Executive Summary of First Distributed Authoring Meeting

Jim Whitehead (ejw@ics.uci.edu)
Tue, 23 Jul 1996 22:57:43 -0700


Working Group on Distributed Authoring on the World Wide Web, Informal Meeting

Executive Summary

On July, 10, 1996, an informal meeting of the Working Group on Distributed
Authoring on the World Wide Web (WWW) was held at the offices of America
Online (AOL) Productions in San Mateo, California. There were 14 meeting
participants, including members of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF) HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Working Group, the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C), the document management community, software configuration
management companies, distributed web authoring tool vendors and
researchers, and the academic hypertext versioning community.  The main
objective of this meeting was to provide a forum where people interested in
fostering interoperability between distributed web authoring applications
could meet, exchange information about the current state of the art and
practice, identify key interoperability issues, and formulate an agenda for
achieving interoperability.

The meeting began with a presentation by Jim Whitehead, U.C. Irvine on the
history of distributed authoring on the WWW, on the purpose of the
distributed authoring working group, and on the purpose of the Working
Group on Versioning and Configuration Management of World Wide Web Content.
Ron Fein, Microsoft, next gave a presentation on collaborative authoring
and WWW features in Microsoft Word.  A presentation by Henrik Frystyk
Nielsen, W3C, on distributed authoring and his vision of a unified PUT
model, finished the morning session. The afternoon began with a
presentation by Dave Long, America Online, on AOLpress and AOLserver, which
was followed by a presentation by Andy Schulert, Microsoft, on FrontPage.
Whitehead next led discussion on the goal of the working group, the
sponsorship of the working group, and criteria for completion.  At the end
of the day, the group discussed what they considered to be key
interoperability issues, and developed a list of activities and
deliverables to be produced by the working group.

Key Results

1. The working group adopted as its goal: Enable distributed web authoring
tools to be broadly interoperable.

2. 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.

3. 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 working group also identified some areas for future work:

1. Criteria for completion of the group's work were discussed, and need to
be clearly described in writing.

2. 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.

3. There should be a reinvestigation of work previously performed by Murray
Maloney on standard LINK REL and REV tags.

4. There should be an investigation by the versioning and configuration
management group into the utility of entity tags (etags) for performing
versioning.

Detailed meeting notes, a list of participants, a final agenda for the
meeting, and slides from the meeting are available at URL:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/sanmateo/

Finally, the working group would like to thank Dave Long of America Online
for arranging the conference room at AOL Productions, and for his
in-meeting support.

- Jim Whitehead <ejw@ics.uci.edu>