Internet Practices

Jim Isaak <Jim.Isaak@digital.com> reports on the October Meeting in Reno, Nevada

The Internet Practices Study Group met in Reno with the Portable Application Standards Committee (PASC) groups. This meeting agreed to move forward a Project Authorization Request (PAR) for Intranet/Extranet best practices, and to further research practices in the area of technical publishing.

The first meeting of the working group for this new project will be January 12­13, 1998 at the PASC meetings in Ft. Lauderdale. Copies of minutes, PAR, and related materials can be found at: <https://computer.org/standard/Internet/>.

This work will be of interest to webmasters, particularly those responsible for corporate intranet and extranet operations, as a way to gain from the experiences of others, and also to establish credibility and confidence in Web-based operations. In some areas, such as protection of property rights (copyright and proprietary information), best practices can provide an essential line of "defense" (or offense) in liability and/or legal disputes.

Issues to be considered include copyright, proprietary data declarations, indexing and content classification of pages, use of epoch transparent dates, context (author, responsible organization, currency, etc.), multinational sensitivities, browser tolerance, accommodation of persons with disabilities, and bandwidth efficiencies. The objective is to improve the productivity of Intra/Extranet Web operations in terms of locating relevant information, and efficient development and maintenance practices.

This will also be of interest to creators of tools, such as dynamic page generation, or page development/design tools. Those products will be able to claim that they generate Web pages consistent with IEEE standards for best practices, and for indexing and other services where coherent use of Metadata and other Web page elements can be of significant value.

It is expected that balloting on a first version of this document will start in June of 1998. Since a "comprehensive" set of recommendations is not likely in the short term, the objective is to nail down a priority set, and bring these to ballot while working on an additional set concurrently.