The Web After Five Years

As the World Wide Web continues exploding across the technology scene, it may seem impossible to keep track of myriad new protocols, standards, and applications. The World Wide Web Consortium is chartered to help members understand the forces behind these developments and to lead the way to further innovation -- and theWorld Wide Web Journalis your direct connection to its work. Every quarter, the W3J provides timely, in-depth coverage of W3C's activities as well as independently referreed papers from around the world.

Issue 3 is a reflection on "The Web After Five Years": how millions of users later, today's Web is still trying to capture the small-scale, collaborative vision of its earliest incarnations while also posing unprecedented challenges as a commercial, mass medium. In an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web and Director of the W3C, we learn that the Web was built to be an interactive, intercreative, two-way medium from the beginning. At the opposite scale, as a mass medium, are urgent questions about the Web's size, character, and users. These issues are addressed in selections from the MIT/W3C Workshop on Web Demographics and Internet Survey Methodology, along with commerce-related papers selected from the Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, which took place from May 6-10 in Paris.

Other contributions include technical proposals from the W3C, lively debates on the size of the Web, the impact of advertising on caching, and ethical guidelines for using such data.

This issue also marks a reinauguration of the W3 Journal itself, with a new editor and an expanded structure. The first part contains a log of the wide-ranging activities of the Consortium, profiles of the researchers and developers behind the scenes, and interviews with experts in the field. The second section is called "W3C Reports," and includes the latest technical reports, standards, and papers from the W3 Consortium, including its Workshops and Working Groups. Finally, a reknowned editorial board will referee contributions to the third section, "Technical Papers," an independent academic forum for the latest in web-related research.