Tim Berners-Lee2

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Berners-Lee Speaks on Web's Future

Inadequacy of existing measures is prompting new companies to come forward with tracking ideas of their own

By Russell Shaw

In a special public appearance at the Internet Society's annual conference held in June in Honolulu, World-Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee endorsed an even more user-friendly paradigm for the entity he invented in 1989 at the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland.

Speaking before an enthralled crowd of more than 1,500 in the main ballroom of the Sheraton Waikiki, Berners-Lee outlined several goals for the Web. These include greater interoperability, automatability, extensibility, efficiency, scalability and security.

He cast the interoperability issue in terms of open standards available across different browser platforms.

"Most of us believe there's a divine right of the consumer to be able to choose where he buys his software from that runs on the PC. We want to keep that independent of the market, and we do that with interoperability, with open standards. At the same time we want to keep the capacity for change," he said.

Berners-Lee feels that the automatability and expandability issues are linked, and says that the Web should be enhanced with new protocols that will make it possible to harness the vast processing power of computers, rather than to just communicate through them.

"At the moment," he said, "the Web is very easy for people to use, but very difficult for computers to use. We would like to see the Web be something computers can help us with as well, but now, all computers can do is provide us information on a stream."

The scalability issue would come in by means of new protocols that will be able to simplify a transmitted image when it is accessed via a slower modem over which graphic file reception would take a long time.

"For the Web to grow, protocols will have to be enhanced, and new ones added," he said. "There are things we'll be able to do by introducing new data formats. The content types which are just the content rather than say 'this is animation in GIF with 256 colors.' This would allow people with slower lines to more carefully use the bandwidth."

To enrich the graphical possibilities of fonts in a way not possible today, Berners-Lee also backs the concepts of style languages for HTML. "Documents should be able to specify 36 point in blue background, for example. We need a separate language to define that," he noted.

This ties in with one of Berners-Lee's broader goals -- upgrading the Web to handle object-oriented computing. He'd like to see a language that will, for example, be able to describe the features on someone's face. "We would like to see documents become objects," he explained. "If you stand by and describe what kind of an object that is, there needs to be a language describing what properties it has."

The Web founder also would like to see some video whiteboard capability within the Web that would make it possible to change part of a Web page while it is running. He cited a typical exchange between genetics labs as one example. "If you have a piece of DNA on one end, and a DNA synthesizer on the other, you might want to synthesize the DNA on-screen. For that, you'd want to go to a very high level of functionality, and very specific content languages -- rather than negotiation and extension," he said.

Berners-Lee added that he would like to see a "Web of trust" climate, in which thorny issues like intellectual property rights and voluntary self-rating of sites for possible objectionable content, are a matter of course.

To Berners-Lee, solving these issues within the framework of increased computer processing power will be the key to the Web reaching its full potential. "As the Web continues to grow, you'll need all the power and ability of the Web to access and negotiate formats," he concluded.

[http://www.iworld.com]

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