I'm reorganizing my web presence. You can still see my previous home page which hasn't changed style since 1997. I'm experimenting with WordPress, about.me, and a few others. Comments, questions, corrections, suggestions much appreciated.
Summary
Principal Scientist at Adobe, Standards, with focus on web and Internet standards. Other interests include machine learning, on-line education, social networking, virtual worlds. I've been at Adobe since 2000; AT&T Labs in 1999; Xerox PARC 1973-1999.
Internet Governance
The value of the Internet comes from the fact there is only one, with everyone (and everything) connected. Governance (regulation, legislation) is local and hierarchical: city, state, region, country, with interactions relegated to treaties, negotiation, or worse. How can anyone offer a global service and be subject to every constraint of every jurisdiction?
- (2015) Adobe becomes Gold Member of Internet Society; I'm primary contact for ISOC Advisory Council
- (2014) Position Paper for STRINT Workshop ("Strengthening the Internet Against Pervasive Monitoring").
- (2013) Governance in Conflict 3 minute presentation of Governance and Web Architecture document.
- (2013) Publishing and Linking on the Web (with W3C TAG): An example of some governance issues at the application layer.
- (2012) Governance and Web Architecture (W3C TAG Editor's draft). A framework for approaching the topic.
Metadata
Metadata is data about data: for a phone call, who called whom when; for a library book, the card catalog information. There are different kinds of metadata.
- (2006) Adobe Partner's Guide to XMP for Dynamic Media: (with Steve Deach) developed library for managing workflow meta-data for compound objects and multimedia, including temporal metadata (describing video, audio), and the management of metadata through the creative process into production and distribution -- part of extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) support within Adobe Creative Suite 4.
Internet standards
Computers across the network from different origins and devices work with each other because everyone agrees how they should work. There's not a separate Internet for Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe. Everyone does't agree without working out differences about the future, which is why standards work is "arguing about how things should work in future".
- (2008-2012) W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG)
HTTP
The primary way communication happens for the Web and many other applications:- (current) HTTPbis working group, trying to guide what happens after HTTP/2.
- (2012) HTTP: how we got here and where we should go, comments for HTTPbis working group at IETF 70, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
- (until 2000) chair HTTP working group which developed RFC 2616 HTTP/1.1, which improved the performance and reliability of the web significantly.
- (2000 talk) Issues using HTTP in Protocols, at Open meeting on XML in protocols.
- (2000 talk) HTTP Extensions (risks of reusing HTTP for non-web functions)
- "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1" R. Fielding, J. Gettys, J. Mogul, H. Frystyk, L. Masinter, P. Leach, T. Berners-Lee. 1999.
- (1998/3/1) RFC 2324 "Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)." An April 1 joke with a serious purpose -- to spoof ways in which HTTP had been extended inappropriately.
URL, URI, IRI, URN
The main invention of the web: using URLs for hypertext. You'd think the standards for URLs would be simple, but this fundamental part of he web still has problems.
- (current) URL problem statement and directions
- (current) Guidelines and Registration Procedures for New URI Schemes.
- (2011) masinter-dated-uri The "tdb" and "duri" URI schemes.
- (2010) ietf-iri-3987bis Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs), in IRI working group (abandoned)
- RFC 6068 "The 'mailto' URI Scheme", M. Duerst, L. Masinter, J. Zawinski, 2010.
- RFC 4395 "Guidelines and Registration Procedures for New URI Schemes", Tony Hansen, Ted Hardie, Larry Masinter, 2006.
- RFC 3986 "Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax", Tim Berners-Lee, Roy Fielding, Larry Masinter, 2005.
- RFC 3553 "An IETF URN Sub-namespace for Registered Protocol Parameters." Michael Mealling, Larry Masinter, Ted Hardie, Graham Klyne, 2003.
- (until 1995) chair URI working group, defining standards for locating, naming, and describing resources on the Internet.
- RFC 2972 "Context and Goals for Common Name Resolution", N. Popp, M. Mealling, L. Masinter, K. Sollins,z 2000. Who owns a name? At the time, I was also on the technical advisory board of RealNames.
- RFC 2732 "Format for Literal IPv6 Addresses in URL's", R. Hinden, B. Carpenter, L. Masinter. December 1999.
- RFC 2718 "Guidelines for new URL Schemes". L. Masinter, H. Alvestrand, D. Zigmond, R. Petke. November 1999
- (1999 talk) Problems URIs don't solve. Presentation at TWIST 99, The Workshop on Internet-scale Software Technologies, Internet Scale Naming.
- RFC 2397 "The 'data' URL scheme." L. Masinter. August, 1998.
- RFC 2396"Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax. T. Berners-Lee, R. Fielding, L. Masinter, August 1998.
- RFC 2368 "The mailto URL scheme." P. Hoffman, L. Masinter, J. Zawinski. July, 1998.
- RFC 1738 "Uniform Resource Locators (URL)." T. Berners-Lee, L. Masinter & M. McCahill. 1994.
- RFC 1737 "Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names." K. Sollins & L. Masinter. 1994.
Forms
- (Current) ietf-appsawg-multipart-form-data Returning Values from Forms: multipart/form-data. https://github.com/masinter/multipart-form-data includes test tools.
- XForms working group
- RFC 2388 "Returning Values from Forms: multipart/form-data." L. Masinter, 1998.
- RFC 1867 "Form-based File Upload in HTML." E. Nebel & L. Masinter. November 1995.
File Formats and Content Negotiation
- RFC 3470 "Guidelines For The Use of Extensible Markup Language (XML) within IETF Protocols", S. Hollenbeck, M. Rose, L. Masinter, 2003.
- (2003) Position on the Binary Interchange of XML Infosets for the W3C workshop on Binary Interchange of XML Information Item Sets.
- RFC 3778 "The application/pdf Media Type", Ed Taft, Jim Pravetz, Steve Zilles, Larry Masinter, May 2004.
- RFC 2854 "The 'text/html' Media Type", L. Masinter, D. Connolly, 2000.
- (2002 presentation) Delivery Context in Internet Protocols, and Position Paper, for W3C Device Independence Workshop on Delivery Context.
- RFC 2938 "Identifying Composite Media Features", G. Klyne, L. Masinter, 2000.
Internet of Things
- (2001) History of Internet Personal Appliances in IETF. Short talk at IETF IPAC (Internet Personal Appliance Control) session.
Internationalization
- (2000) Internationalization of URLs, a summary for the Internationalized Domain Name working group.
- (1996) organizing committee for Web Internationalization and Multilingualism Symposium
- I18N issues in Web Standards
Other standards
Sometimes things don't work out or have more narrow applicability than expected.- (1996) WebDAV working group; WebDAV Interoperability testing event
- RFC 2542 "Terminology and Goals for Internet Fax." L. Masinter. 1999.
- RFC 2534 "Media Features for Display, Print, and Fax." L. Masinter, D. Wing, A. Mutz, K. Holtman. 1999.
- RFC 2532 "Extended Facsimile Using Internet Mail." L. Masinter, D. Wing. 1999.
- Internet Printing
Standards Organizations & Processes
- Internet Engineering Task Force in the Applications Area and member of the Applications Area Directorate
- (current) PDF for an RFC Series Output Document Format
- https://github.com/masinter/pdfrfc for issues
- Thoughts on RFC format (Presentation)
- (2013) In a fit of hubris, I applied for a position on the IAB
- (1998-2001) W3C Advisory Board work on W3C process, including TAG charter.
- (2010) HTML.Next Panel talk W3C TPAC Plenary, November 2010. Overview of disagreements about what standards are for and how to write them.
- newtrk-interop-reports "Formalizing IETF Interoperability Reports", Larry Masinter, October 2005.
- Common Lisp cleanup form.
Web history
- (2000) The Future of Web Standards and Technologies. "Engineering the Web" symposium at Sun and AT&T Web Week.
- (2000) Converging WAP and the Web, talk about eliminating divergence between Web and protocols for mobile devices (WAP at the time.)
- (2003) Introduction of Tim Berners-Lee for Computer History Museum award.
- (1998) Tutorial: Internet Standards for the Web, Part I and Part II, with notes, for 7th World Wide Web Conference.
- (1996) Standards and all that, talk at the IBM Almaden New Paradigms for Using Computers workshop.
- (1996) Document Images on the Internet for 1/96 SPIE conference.
- (1995) PARC Forum, "Document Management and the Net".
- (1996) Tutorial, The State of Web Standards, WWW5 conference
- (1998) Tutorial: Internet Technologies for Digital Libraries. (available as a directory of pdf files)
- (1996) Digital Libraries, Document management, and the World-Wide Web keynote for Multi-Media Japan.
- (1995) Document Management and Electronic Commerce for International Conference on Electronic Commerce.
- (1995) INET'95: Document Management, Digital Libraries and the Web.
- (1995) Rich Interaction in the Digital Library. CACM
- (1994) Collaborative Information Retrieval: Gopher from MOO at INET'94. This application won coolest application at GopherCon '93; it was built in a text-based multi-player virtual world called LambdaMOO.
- (1994) Produced (with Steve Putz and Jennifer Ernst) a video about the Internet
- (1989) System 33 notes
Philosophy, semantics
- (1999) Keynote Address: Building Internet Systems of Lasting Value.
- Evolution of the Web is an attempt to create a model of the standards development processes that are more evolutionary.
- (2004) Philosophy and the Web talk as part of panel at PhiloWeb 2012.
Digital preservation
How do you save documents for a long time? Life insurance policies, plans for buildings, personal health records.
- (2006) A System for Long-Term Document Preservation took a different approach to removing single point of failure by spreading content around, not relying on encryption for confidentiality.
- (2005) Requirements for Data Validation and Certification Services, (presentation). A notary is someone who you can use to prove that a document existed, was signed, by a particular date.
Software as a service for documents and media
- (1997) 'documents.com' project (early hosted Software as a Service project) and presentation
Interlisp
- (1992) ACM Software System Award for our work on the Interlisp programming environment.
- (1986) CommonLoops: merging Lisp and object-oriented programming, OOPLSA '86. Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications
- (1983) Interlisp Reference Manual (one of many editions)
- (1982) Richard P. Gabriel, Larry Masinter. Performance of Lisp Systems. ACM Symposium on LISP and Functional Programming.
- (1981) Warren Teitelman, Larry Masinter. The Interlisp Programming Environment. IEEE Computer, April 1981.
- Selling Lisp machines ~1980. If we could make a computer with an operating system written in Lisp, can't we build a phone OS written in JavaScript?
- (1980) Global Program Analysis in an Interactive Environment (PhD thesis).
- (1980) Overview and Status of DoradoLisp, 1980 Lisp conference.
- (1980) Larry Masinter, L. Peter Deutsch. Local Optimization in a Compiler for Stack-Based Lisp Machines. Lisp Conference. Stanford University.
Common Lisp
- (1988) Common LISP Cleanup. A description of the process of "cleaning up" the Common Lisp standard. Did I invent the "Issue List" for standards? See Wikipedia article and cleanup proposal template.
Artificial Intelligence
- Chief Scientist of Xerox Artificial Intelligence Systems
- DENDRAL project at Stanford
- (1973) H. Brown, L. Masinter, An Algorithm for the Construction of the Graphics of Organic Molecules, Stanford Computer Science Department, STAN-CS-73-361.
- (1972) H. Brown, L. Masinter, L. Hjelmeland, Constructive Graph Labeling Using Double Cosets, Stanford Computer Science Department, STAN-CS-72-318.
Other links
- ACM Fellow in 1999.
- Patents 8099445, 7945784, 7610315, 7577689, 7409405, 5742807, 6856432, and a few others applied for.
- The IETF Applications Area chairs group sometimes had such boring meetings that everyone doodled.
- Xerox uses Dilbert to explain "Empowerment".
- The Larriad
