The title of my talk The Once and Future Web, is a reference to the story of King Arthur - the Once and Future King. You are probably wondering why that is the title I chose and what an ancient nobility has to do with the world wide web.
First let me say that in a period of rapid change some things are still enduring and of another time. Some of us in the web community believe in magic - the kind that makes things appear from nowhere and leaves the observer baffled and confused, wondering just "how they did that."
Such is the Web. When I discovered the world wide web in 1993 (a few years into its evolution, but one or two before its world-wide adoption) I decided this was truly magic. I had been working at Stanford University in the Electrical Engineering department discussing ways in which the professors and students research could be moved into the outside world - "technology transfer" as it is often referred to - when I hit upon this new network capability. I noticed immediately a new way of thinking of information access and soon came to believe that this would surely change the world. What appeared to be a simple user interface on a computer screen was actually a magic window to all the wonders of the world.
Not long after my discovery I began attempting to convince my colleagues, professors and students that this was a new way of looking at information delivery. Not only had we the ability to place a document onto the network and have others easily read it, but that document could contain photos, graphics, iconic representations and, most magical of all, hyperlinks.
In case you are not aware, or have not yet "surfed the web" - hyperlinks are the mechanisms by which you can connect two pieces of information to allow a reader to quickly get to one from the other. By an underlying "hypertext reference" that is connected to a word or phrase, the reader has simply to place the mouse over that word or phrase, click the mouse button and (as if by magic) be swept away to another document with new and interesting graphics, charts and additional links.
Well, let me just say that this changed my life. In fact, in discussions with others involved in the early days of the development of the web, I recall a quote that was floating around at that time that said "This will change everything" and who can argue today that this is not what has happened?
But magic is not the only "Arthurian" reference in my talk - in fact the more I thought about it, the more I realized the parallels between the Arthurian legend and the world wide web.
In the world of knights and kings, a definitive hierarchy is known and respected but Arthur changed all of that. He sat his knights at a "round table" - a means by which he could equalize the relationships of those noble men. (Let me add the fact here that men donned the armor in this story, much like the web was a primarily male-dominated medium in its origins as well but thankfully that is changing) They all had a say at his table - all on equal footing and with a distinctly peer-centric process for making decisions and acknowledging one's position within the knighthood.
So to with the early makers of the web. A community consensus was used to adopt, transform and solidify protocol descriptions and applications and the members of our world-wide web roundtable, the webmasters of today, were given equal access and equal ear in being a part of the process. This, in fact, was not new to the web - most of the protocols and decisions made about the internet itself were formulated in this way.
But of course, every roundtable needs its King and he came in the person of Tim Berners-Lee - the person responsible for spearheading the efforts of the technology and to this day ensuring its proper adoption by directing a consortium that helps develop standards and propogate those standards throughout the community.
But who will be the future King? Who will pull the sword from the stone and claim the Excalibur of the world wide web?
My belief is that the future King is all of us - because of the vast reaches of the internet and its equalizing form people will drive the decisions of the kingdom and push the future of the technology in directions that it must go in.
We see such examples today. Because the early internet and web was the domain of young males, some of the earliest sites provided "adult entertainment" (and let me say I use the word entertainment very lightly). But the public concern and outcry of the accessibility of such sites to young children has become a pressing concern in the web community and has initiated mechanisms by which content can be labeled and filtered based on its labeling. The mechanism, called PICS for Platform for Internet Content Selection, provides content providers with a clear way to indicate to a user the nature of the content - much like television and movies are labeled today as G, PG or M, content on the world wide web can have a label. Correspondingly a parent, teacher or other concerned adult can set their web-browsing software to screen for such content and prevent its delivery to their computers. Once a person has indicated on a browser that only G or PG material is acceptable, material that is of a more mature level, or not labeled at all, cannot be downloaded.
It is the public who have determined the necessity of such a mechanism.
If I may, let me step back to the issue of magic. Perhaps you are unaware of the way in which the web has worked and how far we have come in this magical arena.
The real beauty of the protocols that are in use on both the internet and the world wide web is their simplicity. Many scientists have long believed that there is an elegant simplicity in the universe that explains why things work the way they do. The fact that concrete and steel expand and contract at the same rate allows us to build strong edifices. The simple fact that water expands upon freezing (unlike most other substances) allows ice to float and the landmasses remain above water and we all know that Einstein himself was looking for a simple way to describe the forces of the Universe in unified theory.
So too, has the simplicity of the web allowed for its vast existence. Had it been more complicated (and in fact there were similar concepts before Tim's invention) the masses would have had a difficult time adopting the protocols and the ubiquity of the URL that we see today would not have happened.
What's so simple about the web, you ask? The two pieces of the puzzle are the way in which information is transferred - http, as the protocol is abbreviated from hypertext transport protocol - and the language we use to describe a document, html for Hypertext Markup Language. The first of these elements allowed for computers with weak network connections as well as those with blindingly fast ethernet, to run web servers and deliver content along those lines. The second, allowed even the most junior of programmers and in many cases people outside the computer science realm, to create documents that could appear on the web. Because of the simplicity and easy adoption of the protocols the expansion of the web has been nothing short of miraculous.
But let's not leave out the internet itself. The keepers of the flame, the IETF or Internet Engineering Task Force, is the body of scientists and engineers who have architected the bits and pieces of the internet that have allowed it to become what it is today. We in the internet community - and I include anyone who has ever used a computer connected to the net - owe them a lot for their diligence and foresightedness in making the internet an amazingly scalable entity. Considering when it began there were but 3 or 4 universities and several hundred computers on it, the fact that millions of people and hundreds of millions of pages of content are connected via the internet is testament to their good works.
Having said that, let me interject the downsides. The net is not the idyllic place we would want it to be, of course, and my earlier comments about the magic of it all notwithstanding, we are all aware of the problems.
I have already mentioned the x-rated content issue and let me reiterate that the World Wide Consortium has taken a strong position in getting that problem fixed. But there are others. Every kingdom has them.
Accessibility. Although I am the first to say that the web appears to be everywhere (I'm certain you've seen a URL on everything from a matchbook cover to the side of a bus) it is in fact not.
What I mean by that, of course, is that there are many who are still unable to connect - either due to unwillingness, inability, inaccessability or stubborness (you know who you are ;-) The first and last are social problems and ones I won't address here. But the other two, inability and inaccessibility, I take very seriously.
Barry Jones, National President of Australia's Labor Party, spoke at the closing ceremonies of the 7th International World Wide Web Conference held last week in Brisbane. In his talk he recounted how he had coined the phrase information poor, information rich. He had used his terminology in his book Sleeper's Wake, I believe, and it referred to the notion that those with ready access to information would be distinctly advantaged over those without. This was stated at a time when the web was nowhere in sight, of course, and was quite insightful I believe.
The web has drawn the line quite distinctly. Access to information has mushroomed in certain neighborhoods. Particularly those of the rich, the technologically savvy (you can't imagine how wired Silicon Valley is!), and the cosmopolitan centers. But what about those in the outback? What about those with barely enough to finance a telephone line, let alone a network connection (yes, I know they can be the same thing, but the information poor have few resources to provide that).
Who's resolving this problem? I think information access to all should be of paramount concern to governments. In the United States, the National Infrastructure Initiative is trying to address such concerns. Spin-offs from the NII have produced projects in many states and counties that have gotten schools wired so that all children have access to the wealth of information on the internet. But more needs to be done. In Palo Alto, my home town, and the city that Stanford adjoins, we had a rousing "Net Day" where volunteers, mostly parents of students in the local elementary schools, spent a Saturday stringing cable and configuring classroom Macintoshes so that all of our elementary schools, middle schools and high schools would be connected to the net. This grassroots effort was quite successful.
But that's one town in one state in one country - and although the Netday banner was taken up by more towns and more states the US represents such a small portion of the world population that this is really just a glimpse into what needs to be done and can be done.
More significant is the work of Xing Li in China. Xing Li, who also spoke at the recent WWW conference, is Director of CERNet in China. His organization is providing similar resources to the schools on the mainland. During his talk he indicated that they are connecting schools in China at an incredible rate. The numbers sound impressive until you realize that at the current rate it will take 8 years to connect all of the schools!
But it is a noble effort and one that will be continued with such noble people as Xing Li. A true Knight of our time. Slaying political dragons and establishing new rules in the kingdom. We must admire such fortitude and determination.
But accessibility to the net limited by geography is only part of the larger accessibility problem.
Last year at this time I was co-chairing the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference, the predecessor to the conference held in Brisbane last week. Our theme was accessibility, with the catchphrase "Everyone, Everthing, Connected". I have to mention here that when I was coining that phrase I was trying to find a way to make a call for accessibility for the world wide web by translating the various components of the phrase itself. World, to me, stood for Everone. Wide indicated access to everything and the term Web promised connectedness.
Inability to connect everyone to everything comes in a different framework from geography when we consider the physically challenged.
Stanford University has a project within its Center for the Study of Linguistics and Information called the Archimedes project. At its basis is the theory that if you are given a large enough lever and a place to position a fulcrum you can move the world. The members of this project team are managing to move worlds by giving the physically handicapped the biggest lever possible - access to information.Their project encompasses many technologies, among them things such as speech synthesis and recognition, as well as braille content delivery.
The World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body for the world wide Web that I mentioned earlier, has a Web Accessibility Initiative, that is supported by government and the web community alike to provide protocols and applications that ensure accessibility to all despite physical limitations. One of their recent most applications is a corresponding style sheet for the delivery of content through speech. Those of us who are advancing to the use of Cascading Style Sheets - a mechanism by which we can define how a document looks independent of the content of the document, will now have the alternative, or rather the opportunity, to provide for how that document will sound when read as well. For the blind this will provide correctly delivered content without the distractions of a spoken visual web page (which often includes images, icons and other visual cues that are unavailable to the non-sighted).
In addition to the good intentions of the W3C, we must remember that each of us plays a role in that cause as well - by providing content on the web we too are responsible for ensuring the accessibility of that content. By providing ALT tags for images and by keeping layout of content clean and well-organized and simply navigatable -- and in the future by the use of aural style sheets accompanying our visual style sheets, we will be ensuring that the blind or otherwise visually challenged will have access as well.
What other dragons must we slay in the continuous battle for the right? If I may get a little more technical at this point, I would say that several things are still awaiting fixes, although the future's promise remains.
First is content degradation. If you're not familiar with the web then you don't know yet what I am referring to - but you will. The major search engines of the world are testament to this problem. Once a document is indexed by a search engine it's reference in that index is seemingly a forever thing. Whether or not that document exists, and whether or not it remains at the same network address, it's original reference, or URL, remains neatly in tact in Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek or any of the other search engines. Thus, by all counts nearly 10% of requests on the net reach a non-existent page. That is, they don't reach the page! We call this the 404 Not Found phenomenon. This is much like going to the house of an old friend and discovering he had moved away and left no forwarding address!
There doesn't appear to currently be a scalable fix for this, although the Online Computer Library Center or OCLC is now offering a URL registation capability. This means that a URL may be registered with a resolver service and become a PURL or persistent URL. Each PURL is matched with a URL which may change over time. Search engines using the PURL will always find the document. I understand that the OCLC software is in use at The National Library of Australia for this purpose today.
Today we have more knights than ever round that table and although they find ways to fix problems they seem to create them as quickly as they fix them. The battle of the browsers, that is, the way Netscape and Internet Explorer each instantiate HTML differently, is an on-going nightmare for the content provider. I heard Jeffrey Veen from Wired claim that his group has rewritten the http server software to allow for internal if statements: If the person is using Netscape 2.02 show this, else if they are running Netscape 3.4 show them this, but if they are running IE 3 show this and if its IE4 show this. This is insane! The whole point of the browser from its inception is that one document can be viewed on any platform. However, we have become so enamored of the medium we are willing to put up with such nonsense to deliver interesting and provocative content. It makes you want to cry.
What's the fix for that, you ask? We hope it's standards. Those of us in the core of the community continue to support the W3C in pushing for browser developers to reach a common standard. This task is a daunting one, as you can imagine and one that may cause the death of one or more browser companies. I probably don't have to mention which ones, sigh.
Other more promising aspects of the future include the divergence of document and presentation. In fact, I almost feel that the knights have taken this gauntlet too far - a document destined for the web will soon be able to be broken up into many component parts with a protocol for each one. DOM (or Document Object Model) to describe the model of the various parts of the document. RDF or Resource Delivery Format for the description of the document from the point of view of search engines and categorizations - RDF allows you, for instance, to create an index or table of content automatically. XML for the markup of the document - what parts are what within a single document or set of documents. And finally XSL for a description of how the presentation of the document will be handled. It may seem like document alphabet soup to you, but given the way the world has embraced the technology that is the web it appears to be necessary to satisfy the various ways in which it is wont to be used.
These technologies exist today - at least in some form and will soon be adopted by the primary purveyors of network services. But what of the Future Web? Whither shall it wander?
Prognosticators in the computer field are hesitant to take a guess. Ted Nelson, the recognized father of hypertext, imagined in the 60s that a few years after he coined the term there would be machines sharing information. Well, he was right about the machines sharing information, he just got the timeframe off by a bit.
The future is surely wide open - electronic commerce opens huge potential markets for everone - benefitting both buyer and seller; libraries and university courses on-line provides distance learning to the remotest students of the outback; political materials and politicians voting records available at the click of the mouse means a more informed democratic process; websites for everyone from the dock workers to major corporations mean the world's aware of national disputes on a much more detailed level than just an article in the newspaper and can respond accordingly.
The Once and Future Web is here today and it surely changes everything.
Thank you.