When the Web Was New

Continued from page 2

To address these difficulties, a group of software, electronics, and communications companies founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) this past October. Headquartered at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS), the consortium, which now has about two dozen members including IBM, Digital Equipment, Hewlett-Packard, MCI, Lotus, and Microsoft, is using membership dues to fund work on a long list of technical protocols useful both for designers of Web documents and for software companies hoping to create new ways for users to retrieve and manipulate these documents.

"People were arriving unannounced in my office at CERN demanding that we form the consortium," recalls Berners-Lee, who now directs W3C. "Companies investing larger and larger amounts of their own resources into the Web, or into work that relies on the Web, wanted to know that it would still be there, still interoperable, in 20 years."

Berners-Lee says he chose to base the consortium at MIT because a large number of Web-related research projects are already underway there, and because the effort is similar to the X Consortium, an MIT project in which researchers worked with industry to develop and release at no cost X Windows, a widely adopted point-and-click user interface for workstation computers.

Similarly, starting in 1996 the W3C group plans to release its standards free of charge to Web document developers and software companies writing Web-related programs. Small task forces of specialists are beginning to device W3C's work. Staff from the consortium's corporate members plan to visit MIT's computer-science lab frequently to monitor progress and contribute their own expertise

Setting up Traffic Rules

One W3C group hopes to alleviate traffic problems. The task force intends to develop protocols for storing frequently requested information at multiple locations and ensuring that data follow the shortest possible path to their destinations.

Albert Vezza, associate LCS director and one of W3C's organizers, points out, "Right now, you can't even tell that a request has come from a particular geographic area. It may go all the way around the world to get answered."

He adds, "There have to be enough smarts in the protocol to know how to get it to the closest computer that can answer it."