Minutes of meeting:
I. Attendance
About 12 people attended. Two from Bell Labs, One from Sandia,
two from MIT, GTE, and a few others.
II. Topics
a. Hierachical caching, multi-part MIME messages
briefly discussed as a good thing.
b. Continous (as apposed to stateless HTTP)
A general consensus for need, but a feeling that it should
not be part of the HTTP protocol
c. Multi-Threaded WWW clients
Sure. When can we get them?
d. Embedded audio, movies, and other viewers
Considered part of a new WWW client archicteture
e. New client architecture
General consensus that one large "do-everything" client
is an outdated concept. Clients should be composed out
of a hetergenous mix of pieces - all cooperating to produce
one logical WWW client.
However, there was much to still be resolved as to how these
pieces communicate. Some were inclined to extend HTTP, so
want a new protocol. I am partial to shared distributed memories
along the tuple-space model of Linda, etc.
f. Security
lots of concern about the cost of firewalls (e.g. at Bell Labs).
and also lots of concern about new protocols for continuous
interaction, and the holes they might open up.
Basically, we face competing needs (1) to open up the protocol
to allow more live embedded and interactive apps to work in
conjuction with the client (2) the need for restricited protocols
that can be verified for rigor and security.
g. WWW resource discovery
Some interesting comments about librarians and their ability
to master the task of locating information in one knowledge domain
scattered among many sources.
Also some interesting sociological discussions about the potential
jobs security and career opportunites for those who can master
where to find things on the Web!
Definite interest in URN type mechanisms that detatch physical
name from logical name.
h. Jobs
seems that MIT students are in hot demand this year as summer
interns to produce HTML pages for companies! Students get the
opportunity to "learn about networks" and companies get nice
looking pages.
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Yechezkal-Shimon Gutfreund [email protected] [MIME]
GTE Laboratories, Waltham MA ftp://ftp.gte.com/pub/circus/home/home.html
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