The Latest Web Developments

This paper outlines some of the latest World Wide Web developments, in particular standards which are emerging from W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium. The paper gives an overview of the architectural components of the Web, summarise their deficiencies and describe how these deficiencies are being addressed. The paper should be of interest to people involved in developing applications and services on the Web and anyone who has a general interest in future developments of the Web. BACKGROUND The World Wide Web (often referred to as the web) is a distributed hypermedia system which is based on three key architectural components: 1. Data format 2. Addressing 3. Transport The native file format for resources on the web is the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). The address for resources on the web is given by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Resources on the web are transported from a server to the user's client system using the Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP). We will look at these three architectural components in more detail. DATA FORMAT HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is an application of SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language). The first release, HTML 1.0, provided the hypertext linking which Web users today will be familiar with. HTML 1.0, in keeping with the spirit of SGML of defining the structural elements in documents, included the basic structural elements still in use today, such as paragraphs (the element) and headings ( to ) as well as a small number of formatting elements, such as italic and bold . HTML 2.0 introduced a number of innovations which were incorporated in NCSA's Mosaic web browser, including inline images and forms. Yes the initial implementation of the web did not include inline images! At the first international WWW conference held in CERN, Switzerland in May 1994 David Raggett outlined a roadmap for future developments of HTML. HTML 3.0 (which was initially known as HTML+) would include a range of new features such as tables, richer forms and support for mathematical equations. HTML 3.0 was submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Unfortunately it failed to be standardised, due to a failure to reach consensus. This failure was due partly to the size and complexity of the proposal and also due to the lack of interest from the commercial web browser vendors. In October 1994, the first version of the Netscape browser was released. Although Netscape proved tremendously popular, it also, controversially, announced support for a number of HTML elements which have not featured in discussions of developments to HTML such as the infamous element. By 1995 Microsoft had become aware of the importance of the web. Initially their browser, Internet Explorer, was based on a licensed version of the original Mosaic browser. By the time Internet Explorer 3.0 was released (which was developed inhouse), Microsoft were beginning to compete with Netscape for browser market share. This competition resulted in both companies announcing a variety of new HTML elements, with, for example, Microsoft responding to with their element for displaying scrolling text. The browser wars resulted in confusion within the marketplace. Large companies, who were beginning to invest large sums of money in corporate Intranets, found the lack of interworking across browser and platforms placed a barrier on further growth. At the same time as large corporations began to express their concerns over the browser wars, developers of web standards began to raise doubts as to the long term effectiveness of what became known as the HTML "tag soup". Pressures from large corporate users on one side and the web standards community on the other helped to force Microsoft and Netscape to work together, within W3C working groups responsible for coordinating the development of new HTML proposals. By January 1997 the HTML 3.2 proposal was accepted as a W3C recommendation [1]. HTML 3.2 was based on current established working practices. During 1997 work began on a new version of HTML, which had the codename Cougar. In December 1997 W3C announced [2] that HTML 4.0 (as Cougar became known as) had been accepted as a W3C recommendation. HTML 4.0 included enhancements in a number of areas, such as more sophisticated forms and tables. HTML 4.0 added features to make web resources more accessible by providing support for people with disabilities and for non-English speaking users. Although HTML 4.0 gave recognition to the widespread deployment of frames, it did not introduce a wide range of new features. It primarily provided hooks for embedding other resources within HTML documents, such as multimedia objects and scripting languages. In addition HTML 4.0 provided support for style sheets. STYLE SHEETS As mentioned earlier, HTML was originally intended to define the structure of a document. It has always been recognised that the appearance of a document was important. However it was felt that the appearance should be held separately from the content of a document. The initial recommendation for style sheets, Cascading Style Sheets level 1 (CSS1), was announced in December 1996 [3]. However CSS1 was only partly supported in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0 (which was available at the time) and was not supported in Netscape Navigator 3.0. Exerienced gained in the way in which CSS1 was used highlighted a number of backwards-compatibility issues. In November 1997 a draft release of CSS level 2 was announced [4]. CSS2 provides a great deal of control over the appearance of a document. CSS can be included inline within an HTML element or within the HEAD of a document. However for maintenance purposes, it is better if the CSS is included as an external linked file. For example, all of the conference papers published in the conference proceedings could point to a single style sheet file. Changing the house style for the papers will simply require changing a single file. An example of use of a simple style sheet is shown in Figure 1. Figure 1a Simple Style Sheet Example Figure 1b Simple Style Sheet Example Figures 1a and 1b show the same document content, with slightly different style sheets. The corresponding style sheets are given below.