Saturday, January 20, 2007

HTML SMTP and other open standards.

Speaking of lingua franca, HTML is to the Web what IP is to the Internet: the language of how information is stored in Web servers. Until recently, HTML was an open standard, not under control of any single vendor. This means that browsers (the software that runs on each client that enables viewing of web server resources) can operate similarly whether they run on Unix minicomputers or Macintosh or Intel PCs. That is a powerful incentive for corporations that have such mixtures of machines.

That degree of openness has changed with the rise of Netscape and increased competition from other vendors. The latest version of Netscape's Navigator contains features not found in any HTML standards specifications, such as independent frames within a browser window.

Why is the Web so popular? Three reasons: First off, web servers contain both text and non-text items: recorded speech, graphics, and even video clips are now becoming common. Most other Internet services are strictly for text. This means that web "pages" (as they are known) can range from the most mundane of lists to be sophisticated multimedia shows. Second, web sites (or places where information is stored) can range from the personal to the most corporate, depending on the content, author, and effort. Prodigy, Compuserve, and America Online all began offering the ability to construct one's own personal web page to their respective millions of customers this year, further popularizing the concept. And, as mentioned earlier, highly-visible companies such as Disney, ESPN, and Hershey's Chocolate have begun using the web to provide both corporate information as well as to extend the value of their identities and services.

Finally, each web server contains information that can be cross-linked to others, whether they be located around the world or just down the street. It is this ability to link, designed correctly, that enables the web its power, and its attraction, as a distributed corporate information resource.

But the web isn't the sole piece of corporate Intranets. Along with this technology are support for other standards, such as ftp servers, SMTP and other pieces that were originally developed for Unix computers and have spread throughout a corporate enterprise as IS has embraced them. Take email as an example: ten years ago, PROFS and DISSOS were the IBM heavyweight defacto standards: running on VM or MVS hosts, proprietary and closed systems. Now, those products seem like dinosaurs, and many corporations are looking towards Internet-based email as the more appropriate systems for their enterprise. This is because just about every email product now in use has Internet or SMTP-gateways, making the ability to reach anyone via email more and more likely. Most corporations either have in place or are moving towards such a common backbone to tie their own disparate email systems together, too.

Companies that haven't yet staked out their own Internet domain name at corporate.com are in peril of having their competitors grab it first.

A note on domain names.A side technical note: "domain names" are the company.com or company.org parts of each Internet site address. In years past, anyone could register whatever domain name they wished, and there are several cases of one firm trying to register the name of its competitor.

These names are registered in a central place for the entire world: at a consulting firm in suburban Virginia, called the InterNIC. Indeed, the land rush for domain names has gotten so frenzied that now the InterNIC charges an annual fee of $50 for each name, along with a setup fee for new names -- a service previously provided free of charge. Those ending in .com are supposed to be for for-profit businesses.

The InterNIC also has begun to increase the vetting process to try to prevent misrepresentation, but it is by no means staffed with lawyers or trademark specialists. Chances are good that many domain names that presently exist fall in a vast gray area here. Oftentimes the name itself is the key to finding the location of Internet resources for a company, so who knows what name takes on more importance until it becomes easier to find things on the Internet.


http://www.strom.com/pubwork/intranetp.html