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24
The Internet, the World Wide Web, and Open Information
Services: How to Build the Global Information
Infrastructure
Charles H. Ferguson
Vermeer Technologies Inc.
Summary
The rise of the Internet represents the most fundamental
transformation in information technology since the development of
personal computers. We are witnessing the emergence of an open,
distributed, global information infrastructure based on the
Internet, World Wide Web servers, and Mosaic. At the same time,
inexpensive servers, fast networks, client-server technology, and
visual software tools usable by nonprogrammers are transforming the
strategic use of information by organizations. Taken together,
these developments offer an opportunity to revolutionize
information services and electronic commerce, generating both an
enormous business opportunity and a chance to vastly improve access
to information for everyone.
Over the next 5 years, the Internet software industry will
construct the architectures and products that will be the core of
information infrastructure for the next several decades. The
promise of these technologies to enable a global information
infrastructure can hardly be exaggerated. Decisions made during
this critical period will have a profound effect on the information
economy of the next century. But there is a serious risk that
avoidable mistakes and/or entrenched economic interests will cause
the opportunity to be lost or much reduced.
This paper therefore discusses the principles that should drive
technology development and adoption in the Internet market,
especially for the World Wide Web. Our goal is to promote the
development of an open architecture Internet/Web software industry,
and to support the deployment of the Internet/Web software
industry, and to support the deployment of the most open, easy to
use, and productive information infrastructure possible. We believe
that a simple set of principles, if adhered to by vendors and
buyers, can maximize the openness, interoperability, and growth of
both the Internet-based infrastructure and the industry providing
it.
Vermeer Technologies intends to succeed as a firm by
contributing to the development of this open architecture,
Web-based software industry. Vermeer is developing open,
standards-based, client-server visual tools for collaborative World
Wide Web service development. These visual tools will enable
end-users to use the Internet to inexpensively develop and operate
powerful World Wide Web information services, which currently
require complex programming.
The Opportunity to Build a Global
Information Infrastructure
The global Internet has rapidly evolved into the basis of an
open, nonproprietary, global information infrastructure. The
Internet now contains nearly 25,000 networks and 30 million users
and is growing at a rate
NOTE: In January 1996 Vermeer Technologies was
acquired by Microsoft Corporation.
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of 10 percent per month. Within the next year, Internet
connectivity will be bundled as a standard function with nearly all
newly sold personal computers. The Internet architecture already
provides excellent nonproprietary standards for basic connectivity,
electronic mail, bulletin boards, and, perhaps most critically of
all, the World Wide Web architecture for distributed information
services. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the newly
formed MIT-CERN World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will continue to
evolve these basic standards (e.g., by adding security) and we
support these efforts completely.
At the same time, there is an explosion of commercial investment
in development of Internet software such as Web servers, Web
browsers, and Internet access products. In general, we support the
development of the Internet software industry because there is a
real need to bring state-of-the-art, commercial software technology
to the Internet. In this way the Internet and the Web, originally
developed by and for researchers, can and should be made fully
accessible to the entire world of end-users. We feel that this is
an extremely important goal, nearly as critical as developing the
Internet itself: information infrastructure should be easily usable
by everyone, on any computer, and should not be available only to
programmers and researchers. We do not require that everyone learn
typesetting and printing to write a book; we should not restrict
electronic publishing to those who can write computer programs.
The independent software industry has already developed a large
set of technologies that address these problems in other markets
and that could be of huge benefit to an Internet-based information
infrastructure. State-of-the-art commercial technologies applicable
to the Internet include visual tools and WYSIWYG techniques that
enable end-users to develop applications that previously required
programming; client-server architectures; online help systems;
platform-independent software engineering techniques; and
systematic quality assurance and testing methodologies. Adobe,
Quark, Powersoft, the Macintosh GUI, and even Microsoft have used
these techniques to make software easier to use. If these
techniques were applied to Internet software, the result could be a
huge improvement in everyone's ability to use, communicate,
publish, and find information. However, commercial efforts must
respect the openness, interoperability, and architectural
decentralization that have made the Internet successful in the
first place.
The World Wide Web and the Revolution
in Information Services
With the possible exception of basic electronic mail, the World
Wide Web (WWW) is the most vital and revolutionary component of
Internet-based information infrastructure. The WWW architecture
provides a remarkable opportunity to construct an open,
distributed, interoperable, and universally accessible information
services industry. The Web, started about 5 years ago, now contains
tens of thousands of servers and is growing at a rate of 20 percent
per month. It is now being used not only to publish information
over the Internet but also to provide internal information services
within organizations.
In combination with TCP/IP, the Internet, and SMTP-based e-mail
integration services, the Web will enable the development of a new
information services sector combining the universal access and
directory services of the telephone system with the benefits of
desktop publishing. If we develop this industry properly, and
continue to honor the openness of the Web architecture, the result
will be an explosion of information access and a huge new global
industry.
The importance of the Web, of its open architecture, and of
enabling everyone to use it can hardly be overstated. The World
Wide Web offers, for the first time, the opportunity to liberate
computer users, publishers, and information providers from the grip
of the conventional online services industry. This $14 billion
industry, which includes such firms as America Online and
Bloomberg, is strikingly similar to the mainframe computer
industry. It once represented progress but has long since become
technologically obsolete. It maintains its profitability only by
charging extremely high royalties and by holding proprietary
control over closed systems. Some current online services vendors
continue to retard progress to maintain their financial
viability.
There is consequently a real risk that entrenched incumbents in
the online services industry will try to suppress the Web or to
turn it into simply another collection of proprietary, closed,
noninteroperable architectures. There is a similar risk that other
companies, such as vendors of commercial Web servers,
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browsers, tools, or system software, might attempt to do
likewise to establish a new generation of closed, proprietary
systems.
Such a return to the world of centralized, proprietary systems
would be a disaster, but it need not take place. If developed
properly by the emerging Internet software industry, the Web offers
huge advantages relative to conventional, centralized online
services and would generate gigantic revenues because the Web
enables many applications unreachable by the current industry.
Web-based services are enabling the free publication of huge
quantities of information, real-time access to individual and
workgroup data, the rise of large-scale internal corporate
information services, the use of online services for educational
and library applications, and the growth of information services
and electronic commerce as a strategic component of all business
processes.
Conventional services cannot do any of these things. They cannot
make use of local, distributed, and/or real-time information stored
on personal systems or workgroup servers; their capacity is
severely limited; they are not interoperable with each other; they
cannot be used for internal information services; they cannot be
managed by those who create their content; they cannot integrate
with database systems and legacy applications used in operating
businesses; they are expensive and uneconomical for many services,
including most free services; they cannot be linked with each
other; and they cannot be viewed using a single, common graphical
program such as Mosiac. In contrast, the World Wide Web offers the
potential for millions of electronic publications, information
services, authors, and publishers to evolve in a layered, open,
interoperable industry with support from navigation and directory
services.
The Current Situation and Some
Principles for Future Development
The Internet, the Web, and Mosaic have already laid an excellent
foundation for the development of standardized, open, distributed
information services. However, two major problems remain. The first
is that this foundation will come under attack from vendors
interested in slowing progress or exerting control via closed
systems. The second problem is that the Internet, and especially
the Web, remain much too hard to use.
The first problem—attacks on the openness of the
Web—must be dealth with simply by industry vigilance. Internet
software vendors should adhere to, and customers should insist on,
several basic principles in this industry. These include complete
support for current and future nonproprietary IETF and W3C
standards; open architectures and vendor-independent APIs;
cross-platform and multiplatform products; and complete
independence of each product from the other products and services
provided by the same vendor. Thus buyers should resist attempts by
vendors to link viewers, servers, tools, operating systems,
specific information services, and/or Internet access provision
with each other. Every product and architecture should be open and
forced to compete independently.
The second problem—the fact that Web services are still
overly difficult to create and use—requires further work. At
present, tools are extremely hard to use, do not provide WYSIWYG
capability, do not manage the complexity of hypertext-based
services well, and do nothing to eliminate the need for custom
programming. Most interesting user interactions with Web
servers—sending or requesting electronic mail, performing text
searches, accessing databases, creating or filling out
forms—require custom programming on the Web server.
The importance of this problem is frequently underestimated
because of the computer science origins of the Internet community.
However, a few simple facts can illustrate this point. First,
information services and/or Web servers can remain hard to develop
only when there are few of them. There are still at most 100,000
Web servers in use, most of them deployed in the last 6 months. But
this year, 2 million to 4 million Intel-based servers will be
shipped, and the server market is growing at a rate of 100 percent
per year. If in the long run 10 percent of all servers and 5
percent of all personal computers run Web servers, then the Web
server installed base will soon be in the millions. If the average
Web server holds content from 5 people, then it will be necessary
or at least desirable to enable 5 million to 10 million people to
develop Web services. There are not enough programmers to do
that.
Even more importantly, the people who understand what the
services should look like are the professionals close to the
application, not the programmers currently required to code it.
Furthermore, the development and maintenance of information
services should be a seamlessly collaborative client-server
activity.
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It should be possible to develop, debug, and edit services over
the Internet, using PC-based graphical tools, in collaboration with
other remotely located or mobile developers.
We have seen situations like this before. Before development of
spreadsheets, accountants performed spreadsheet computations by
asking MIS to write a COBOL program. With the advent of PC-based
spreadsheets, professionals could perform such computations
themselves far more effectively and could share them with
coworkers. Desktop publishing, presentation graphics, and visual
application development tools such as PowerBuilder had similar
effects. We believe that modern graphical tools will do the same
for the construction of Web-based online information services.
Vermeer Technologies and its
Mission
Vermeer Technologies Inc. is a venture-capital funded
independent software firm founded in 1994 by Charles Ferguson and
Randy Forgaard. Vermeer Technologies intends to become an industry
leader in Internet software by contributing to the construction of
an open, standards-based information infrastructure available to
everyone. In particular, we plan to make it easy for anyone to
develop a Web-based information service, either for internal use
within their organization or for publication on the Internet.
Accordingly, Vermeer is developing open, standards-based,
client-server visual tools for collaborative World Wide Web service
development. These visual tools will enable end-users and
professionals (collaborating across the Internet) to inexpensively
develop and operate powerful World Wide Web information services,
without the need for programming. (These services currently require
complex custom programming.) Nonprogrammers will be able to develop
services for the first time, and professional developers will gain
highly leveraged productivity tools. Our architecture also supports
many usage models ranging from individual self-publishing to
collaborative remote authoring for large commercial Web hosting
services. Our architecture is platform independent and will be
available on all major client and server computer platforms, on all
operating systems, and for all standard-conforming commercial Web
servers. Our vendor-independent, open APIs will enable us to
construct partnerships with other industry leaders in complementary
areas such as text indexing, electronic payment systems,
high-performance Web servers, and other functionalities to be
developed in the future.
Vermeer intends to rigorously support IETF and W3C standards and
is a member of the World Wide Web Consortium. Vermeer's
architecture relies on and supports all current standards and is
designed to accommodate future standards as they are finalized.
Vermeer is an entirely independent firm and has no entrenched
interests derived from existing or proprietary products or
businesses. Vermeer is therefore completely free to focus on the
construction of the most open, easy to use, interoperable products
possible.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
information infrastructure
