This is just a brief summary of the Informal Technical Meeting on WWW Distributed Authoring and Versioning, held September 16, 1996, at the MIT Faculty Club. More detailed minutes will be prepared, however, they will likely not be available until early October. Information about the meeting can be found at: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/cambridge/ There were 18 attendees at this meeting, a complete list of which can be found at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/cambridge/Participants.html. These attendees were members of companies which make general purpose application software, document management systems, configuration management systems, distributed authoring tools, and networking software, along with researchers in hypertext versioning, and many participants from the World Wide Web Consortium. The meeting was very productive. The main accomplishments of the meeting were: - reaching rough consensus on the draft distributed authoring requirements - reaching rough consensus on the draft versioning requirements - an understanding of the language and terminology being used Additionally, there was much discussion of various approaches for addressing these requirements. There was some discussion on the draft charter for the working group, which generated some good feedback. The meeting produced several action items: 1. Modify the distributed authoring requirements, "Requirements on HTTP for Distributed Content Editing," based on comments received at the meeting. Assigned: Jim Whitehead, due: 9/20/96 2. Revise the versioning requirements, "Functional Requirements and Framework for Versioning on the WWW," based on feedback received at the meeting. Assigned: David Durand, due 9/27/96. 3. Revise the draft charter based on feedback received at the meeting, and also from the mailing list. Assigned: Jim Whitehead, due: 9/20/96 4. Submit a draft distributed authoring and versioning scenarios document to the mailing list for review. Assigned: Ora Lasilla, due: 9/20/96 Additionally, several documents were promised by meeting participants: - A draft protocol specification for distributed authoring and verisoning capability, Yaron Goland, by 9/20/96 - A document listing scenarios which result in server-to-server communication, Stephen Carter, week of 9/23-9/27/96. We also revisited action items from the San Mateo meeting: - Create a task-oriented list of scenarios which interoperable distributed authoring tools should be able to perform. Keith Dawson, Atria, is the editor of this document. Due to other commitments, Keith is unable to edit this document. Ora Lasilla has graciously agreed to become the editor of the scenarios document, and will be producing a draft shortly. - Create a list which collates the "key functionality" among AOLpress/AOLserver, FrontPage, Word, as well as other distributed authoring tools. Dave Long, America Online, is the editor of this document. The general sentiment is that while this document would still be useful to produce, its main purpose was to motivate the generation of requirements, which has already occurred without having this information. Dave Long is still willing to accept contributions and edit them. However, this activity is currently low priority. - Criteria for completion of the group's work were discussed, and need to be clearly described in writing. I have submitted a draft read/write interoperability definition to the working group. This document still requires revision, and feedback. Read/write interoperability is only one aspect of this group's work, and more effort needs to go into defining exit criteria. - The working group was tentatively interested in seeking sponsorship by the W3C. However,before the group is officially sponsored, members needs to know the intellectual property rights implications of such sponsorship. The working group is still interested in pursuing W3C sponsorship, due to the perception that it can move more rapidly in standards development. The issue of intellectual property rights has still not been addressed, beyond a general sentiment that the results of the working group should be open, and non-proprietary. - There should be a reinvestigation of work previously performed by Murray Maloney on standard LINK REL and REV tags. While there is still some disagreement on whether this group should attempt to define some standard link types, with the dominant opinion holding that this group should not, this document is still of interest to our discussions. Originally issued as an internet-draft, it has currently expired. I have made it available from the working group page, and at URL: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/draft-ietf-html-relrev-00.txt - There should be an investigation by the versioning and configuration management group into the utility of entity tags (etags) for performing versioning. As a result of this action item, there was some discussion on the mailing list about use of entity tags. However, there is still a real need to collect this information about entity tags into one definitive, "use of entity tags in versioning" document, which lists their uses and limitations. Any takers? I asked for volunteers at the meeting, but there were no takers. However, there was some interest in having another thread on the issue. Would someone like to start? - Jim Whitehead