The first steps toward forming the new nonprofit organization to administer the Internet's central infrastructure, such as domain names and IP addresses, has been made following the U.S. Government's paper advocating such a move. The new organization, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has been incorporated in California, has selected its initial board of directors, and had a public meeting on November 14 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They've put up a Web site at www.icann.org, and are working towards taking over Internet administrative tasks now being performed by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, www.iana.org) by the year 2000. IANA was headed for many years by the late Jon Postel, who died in October of this year.
The new organization is intended to have broader representation of the various people, organizations, countries, and interests involved with the Internet than IANA, which is run by the academics who built the Internet originally as a research project. However, some people are already criticizing the new organization, before it has even managed to actually do anything substantial, for being too centralized in power and dominated by large governmental and corporate interests at the expense of the "little guy" who uses the Internet as a communications medium.
If ICANN makes a decisive act, such as adding new top-level domains, it remains to be seen if the rest of the (rather anarchic) Internet will accept their authority, or if there will just be more rounds of bickering (as in the last few years) that will prevent any new domain endings from getting widely accepted. We can hope this won't cause a fragmenting of the net, with some of the top-level servers supporting a different set of domains than others, so that URLs are no longer universal.
Netscape has announced that the 5.0 version, due in beta release by the end of 1998, will include the "new-generation" layout engine originally code-named "NGlayout", but now referred to as "NGT". This layout engine has been under development by Netscape and outside developers under the free-source system coordinated at mozilla.org. the source code freely available, programmers worldwide have been able to do volunteer work improving this program and making it more compliant with Web standards. The new layout engine is much faster at displaying pages with tables than the old one, and supports standards of HTML 4.0 and Cascading Style Sheets Level 1 (and some of level 2) to a much greater degree than the current Netscape. (Last I checked, though, it still didn't support the tag, a new HTML 4.0 element for quotes. The only browsers I know of that do this element correctly are the text-mode browser Lynx and the specialty "internationalized" browser Alis Tango.) More news and information (from a developer's perspective) can be found in the independent "Mozilla fanzine" at www.mozillazine.org.
In other Netscape / Mozilla Project news, Netscape has just taken over the "Open Directory Project" (formerly called "NewHoo"), an attempt at creating a "Yahoo-style" Web directory on a more grass-roots basis, with volunteer editors for different topics instead of centralized editing like Yahoo or automated indexing like AltaVista and other search engines. It is now accessible at directory.mozilla.org. You can search its topics there, and if there isn't enough about your favorite topics, you can sign up as an editor of that topic yourself.
A U.S. district court has issued an injunction against Microsoft in a suit by Sun Microsystems over Microsoft's failure to follow Sun's standards for the Java language. Sun created Java and licensed it on the basis that vendors had to follow certain standards in order to be allowed to market their products as "Java-compatible". The purpose was to promote a standardized cross-platform development environment that wouldn't be full of vendor-specific incompatibilities. According to Sun's charges, Microsoft has failed to follow the standards consistently, and has introduced proprietary features not in the standard while not implementing the standardized features consistently. The judge has found that Sun is likely to prevail in the full trial, and so has issued an injunction requiring Microsoft to stop advertising its products as Java-compatible.
In other Microsoft news, an internal memo recently leaked (dubbed the "Halloween Memo" due to the date it was leaked) indicates the proposed strategies Microsoft has been considering to counter the trend toward open-source software (programs and operating systems for which the source code is freely available and lots of volunteer programmers are working on its development, such as Linux and Mozilla, as opposed to proprietary programs where the source code is a trade secret, like most commercial software). Some parts of this document indicate that it is Microsoft's intentional strategy to get the market to move away from easy-to-understand, well-documented protocols and data formats in favor of more complex, proprietary protocols designed by Microsoft, which are harder for independent developers to support. You can read this memo at: http://www.opensource.org/halloween.html.
(Contact Daniel Tobias at dan@softdisk.com. My personal World Wide Web page is at:http://www.softdisk.com/comp/dan/)