ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It has been a great pleasure working with the faculty, staff, and students at the University of California, Irvine, during my tenure as a doctoral student. This work would never have been possible if it were not for the freedom I was given to pursue my own research interests, thanks in large part to the kindness and considerable mentoring provided by Dick Taylor, my long-time advisor and committee chair. Mark Ackerman also deserves a great deal of thanks, for it was his class on distributed information services in 1993 that introduced me to the Web developer community and led to all of the design work described in this dissertation Likewise. it was david rosenblum's work on Internet-scale software architectures that convinced me to think of my own research in terms of architecture, rather than simply hypermedia or application-layer protocol design The Web's architectural style was developed iteratively over a six year period, but primarily during the first six months of 1995. It has been influenced by countless discussions with researchers at uCl, staff at the world wide web Consortium(w3C), and engineerswithinthehttpanduriworkinggroupsoftheInternetEngineering Taskforce(ETF). I would particularly like to thank Tim Berners-Lee, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, Dan Connolly, Dave Raggett, Rohit Khare, Jim Whitehead, Larry Masinter, and Dan Laliberte for many thoughtful conversations regarding the nature and goals of the www architecture. Id also like to thank Ken Anderson for his insight into the open hypertext community and for trailblazing the path for hypermedia research at UCI. Thanks also to my fellow architecture researchers at UCl, all of whom finished before me including Peyman Oreizy, Neno Medvidovic, Jason Robbins, and David Hilbert The Web architecture is based on the collaborative work of dozens of volunteer software developers, many of whom rarely receive the credit they deserve for pioneering the Web ecame a commercial phenomenon. In addition to the w3c folks above, recognition should go to the server developers that enabled much of the Web's rapid growth in 1993-1994(more so, I believe, than did the browsers). That includes RobMccool(nCsahttpd),AriLuotonen(cernhttpd/proxy),andTonySanders (Plexus). Thanks also to"Mr Content", Kevin Hughes, for being the first to implement most of the interesting ways to show information on the Web beyond hypertext. The early client developers also deserve thanks: Nicola Pellow (line-mode), Pei Wei (viola), Tony Johnson(Midas), Lou Montulli (Lynx), Bill Perry (W3), and Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina(Mosaic for X). Finally, my personal thanks go to my libwww-perl collaborators, Oscar Nierstrasz, Martijn Koster, and Gisle Aas. Cheers!viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It has been a great pleasure working with the faculty, staff, and students at the University of California, Irvine, during my tenure as a doctoral student. This work would never have been possible if it were not for the freedom I was given to pursue my own research interests, thanks in large part to the kindness and considerable mentoring provided by Dick Taylor, my long-time advisor and committee chair. Mark Ackerman also deserves a great deal of thanks, for it was his class on distributed information services in 1993 that introduced me to the Web developer community and led to all of the design work described in this dissertation. Likewise, it was David Rosenblum’s work on Internet-scale software architectures that convinced me to think of my own research in terms of architecture, rather than simply hypermedia or application-layer protocol design. The Web’s architectural style was developed iteratively over a six year period, but primarily during the first six months of 1995. It has been influenced by countless discussions with researchers at UCI, staff at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and engineers within the HTTP and URI working groups of the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF). I would particularly like to thank Tim Berners-Lee, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, Dan Connolly, Dave Raggett, Rohit Khare, Jim Whitehead, Larry Masinter, and Dan LaLiberte for many thoughtful conversations regarding the nature and goals of the WWW architecture. I’d also like to thank Ken Anderson for his insight into the open hypertext community and for trailblazing the path for hypermedia research at UCI. Thanks also to my fellow architecture researchers at UCI, all of whom finished before me, including Peyman Oreizy, Neno Medvidovic, Jason Robbins, and David Hilbert. The Web architecture is based on the collaborative work of dozens of volunteer software developers, many of whom rarely receive the credit they deserve for pioneering the Web before it became a commercial phenomenon. In addition to the W3C folks above, recognition should go to the server developers that enabled much of the Web’s rapid growth in 1993-1994 (more so, I believe, than did the browsers). That includes Rob McCool (NCSA httpd), Ari Luotonen (CERN httpd/proxy), and Tony Sanders (Plexus). Thanks also to “Mr. Content”, Kevin Hughes, for being the first to implement most of the interesting ways to show information on the Web beyond hypertext. The early client developers also deserve thanks: Nicola Pellow (line-mode), Pei Wei (Viola), Tony Johnson (Midas), Lou Montulli (Lynx), Bill Perry (W3), and Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina (Mosaic for X). Finally, my personal thanks go to my libwww-perl collaborators, Oscar Nierstrasz, Martijn Koster, and Gisle Aas. Cheers!