Organization looks to codify principles The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) this week published a final version of its “Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume 1” document, looking to set forth codified principles for the Web itself.Published as a formal W3C recommendation, the architecture features components for URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers), data formats, and protocols such as HTTP.“The purpose of this document is [to serve as a guide] if you need to know everything about the Web in 50 pages, in a sense,” said Dan Connolly, member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group. W3C with the document is eyeing those doing software development and design work, he said. “We’d like them to know the principles of the Web that allow it to scale and work well,” Connolly said.The architecture features information about Web data formats and HTTP that might be presumed to be common knowledge. But that is not necessarily the situation, Connolly said. “It would be nice to think that everybody knew this, and we just discovered that not everybody does,” he said. “Each person’s assumption about what everybody else knows turns out to be wrong.”Earlier drafts of the document have been used in software engineering classes. The planned next volume of the document will focus on areas of Web applications such as Web services, the semantic Web, mobile Web applications, and additional principles. Work on this volume will start in 2005, with no date set yet for completion, according to W3C. Volume One of the Architecture of the World Wide Web can be found at https://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/. A summary document is at http://www.w3.org/TR/20 04/REC-webarch-20041215/summary.html. Software Development