Researcher's speaking
Founded in the fall of 1994, W3C has just entered its fourth year of existence.
It has a French President, Jean-François Abramatic, Research Director at
INRIA, and a British Director, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web
(which was developed at Cern) who is now Research Director at
MIT-Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS). For this international consortium
whose main mission is to lead the evolution of the World Wide Web
while preserving its interoperability, the balance is rather positive.
Following is an interview with Vincent Quint, Deputy Director of W3C for Europe.
INédit: Can we speak of success after three years of existence?
Vincent Quint: At its creation, on October 1st, 1994, in addition to the technical work to be carried out, we had a particularly important task to fulfill: build up the consortium, that is to say develop a team and attract members. As far as build up is concerned, W3C has 219 members worldwide today involved in diverse activities, and this number continues to grow. As for the team itself, it is composed of approximately 45 persons divided among the three consortium sites: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for America, INRIA for Europe and the University of Keio for Asia. We can effectively talk about our success.
INédit: How is the work of the consortium organized and what are the principal results?
V. Q.: There are three main areas of work on the technical level: "Architecture", "Man-Machine Interface" and "Technology and Society". This breakdown of activities in fact corresponds to three different levels of communication between the user and the machine. The first concerns communications between machines, the second communications between machines and users and finally, communications between users and sociopolitical or economic impact. For more than a year, we have published several new specifications, in the form of recommendations, to help the Web develop harmoniously. For example, we have one recommendation for HTML (HyperText Markup Language), one for PNG (Portable Network Graphics), one for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Another one, called PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection), can be used for data access control. Other recommendations should be published no later than the beginning of the coming year.
INédit: Along with Tatsuya Hagino (Japan) for Asia, you work with Tim Berners-Lee as Deputy Director for Europe. At the same time, you are responsible for the "Man-Machine Interface" area. What are the principal activities of the consortium in this respect?
V. Q.: The principal activities currently under way are mainly concerned with the HTML document description language. We are now preparing version 4.0 of HTML. At the same time, we are working on version 2 of CSS, a style sheet language, originated by the consortium. The internationalization and the representation of mathematical expressions are also the object of specific research. The aim in particular is to make the Web accessible to all languages and all cultures. We are also developing a document model to make Web pages more dynamic. In addition, we have developed Amaya, a client software that we use experiment on and demonstrate the specifications that are currently under development in the consortium.
Contact: Vincent Quint,
Deputy Director of W3C for Europe - Research Director at INRIA
Tel.: +33 4 76 61 53 62
Vincent.Quint@inria.fr -
Vincent.Quint@w3.org
Web Site: http://www.w3.org/