W3C still setting the standards for the Web

The organisation, which gives stamp of approval to selected interoperable technologies, relies heavily on the reputation of Web founder Tim Berners-Lee, writes Karlin Lillington

As Web organisations go, few have pedigrees that match that of the World Wide Web Consortium - W3C for short. Dr Tim Berners-Lee, the British researcher who invented the Web and the initial technologies behind it, set up the non-profit organisation at the Web's public emergence in 1994.

W3C, which works to keep the Web's technological infrastructure sound, is still overseen by him - all final decisions on whether a particular technology or protocol should become a W3C standard are made by him.

Amazingly, he has managed to remain one of technology's most admired and least controversial figures, due in no small part to the fact that he never aimed to make his extraordinary creation the commercial basis of a personal fortune. Instead, he gave the Web life and placed it in the public domain, with the intention of keeping it as open and able to work with complementary technologies as possible.

Thus, the Web - itself a graphics program that runs on top of the basic infrastructure of the internet - is accessible by different browsers, and enables users to access and handle information in a range of ways.

The goal of W3C (www.w3.org) is to make sure that accessibility and interoperability remain priorities on the Web. Or, as the consortium says, to "lead the Web to its full potential" by evolving the Web as a "robust, scaleable, adaptive infrastructure".

It gives a stamp of approval to selected, interoperable technologies - specifications, guidelines, software, and tools.

This is fraught territory, given the deeply held and often at-odds beliefs of those who care passionately about the internet and the way it works. Battles in the land of the Net are often bitter, protracted and bloody, as early internet developers and denizens clash with those who would like to use the Net for commercial purposes.

Then there are the religious wars between advocates of given technologies, from operating systems to Web browsers to the protocols, or technical rules, that govern the smallest bits of Web functionality. So, W3C decisions over which technologies become standards - which can determine the commercial success of entire companies - are enormously important.

Those decisions are made by working committees within W3C's membership of some 490 companies. Curiously, that membership come from all walks of life - not just computer and technology companies, but publishers, airlines, government departments, telecoms companies, health services and anyone else that uses the Web and its related technologies. Six Irish companies are among the members: Iona Technologies, Baltimore Technologies, Mobileaware, Vordel, Propylon and Voxpilot.

"We have extreme religious wars between the companies within W3C," acknowledges Dr Michael Wilson, chairman of the Britain and Ireland regional office of W3C, and a researcher at Britain's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford.

Dr Wilson was in Dublin yesterday to speak at a conference about W3C's latest standards work and the role of the British and Irish regional office.

Despite the potential for obstructive conflict, W3C remains one of the more respected administrative bodies in the Internet world. That's likely due to two things, says Dr Wilson.

On one hand, there's the respect afforded to Dr Berners-Lee. "Much of what makes W3C work is his personal commitment and the trust people have that he already got it right once. His decisions were clear successes, technically."

Then, the organisation is scrupulous in trying to ensure that no single company will benefit directly due to a standards decision. One of the big issues for members and Web developers, he says, is that the consortium puts forward recommendations on technologies, which then require companies to create software to work within W3C standards.

Depending on the recommendations, developers need to use algorithms - the mathematical building blocks of programs - which might have royalties attached to them. W3C's preference is to make sure the algorithms needed to create software that works within a particular standard is royalty-free.

Alternatively, he says, they sometimes go for algorithms available on a "reasonable and non-discriminatory" use basis. People would then perhaps not pay a royalty but would need to sign a licence to use the algorithm for a set period of time.

The process of getting a technology approved as a standard is arduous. Companies or organisations can propose a standard by completing an 80-page application. If deemed suitable, applications are passed to working committees as small as a dozen people or as large as 60 or 70 individuals.

"There can be 300 to 400 e-mails a day going around these committees for six to nine months while they try to standardise on a particular technology," says Dr Wilson. Dr Berners-Lee looks at the committee recommendations and makes a final decision after this detailed process.

The two key areas of concern for W3C right now - both of which Dr Wilson sees as crucial to the business world - are deciding on standards in the areas of Web services and what he calls the "semantic Web". The latter involves the issue of making sure that Web pages can be viewed in a range of languages, many of which do not have Western character sets or run from left to right, as do English and most European languages.

This should be a primary, not esoteric, concern for businesses, he says, because it is now estimated that only 40 per cent of all the Web's documents are in English. "Sixty per cent of people using the Web won't have English as their native language," he says, with the biggest area of growth in Chinese content.

A company's Web pages can be set up to recognise the language used in the browser of the person accessing its pages, and then display the right language version.

On the Web services side, W3C is anxious to create standards around the use of XML - extensible markup language - and its related technologies.

XML, which lets developers identify and categorise individual elements of information to a Web browser, is an advance upon HTML, hypertext markup language, the original language used to create a Web page (and invented by Dr Berners-Lee).

"HTML muddled up content and presentation," says Dr Wilson, because it made the two inseparable - information was defined by the way it was physically presented on a Web page. With XML, content is liberated from presentation and can be accessed and reused in many ways because it is marked with sets of standard identifiers.

Thus, a company can use a Web browser to create a mailing list instantly from a database of client information, for example, or easily search for specific types of data. Data is reusable in endless ways.

XML has related uses in areas that seem far distant from a basic Web page, too. It can help synchronise multimedia applications, making sure sound and video mesh correctly, for example. It helps voice-recognition applications sound more naturalistic and accomplish more complex tasks.

The marriage of Web and voice may not seem obvious now, but 3G networks will create a link between phone networks and the Web that will depend on such interoperability. "These really will become interactive services," notes Dr Wilson.

He'd like to see more Irish companies become members of W3C, and hopes the new regional Britain and Ireland office, created this month, will encourage companies to find out more about what the consortium does and perhaps contribute to the decision-making process.

Annual dues to the non-profit start at $5,000 (€5,430) annually. Anyone can sign up for a monthly newsletter and a wide range of discussion groups on the W3C website. "Obviously, members have an influence in developing future technologies," he notes.