"Together we are striding out of the springtime of the information age into the summer," announced Elisabeth Dufourcq at last week's Paris launch of the European branch of Le World Wide Web Consortium (henceforth W3CE). She's Secretary of State for Research at the French Ministry of National Education, Higher Education, Research and Occupational Integration. Both her slogan and her job title sound much more, well, intellectual in the original French. But is it only Anglo-Saxon cynicism which has her sentiment evoke the inevitability of an autumnal chill?

W3CE has some impeccable aspirations; its vision of the web is worthy. Walter de Backer from Directorate-General XIII of the European Commission reminded everyone how connectivity was essential to the growth of small and medium-sized business enterprises -- SMEs in Eurospeak -- and that this is where European economies must look for growth in employment.

Everyone from Brussels and Paris pointed to the need to nourish "cultural diversity" This goal is only slightly tainted by the fact that it usually translates from Eurospeak into English as "promoting French and not letting English be the world language". Neanmoins, the world and the web would be much narrower without cultural diversity. It will be fun to demand space on a French government site for some pages in Arabic, just to watch said government squirm. (French Cable TV carries the BBC, CNN, Spanish, Italian and German channels -- but, in the name of cultural integration of the minorities, Arabic is not permitted.)

You can't, at the moment, put up Web pages in Arabic at all. Even if you have the typefaces, browsers barf on right-to-left text.

Internationalisation of the Web will be one of W3CE's first projects. Its team, based at the French national research organisation INRIA, will take in proposals from information and software providers and users, and refine them into a Hyper-Text Mark-up Language standard which will allow a single document to contain passages in different languages.

Style sheets, the other initial area of work for W3CE, are technically closely linked to this problem. They're also important to MogulWeb. Corporate designers are frustrated that the present Web leaves users to define the typefaces and colours on their screens. When documents come with style sheets, the electronic Guardian will be able to specify that headings are in the type-style Franklin Gothic Extra Bold, so that the pages will look like the Guardian. (The Netscape browser has a method, but as Web co-founder Robert Cailliau puts it, technically "they've done it all wrong".)

W3CE will work in parallel with the original W3C, headed by Tim Berners-Lee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on open standards for electronic payment. W3C is also working on a host of other projects, with a standard for ratings systems (U, PG, 15) first to be launched.

As Robert Cailliau reminded the Paris gathering, the first Web browser which Tim Berners-Lee knocked up in a few days on the object-oriented NextStep system was philosophically superior to anything available today. Hypertext authoring was built in to the browser, so that all readers could be authors and the proto-Web was inherently participatory. But the first widely-distributed browser program was written to work in line mode for maximum portability, and by default the Web grew into a publishing medium.

Tim Berners-Lee noted that there was remarkably little demand from industry for an interactive Web, but he'd still like to see W3C work on it. Another philosophically important area which industry was ignoring was "semantics" -- at the simplest level, embedding information in documents so that computer programs could "know" things about their content and do useful things for us. (He gave the example of a person's home page, the description of their house and the deeds to the house "knowing" how they are connected.)

But can W3CE achieve its worthy goals? The line-up of founding members wasn't hopeful: men in suits from Electricite de France, France Telecom, Nokia, Belgian Telecom, French publishers Hachette, French hi-tech and arms company Thomson-CSF... The man standing in for the Minister of Technology didn't help by announcing that "the Web is better than hypertext, even". Netscape, which two weeks ago opened a Paris office, didn't show up. The US-based W3C at least counts many software players, from Netscape and Microsoft to Fujitsu and BT labs, among its members.

The parade of suits from state-linked corporations is, at one level, just how you do a launch in the French political system. It doesn't necessarily stop the team at INRIA from doing useful work.

More interesting was the suits' conception of what the Web is all about. Many spoke of their hopes for distributing confidential information strictly within their organisations. They appeared to conceive of a suit-based standards process like that which gave us X.400 email addressing: the Outernet embraces Internet and produces Innernet.

The deeper question, of course, is whether the setting of open standards is likely to succeed at all, in information economy where the first product to market gains an enormous advantage. Microsoft seems to be poised between trying to take over the Web and trying to replace it with Blackbird (OnLine Nov 2). Netscape has just launched yet another set of proprietary extensions, and no-one involved in W3C will say how annoyed they are (or are not).

The Web was born of scientists' insatiable urge to communicate freely, and of two scientists' predilection for logically clean, intellectually beautiful solutions. Is the best hope for W3C, and its worthy goals, not to concentrate precisely on those areas which industry wants not to know about? And then, when industry wants to know and moves in with messy, ad-hoc and potentially profitable rip-offs of the results, to move on to further intellectually stimulating challenges?

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Written:
5 November 1995

An edited and doubtless thus improved version of this article appeared in the Guardian OnLine section.

This version is © copyright 1996 Mike Holderness; moral rights are asserted.

Damn! If I'd dared to use Greek in the paper, I'd have invented the Intranet. I rather like the accent and inward-looking implications of "Innernet", but I can see that only Bell Labs (oops, Lucent would dream of marketing something under a name like that...

Mike Holderness [could then] be contacted by suits at X.400 address "c=de; a=dbp; p=geonet; s=holderness; g=mike" - or by you as mch@cix.co.uk.