We'd like to do it, but we have all kinds of things on our plate right
now and not enough people/time to do them all. So it's hard to say
when the editor is going to move far enough up the "important todo"
list to be given time and energy, if the current situation holds
(i.e., if nobody dumps a pile of money on our laps).
> One project we are considering getting started on is integrating the
> Z39.50 information retrieval protocol into WWW. We're a library and
> Z39.50 is becoming *very* important to us. Z39.50, by the way, is
> essentially the protocol used by WAIS (with a few caveats). I have
> yet to take a close look at the WWW-WAIS gateway code. Comments?
Mosaic has to speak Z39.50 sometime this year -- again, not sure when,
though -- and we're hoping it will be done for us (i.e., in the client
library) but if not we'll probably put work into it.
> Finally, in http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu:80/www-overview.html, TBL
> says
> HTML is eventually going to be a real ``standard''; by
> the time that happens, it should be fully SGML-compliant.
> What does "real" mean in this context? Which standards organization(s)
> are involved?
Probably the Internet RFC process (?), which would make it a
"standard" on a roughly equivalent footing with the format of Internet
mail messages, or MIME, or the FTP protocol, or anything else defined
by an RFC.
Cheers,
Marc
-- Marc Andreessen Software Development Group National Center for Supercomputing Applications marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu