The Web Is Moving Too Slowly
The
Internet is about a lot more than the Web. But the Web, with its familiar buggy
browsers and slow servers, is still at the center of everything. It is the face
the Net presents to end-users, and without end-users nobody does any business.
Despite the frenetic waves of investment, innovation, and hype, the Web is
still remarkably like it was when it burst to the surface 7 long years ago,
which is very surprising and bears thinking about. There are some
straightforward things we could do with recent technologies like XML and P2P
that could make an immense difference in the user experience of the Web. It's
safe to predict that there are fortunes to be made (and lost) in this space,
and far-reaching effects.
Paper unavailable at press time.
Tim Bray
Tim Bray - Tim Bray has been in the
technology business for 20 years. After jobs at DEC and GTE, he became Manager
of the New Oxford English Dictionary Project in 1987, co-founded Open Text
Corporation (Nasdaq:OTEX) in 1989, and built one of the first successful
commercial Internet search engines in 1995. Between 1996 and 1999 served as an
independent consultant for, among others, IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, Adobe, the
United Nations, the European Union, the Government of Canada, A.T. Kearney, and
Merrill Lynch. During this period, serving as an invited expert for the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C), he co-invented XML and served as co-editor of the
W3C recommendations "XML 1.0" and "Namespaces in XML." Since mid-1999 he has
served as founder and CEO of Antarctica Systems Inc.
(http://antarcti.ca)
