Journal• ISSN: 1067-9936
ACM Standardview
Association for Computing Machinery
About: ACM Standardview is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Standardization & Software construction. Over the lifetime, 134 publications have been published receiving 1390 citations.
Topics: Standardization, Software construction, Interoperability, Social software engineering, Software deployment
Papers
TL;DR: XML is an enabling technology; well designed XML can provide a valuable tool in the effort to provide more precise and more powerful searching on the Web.
Abstract: ■ XML (Extensible Markup Language) provides both a standards-based way to identify the information that is of importance in a particular application, and the ability to process information tagged according to highly user-specific requirements with general-purpose software, such as editing tools, composition engines, and electronic browsers. The power of XML comes in part from principles that guide the design of good XML applications: separation of format and presentation information from document markup; consistent and clear text tagging; context-dependent processing; and hierarchical structures. But these alone do not explain the real power of XML, which lies in the ability to create tag sets and markup languages customized to the needs of the particular application. A custom XML tag set allows the user to identify all of the types of information that are needed for search and retrieval, formatting, and tracking. Any type of information your end users may want to find, or not find, can be identified, and expensive distinctions among types of information that are not important to you are not made. Note, however, these phrases from the preceding paragraph: “way to identify”; “ability to create”; and “can be identified.” XML provides a way to do these things, but does not do them. XML should be thought of as a useful tool, but not as a solution to any problem. here seems to be as much excitement about XML as there has been on any related technology since the Web went public. The hype surrounding XML has created such unreasonable expectations that there are already people trumpeting its failure, primarily because it hasn’t become instantly ubiquitous. XML is being hailed as the future of the Web, the replacement for HTML, the replacement for Java, and the technology that will create precise Web searching. XML will be easier to use than SGML, more powerful than HTML, and will enable secure electronic commerce. XML is the Internet’s Silver Bullet—such is the hype. XML will not leap tall buildings at a single bound, nor will it solve all of the problems of retrieval on the Web. XML will transform the Web in much the same way barbed wire transformed the American West. Barbed wire didn’t do anything. But using barbed wire, a lot of people did a lot of hard work and changed the culture from one of open ranges to one of farms and property rights. XML is an enabling technology; well designed XML can provide a valuable tool in the effort to provide more precise and more powerful searching on the Web. XML will replace HTML in those situations in which HTML is insufficient to meet a need. XML software is easier to build than SGML software and more appropriate for Web environments, but authoring documents in XML is unlikely to be any easier than authoring in SGML. The ease of authoring in both XML and SGML is dependent on how well the document structure meets the author’s needs and on how graceful the authoring application is. And interchange of information in XML depends on the development and promulgation of shared XML tag sets.
89 citations
TL;DR: An ad hoc collection of people interested in remote authoring (now known as the WebDAV working group) met at the WWW4 conference in December 1995, and then at America Online in June 1996, and identified key issues in writing these authoring tools, and found a pressing need to develop standard extensions to the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
Abstract: Ⅵ Today, the typical use of the World Wide Web is to browse information in a largely read-only manner. But this was not the original idea—as early as 1990, a prototype Web editor and browser was operational on the Next platform, demonstrating how Web content could be read and written. Unfortunately, most of the world never saw this editor/brows-er, but instead developed their view of the Web from the widely distributed text-based line mode browser. When NCSA Mosaic was developed, it improved the line mode browser by adding a graph-ical user interface and inline images, but had no provision for editing. As Mosaic 2.4 reached critical mass in 1993–4, \" publish/browse \" became the dominant model for the Web. But the original view of the Web as a readable and writable collaborative medium was not lost. n 1995, two browser/editor products were released: NaviPress by NaviSoft and Front-Page by Vermeer. These products began developing a market for authoring tools that allow a user to edit HyperText Markup Language (HTML) pages remotely [Raggett 1997], taking advantage of the ability to work at a distance over the In-ternet. In early 1996, NaviSoft and Ver-meer were purchased by America Online and Microsoft, respectively, presaging major corporate interest in Web distributed authoring technology. In 1995–96, Netscape released Navigator Gold, a Web browser/editor tool, able to publish pages to a remote Web server. 1996–7 also saw the release of Web-integrated word processors, with Microsoft Word 97, Lotus WordPro 97, and Corel WordPerfect 7, all with HTML editing and remote publishing capacities. In this setting, an ad hoc collection of people interested in remote authoring (now known as the WebDAV working group) met at the WWW4 conference in December 1995, and then at America Online in June 1996. Comprised of developers working on remote authoring tools, and people generally interested in extending the Web for authoring, this group identified key issues in writing these authoring tools, and also found a pressing need to develop standard extensions to the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) [Fielding et al. 1997] for the following capabilities: —Metadata, to create, remove, and query information about Web pages, such as its author, creation date, etc., also to link pages of any media type to related pages. —Name space management, to copy and move Web pages, and to receive a listing of pages at a particular hierarchy level (like a directory listing in a file …
72 citations
TL;DR: This paper is a retrospective view on key conceptual issues driving the standardization of a Business Object Component Architecture (BOCA) within the Object Management Group (OMG).
Abstract: Object technology, a necessary but not sufficient condition for software reuse, requires an infrastructure that supports plug compatible Business Object Components for fast and flexible delivery of new or enhanced products to the marketplace. This paper is a retrospective view on key conceptual issues driving the standardization of a Business Object Component Architecture (BOCA) within the Object Management Group (OMG). The seamless integration of BOCA with the Unified Modeling Language (UML), a standardized Meta-Object Facility (MOF), and an emerging CORBA Component specification is essential to design-driven generation of runtime components into heterogeneous distributed object frameworks. BOCA standardization can enhance software productivity with plug compatible, reusable components, the holy grail of object computing.
62 citations
TL;DR: Many economists believe that encouraging innovation is more important in general than encouraging efficient diffusion, suggesting that the balance should tilt somewhat towards protection and encouragement of innovation rather than towards encouraging low prices for existing innovations.
Abstract: ■ Economists view intellectual property policy as a tradeoff (isn’t everything?) between rewarding, and thus encouraging innovators, and the “efficient diffusion” embodied in marginal-cost pricing. By protecting intellectual property from imitators, society raises the price of innovative products above cost and above what it would have been with no protection. This causes inefficiencies as some people refrain from adopting a useful idea because the price is too high, but it also rewards the innovator and thus encourages innovation. Many economists believe that encouraging innovation is more important in general than encouraging efficient diffusion, suggesting that the balance should tilt somewhat towards protection and encouragement of innovation rather than towards encouraging low prices for existing innovations.
60 citations
TL;DR: The BSCW Shared Workspace system as mentioned in this paper is an extension of a standard Web server that provides a range of basic services for collaboration, including features for uploading documents of any type, remote editing, version management, group administration, access control and more, accessible from different platforms using unmodified Web browsers.
Abstract: m We consider requirements for distributed authoring on the Web, based on experience with the BSCW Shared Workspace system. The BSCW system is an extension of a standard Web server, which provides a range of basic services for collaboration, including features for uploading documents of any type, remote editing, version management, group administration, access control and more, accessible from different platforms using unmodified Web browsers. We discuss the need for standards for Web-based distributed authoring and reveal our own application-level solutions as implemented in the BSCW system. he Web was originally intended to support a richer, more active form of information sharing than is currently the case. Early implementations at CERN allowed browsing of pages, as is common today, but also supported annotation and the addition of links between arbitrary pages, not just those on local servers, which the user could access and edit [Berners-Lee 1992]. Some of these concepts were carried through to early drafts of the standards for Web protocols, which describe features such as remote publishing of hypertext pages and check in/out support for locking documents, to ensure consistency in a multiauthor environment. To date, these aspects have largely been sidelined, while development of Web browsers, servers, and protocols has focused on the more “passive” aspects of information browsing. The emergence of tools like Netscape Composer (Gold) and America Online AOLpress suggest a return to the Web as the basis for more active information sharing. Such tools support WYSIWYG editing of Web pages and publishing to remote Web servers: a first step towards true distributed, cross-platform, collaborative authoring and annotation. These developments in turn raise questions about the support required for version management, consistency control, and the like, and how (and to what extent) this support should be provided through extension of the standard Web protocols. These questions are the focus of the work of the recently established IETF Working Group on Distributed Authoring and Versioning. To provide input to these discussions, we describe our work with the BSCW Shared Workspace system [Bentley et al. 1997a; 1997b]. Conceived as a means to support dispersed work groups, BSCW provides features for sharing documents of any type by upload to a BSCW server. Simple locking and versioning services are also provided, and a basic event service informs users of the current state of the authoring process. BSCW integrates tools like Distributed Authoring on the Web with the BSCW Shared Workspace System
55 citations
Related Journals (5)
Performance Metrics
| Year | Papers |
|---|---|
| 1998 | 24 |
| 1997 | 19 |
| 1996 | 32 |
| 1995 | 21 |
| 1994 | 25 |
| 1993 | 13 |