Future-Proofing Your
Web Service
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath
Email:
B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
URL:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
Abstract
What is the current status of Web
sites in Bristol?
What challenges do Web
developers face?
What new opportunities are there?
New technologies (RDF, XML,
XSL, WAP, etc.) are being
mentioned But what are they? Do I
really need them?
UKOLN is funded by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries,
the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding
Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union.
UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based.
Contents
• The Bristol Web Site
– SiteServer Analysis
– Bobby Accessibility Audit
– Servers at Bristol
• HE Communities' Interests:
– Web Site Promotion
– Performance Indicators
– Re-engineering
• New Areas
• Protocols, Tools and Architectures
• Discussion
2
The Bristol Web Site
(Incomplete)
survey of main
Bristol Web
site carried out
on 19 Jul 2000
using the
Microsoft
SiteServer
analysis
package
3
See http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/
events/seminars/ilrt-jul-2000/
Accessibility Audit
Used Bobby Java
application to report on
the accessibility of the
main University of Bristol
Web site:
• Resources up to level 4
checked
• > 1,000 pages found
• 737 pages approved!
See <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/
seminars/ilrt-jul-2000/>
4
Server Profile
Using Netcraft.com to
search *.bris.ac.uk
on 18 Jul 2000:
• 83 servers
• Apache used at
www.bris.ac.uk
• Mixture of departments
and projects
• No obvious strange
servers
• 48 servers found when
looking for bristol.ac.uk
5
See <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/
web-watch/> for a survey of UK HEIs
Problems and Opportunities
What problems are you facing?
What opportunities are there?
6
Current Interests
Topics, developments of interest to UK HE
Web management community:
• Promoting resources (and the institution) using
the Web
• Performance indicators
• Web site re-engineering
• E-business and structured Web sites
• WAP and the Mobile Web
• Tools:
– Content Management System
– Free tools / external tools
7
Promotion
See <http://www.exploit-lib.
org/issue4/promotion/>
You want:
• People to find your Web site
• People to find quality resources
You need to:
• Have short domain name
• Use robots.txt (etc.) to restrict access
• Guidelines on directory structures to support
management of areas
• Consider use of "submit it" submission tools
• Beware of robot traps (frames, unusual URL
strings, etc.)
Scrubtheweb reviewed in
8
<http://www.exploit-lib.org/
issue6/software-used/>
Performance Indicators
Your management / funders may require performance
indicators to justify further spending:
• Nos. of visitors / sessions / hits:
Web stats can be dubious, but needed
• Nos. of links to you:
Indication of perceived value
Provides potential traffic / Is used in marketing
Can monitor using linkpopularity.com, etc.
• Nos. of resources indexed in AltaVista, etc.
Help people find you
18 July 2000 Indication of success in Web site promotion
10,195 remote pages pointing to
main site, 35,815 to all
AltaVista contains12,940 pages
from main site, 25,427 (all sites)
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See http://www.exploitlib.org/issue5/indicators/
Should you carry out such
surveys systematically?
Reengineering
What every Web manager knows:
• It's not fun any one 
• Sites are difficult to manage at (HTML) file level
• Need for semantics (will global change of 0191
work?)
• Need to manage fragments (change all MRC
images with WAI P1 problems)
• New requirements are coming (e.g. Hero)
• Knowledge of (fear of) new stuff around the corner
(XML, XHTML, SVG, RDF, …)
• Need for tools to:
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– Manage current problems
– Deploy new solutions when they arrive
• Are they costly? Do we have the technical expertise?
A New Requirement: Hero
Hero:
• HEFCE, SHEFC, etc funded portal to UK HE
• Will contain brief course information, URLs, etc for
users to search on
• Will deliver users to departmental page
Challenges for institutions:
• How to get large nos. of departmental information
to Hero and everyone else who wants similar
information
• Solutions:
– Buy more and more data input staff
– Move to a business-to-business (B2B)
environment which is more scalable
11
New Requirement: WAP
Some comments:
• In Japan more mobile than PC
Internet users ( >10m
according to ITWeek)
• Lot of investment
• Some interesting prototypes
(e.g. <www.tomtom.com>)
What should UK HE do?
• Can't ignore it
• Need to thing about use of
content management systems
and structured file formats to
author content for the Web,
mobile phones, print, etc.
12
<www.tomtom.com>
http://mobile.ericsson.com/
mc218/
13
http://www.nokia.com/3g/
A New Requirement: News
Growing interest in automated news / content feeds
BBC News
JISC News
Bristol Echo
news
Bristol
filestore
Dept of X
Web site
Dept.
Serve local content
filestore (copy files, use SSIs, ..)
Perhaps links to images
Remote users can link to
your resources
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Remote
filestore
Dept of Y
Web site
Bristol
filestore
Dept.
filestore
Serve local content (copy files,
use SSIs, ..)
Automated feeds of content
Content move easily managed
and personalised
Remote users can syndicate your
resources (e.g. news feeds to
depts, MANs and Hero)
Technologies In Context
What technologies are needed to implement
such services?
•
•
•
•
Proprietary solutions
XML: structured information
XSLT: transforming XML to other formats
RSS: an XML application designed for news
feeds
• RDF: an XML application which provides a
framework for metadata applications
15
XHTML
XHTML:
• HTML as an XML application
• Current W3C Recommendation
• Provides the benefits of XML:
– Future developments such as XLink
– XSLT for transformations
• Look to deploy now (see Tidy and HTML-Kit)
• See <http://www.exploit-lib.org/
issue6/xhtml/>
<h1>XHTML</h1>
<p>This is XHTML.</p>
<img src="logo.gif" alt="Logo" height="20" width="20 /></p>
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XSLT
XSLT:
• XSL Transformations
• W3C Recommendation
• Transform XML document to other XML DTD
or other format (RTF, PDF, etc.)
CMS
XSLT
rules
XHTML
XSLT
engine
XML file
for Hero
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WML file
for WAP
XSLT
rules
XML file
for Hero
XML
XSLT
engine
RSS for
My.MRC
WML file
for WAP
XHTML
for Web
RSS
RSS:
• Rich Site Summary
• Originally developed by
Netscape for use in
My.Netscape.com
• Lots of interest from
providers of news
services
• See:
<http://www.ukoln.
ac.uk/metadata/
resources/rss/>
18
RDF
RDF:
• Resource Description Framework
• Viewed by W3C as the key architectural
component of The Semantic Web
• Much interest in the Web research community
• Seems to be slow in having a real-world impact
• See <http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
discovery/rdf/resources/>
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Content Management Systems
Do we agree:
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• We can't do continue Web site management by
hand or by simple file-based authoring tools?
Need for:
• Content management systems (CMS) for
professional Web services (which manage
technologies such as XSL, RDF, RSS, etc.)
Do we go for:
• Expensive, shrink-wrapped systems (e.g. Vignette
StoryServer, used by Guardian Unlimited)
• Roll your own services (e.g. PHP / ASP, Frontier,
Oracle, Zope, etc.)
Or will this result in limited publishing to a
small portion of an institution?
CMS – The Problems
A CMS sound great, but:
They sound expensive
Warfare erupts Universities are a
good place for
rational debate :-(
CMS
– the answer to
my problems
From Microsoft,
running on NT
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Great, an
opportunity to hack
some Perl / C / Java
/ Python scripts
No problem, I'll buy
a shrink-wrapped
solution
My Perl, … hackers
have gone to earn
£xxx,xxx in the City
CMS, MLE, VLE, NLE
Do you want a:
• Content Management System (CMS)
• Managed learning Environment (MLE)
• Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)
• Networked Learning Environment (NLE)
Will you find your University has independently
bought one of each
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Web-Enabling Your MIS
Why bother with:
• New technologies such as CMSs, which would be
used by newly-established groups (Web teams)
with a short history of service provision
• New technologies such as VLEs (MLEs) which are
driven by the teaching & learning community which
have limited experiences of deployment of largescale services
When you can:
• Web-enable your Management Information System
• Exploit the experiences of companies like Oracle
which have experience of service support and
development in large organisations
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I've No Resources!
CMS are fine but:
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• I've no money for software
• Good techies leave
How about:
• Use of externally-hosted services
• Can be used for Web statistics, authoring tools,
user feedback, file management, Intranets, …
• Move towards ASPs (Application Service Providers)
helped by SuperJANET 4
• Opportunity to supplement national Mailing list
service by National Word Processing service?
• See <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/webfocus/events/workshops/jusw-2000/> and
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/
web-focus/>
Discussion Time
Any questions?
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