creating technological standards and influencing public policy through technical means? Clearly there is technology and there is public policy, but in practice when you create a new technology it has an effect on society. Those who create technology have a duty to educate the world about its capabilities and to be responsible about it. There are some ways that the Web can help produce a society in which government is fairer and more decentralized, but the job of the W3C is merely to explain how it could work--how society could use the technology. From RedHerring