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Lydia Zajc

The 10th World Wide Web conference (WWW10), the developers' meeting held for the first time in Asia last week, was marked by a critical advance in cyberspace development and debates over how to broaden the Web's reach beyond its largely English-language base.

WWW10 concluded its five days of panels, workshops and presentations on Saturday.

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, and the grassroots standards body World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), unveiled the latest standard for online communications called the Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) Schema.

The new schema, which W3C staff and companies have been working to develop for more than two years, defines vocabularies to be used in Web documents operating on XML technology.

This means files read over the Internet can be understood by other machines, no matter how they are put together.

The XML Schema will speed development of the 'second Internet revolution' which is the Semantic Web, according to Mr Berners-Lee.

The Semantic Web, which uses a linguistic term describing the study of meaning in language, will give meaning to online data so computers can understand information without the need for human interaction.

Presently, a human can read a page of numbers on the Web and pick out individual information, but computer programs cannot.

Web information also will be easier to access from a far broader range of devices.

Mr Berners-Lee, who directs W3C, said at the conference the concept would 'fix stupid computers'.

This year's gathering also included the topic of Web internationalisation - reflecting the interests of the organisers, the Hong Kong International World Wide Web Conference Consortium.

Some of the about 1,200 technologists discussed ways of broadening the Web from its English-language platform so that sites could be called up and read easily by surfers around the globe.

Multilingual domain names and addresses were discussed, along with programs that translate languages with some accuracy.

'Some of the original e-mail systems were limited in their capacity in the set of characters that they support,' said Tex Texin, director of international products at Progress Software. 'We want to extend the Net to be accessible by all kinds of users.'

Although multilingual domain names threaten to fracture the existing Web, they are considered an inevitable developments.

E-commerce was another discussion topic, with attendees concluding that e-commerce was not dead and that last year's plunge in technology stock prices had simply slowed its development.

Several keynote speakers, including NTT DoCoMo chief executive Keiji Tachikawa, outlined visions of the Web's future.

Mr Tachikawa showed a video that unveiled mobile phones with television cameras and screens in cars and homes.

The last word at the conference came from chairman Narayana Murthy, of Infosys Technologies.

Mr Murthy said only people from China and India, the globe's most populous countries, could fill the shortage of skilled information technology labour.

Eventually overseas companies would bring their operations to meet the pool of talent in Asia instead of enticing people to move overseas, he predicted.

He also asked the audience, made up mostly of developers, for more technological standardisation to ease the trend toward globalisation.

Technology had to be created in a way which allowed communication among all peoples and all machines from all companies, Mr Murthy said.

Next year's World Wide Web conference will be held in Hawaii.



New XML Schema hailed as key to the 'second Internet revolution'