Back in 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee sat down at the European particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva to invent what would one day become the World Wide Web, there was no one around to notice. When he and a few associates began creating the first browsers a year later, a mere handful of people were paying attention. The process of invention was swift, personal, intuitive and collegial.
It was the Web's Lost Age of Innocence.
Today, billions of dollars and the fate of thousands of companies ride on Berners-Lee's invention, and on the international standards body he co-founded in 1994 and still directs - the World Wide Web Consortium, universally known as W3C.
As one man's initiative has flowered into an international engine of commerce and communication, the W3C has evolved into the United Nations of the Internet. Operating continuously under a microscope, it welcomes representatives of a business world eager to create standards for Web-based languages and technologies. Yet, lacking enforcement powers, it must rely on international goodwill to persuade competing companies to comply with the standards it creates. And, like the U.N., politics, greed and rancorous debate are increasingly making its work painfully contentious and slow.
The days when any aspect of the Web's design or architecture "comes in low and fast and under the radar" are long since past, observes Danny Weitzner, the W3C's technology and society domain leader.
By the time Berners-Lee and other pioneers founded the W3C, they had moved the heart of the Web from Switzerland to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science in Cambridge, Mass. Initial progress was swift, as Berners-Lee, W3C staff and member companies hammered out new standards, recommendations and upgrades to the original HTML, to Style Sheets and, eventually, to eXtensible Markup Language (XML), a sort of HTML on steroids. Everyone agreed. Everything worked. The whole world seemed to love the Web and the W3C.
"Early on, they were astoundingly successful," says Tim Bray, chief executive of Antarcti.ca Systems and one of the primary authors of XML. "They did XML and PNG [Portable Network Graphics] and HTML 4.0 quickly, and all are widely deployed."
Leon Shklar, vice president of technology at Information Architects, agrees. "We're absolutely pleased with what they did," says Shklar, who today is a member of one of the W3C's more than 30 working groups, which are committees that study and develop new standards for the Web.
But by all accounts, the pace of the W3C today has become a crawl, even though people such as Shklar insist that swift action is still essential in the Internet world. "You have to do standards really fast," he says, because if the W3C fails to act quickly, business interests will grow impatient, develop their own solutions and soon "someone will have an alternate standard."
One glaring example is the working group chartered to develop the Platform for Privacy Preferences specification, a name mercifully shortened to "P3P." The P3P's deliberations took more than three years - four years if you count the prior work of the ad hoc Internet Privacy Working group, which was eventually absorbed by the W3C.
"Beyond the technical problems, we were working on a privacy vocabulary," says Lorrie Cranor, the AT&T senior researcher who chaired the P3P working group. "There were lawyers and policy people involved, because we had to define vocabulary for an international framework."
In addition, the P3P working group was temporarily stopped dead by a patent dispute, and it added a number of "invited experts" as nonvoting members who participated in - and, some argue, prolonged - deliberations.
Despite such delays and setbacks, Berners-Lee remains philosophical about the complications bred by the Web's success. "Standards are hard because they involve understanding between a lot of people," he says. "And that means a lot of communication, which is a lot of hard work."
Besides, the effort is worth the pain, Cranor says. "It's a great opportunity to work on things that impact the whole industry," she says.
