organised a Workshop on W3 Design Issues

Minutes from the Protocols and Performance Subgroup

The discussions in the P/P Subgroup centered around the following topics:

1. The Future of the Protocols

A number of concerns were raised regarding the future of the protocols http and html. Future reduction of flexibility in eg. mime-types, binary headers and content length.

ACTIONS:

Monitor and contribute to the mailling lists html-wg@oclc.org, http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com, www-talk@...
Raise the concerns on lists and to CERN developers directly (via W3C channels)
Implement demo applications to demonstrate usefulness of the features. For example keeping tcp/ip connections open for non-immediate use (eg, ftp, directory browsing)

2. (server local) Searching

We see a need for a query language to perform server local searching (ala OODB?). The server should help robots/wanderers to provide an index base. The search code should execute in server/proxy. A standard way is needed to provide (a) index databases (b) standardized access (same URL on each site/server).

ACTIONS:

Monitor, contribute to the mailing list robots@nexor.co.uk
CERN/NCSA server should provide a 'Contrib' directory on their Servers.

References:

A World Wide Web Robots, Wanderers, and Spiders list describes robots like:
The WebCrawler Index,Jumpstation,Nikos,RBSE's URL Database,The NorthStar Database,The ALIWEB Database,The SIMON Index,The WWW Worm,Harvest,Lycos.

3. HTML to SGML/DSSL/HyTime

There should be an evolution from HTML to SGML. Different levels of SGML should be implemented starting from the servers. Future browsers/servers should be a capable of negotation on the level of SGML awareness.

ACTIONS:

Monitor and contribute to the SGML/DSSSL mailing group
W4G should input on this to the html-wg.

4. Distributed Caches

The CERN server should allow extensions to incorporate different (distributed) caching algortiehms and tuning parameters as well as mirroring canches (on the fly replication). This pleads for modularity of the server.

ACTIONS:

Someone (in W4G?) should make a prototype of the CERN server extention for (distributed) caching.

5. Very Large Binary Object

This is clear a research area. (eg. Multimedia applications)

6. Management of URL/URN's

There should be a track from the current URLs and migration problems that occur to the URN approach. There is a difference between a 'local migrated URL' and a URN. Mesaac made a proposal for a URL manager in the client.

Implementation of a prototype for migrated (local URL) translation process.

7. Scripting Languages

Need for bidirectional script exchange from server to client and client to server. Issues here are: generality vs. security and load balancing (server/client/network). Is a new language needed that is understand at client and server level?

ACTIONS:

Put up an example on the Web of Scripting languages (HUSH)
Exploit the current possibilities of http to the full.

Fred Kwakkel

Last modified: Fri Dec 2 14:45:23 1994