Future-Proofing Your Web Service

Brian Kelly

UK Web Focus

UKOLN

University of Bath

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.

Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk

URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/

AbstractWhat 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?

AbstractWhat 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?

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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

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The Bristol Web Site

(Incomplete) survey of main Bristol Web site carried out on 19 Jul 2000 using the Microsoft SiteServer analysis package

See http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/seminars/ilrt-jul-2000/

See http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/seminars/ilrt-jul-2000/

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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/>

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Server ProfileUsing 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

See <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/web-watch/> for a survey of UK HEIs

See <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/web-watch/> for a survey of UK HEIs

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Problems and Opportunities

What problems are you facing?

What opportunities are there?

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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

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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 <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue6/software-used/>

Scrubtheweb reviewed in <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue6/software-used/>

See <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue4/promotion/>

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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 valueProvides potential traffic / Is used in marketingCan monitor using linkpopularity.com, etc.

• Nos. of resources indexed in AltaVista, etc.Help people find youIndication 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)

10,195 remote pages pointing to main site, 35,815 to all

AltaVista contains12,940 pages from main site, 25,427 (all sites)

18 July 2000

See http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/indicators/

See http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/indicators/

Should you carry out such surveys systematically?

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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:

– Manage current problems– Deploy new solutions when they arrive

• Are they costly? Do we have the technical expertise?

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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

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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.

<www.tomtom.com><www.tomtom.com>

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http://mobile.ericsson.com/mc218/

http://www.nokia.com/3g/

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A New Requirement: News

Growing interest in automated news / content feeds

Bristolfilestore

Dept.filestore

Dept of X Web site

Serve local content (copy files, use SSIs, ..)

Perhaps links to imagesRemote users can link to your resources

Dept of Y Web site

Serve local content (copy files, use SSIs, ..)

Automated feeds of contentContent move easily managed and personalised

Remote users can syndicate your resources (e.g. news feeds to depts, MANs and Hero)

Bristolfilestore

Remotefilestore

Dept.filestore

BBC NewsJISC News

Bristol Echo news

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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

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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.)

XHTML

XML filefor Hero

WML filefor WAP

XSLTrules

XSLTengine

XML

XML filefor Hero

WML filefor WAP

XHTML for Web

XSLTengine

XSLTrules RSS for

My.MRC

CMS

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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/>

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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:• 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?

Or will this result in limited publishing to a small portion of an institution?

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CMS – The Problems

A CMS sound great, but:

CMS – the answer to

my problems

They sound expensiveGreat, an opportunity to hack some Perl / C / Java / Python scripts

My Perl, … hackers have gone to earn £xxx,xxx in the City

Warfare erupts - Universities are a good place for rational debate :-(

From Microsoft, running on NT

No problem, I'll buy a shrink-wrapped solution

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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 large-scale 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:

• 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/web-focus/events/workshops/jusw-2000/> and <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/web-focus/>

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Discussion Time

Any questions?