Larry Masinter

Summary

I'm a Principal Scientist at Adobe Systems. I'm interested in the general area of improving network-mediated human communication. My current focus is on Internet and Web standards, through W3C and IETF. I think some of the architectural principles established long ago have gotten lost in the move from the "document" web to the "application" web. I'm also interested in social networking, virtual worlds, and the underlying architecture that would allow diverse applications to interoperate securely.

I've worked on a variety of projects at Adobe. A focus on designer/developer workflow led to inclusion of metadata for compound objects and multimedia, including temporal metadata (describing video, audio), and the management of metadata through the creative process into production and distribution. The architecture and design are delivered in the eXtensible Metadata Platform (XMP) support within Adobe Creative Suite. Work on long-term document archiving (see paper) developed a novel prototype for spreading content among multiple service providers. Other work ranged from designer interactions with programming and software development tools, enterprise applications, forms processing.

In the '90s, at Xerox PARC, I worked mainly on Web and Internet standards, document management systems, digital libraries, as well as an experimental project ("documents.com") for Internet-based hosted services. In the '70s and '80s, I worked on the Interlisp system (from microcode to programmer tools to the graphics environment) and the Common Lisp standard. For a short while, I was Chief Scientist of Xerox Artificial Intelligence Systems. In the early 70's, I worked on the DENDRAL project at Stanford.

Publications

Internet Drafts

IETF documents still under development:

masinter-dated-uri The "tdb" URI scheme: denoting described resources, Larry Masinter, July 2009. Still hope to update this soon.
ietf-iri-3987bis Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs), January 2010, in IRI working group.
duerst-mailto-bis "the mailto URI scheme", M Dürst, L. Masinter, J. Zawinski, March, 2010.
ietf-httpbis-* update to RFC 2616 HTTP/1.1 in seven sections:
- ietf-httpbis-p1-messaging "URIs, Connections, and Message Parsing"
- ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics "Message Semantics"
- ietf-httpbis-p3-payload "Message Payload and Content Negotiation"
- ietf-httpbis-p4-conditional "Conditional Requests"
- ietf-httpbis-p5-range "Range Requests and Partial Responses"
- ietf-httpbis-p6-cache "Caching"
- ietf-httpbis-p7-auth "Authentication

Not actively being developed but still of minor interesting:

ietf-ltans-notareq Requirements for Data Validation and Certification Services; A. Schmidt, T. Gondrom, L. Masinter, December 2005.
newtrk-interop-reports "Formalizing IETF Interoperability Reports", Larry Masinter, October 2005.

IETF RFCs

These are publications of the Internet Engineering Task Force; some are "on the standards track", some are informational documents, and one is satire.

RFC 4395 "Guidelines and Registration Procedures for New URI Schemes", Tony Hansen, Ted Hardie, Larry Masinter, February 2006.
RFC 3986 "Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax", Tim Berners-Lee, Roy Fielding, Larry Masinter, January 2005.
RFC 3778 "The application/pdf Media Type", Ed Taft, Jim Pravetz, Steve Zilles, Larry Masinter, May 2004.
RFC 3553 "An IETF URN Sub-namespace for Registered Protocol Parameters." Michael Mealling, Larry Masinter, Ted Hardie, Graham Klyne. June 2003.
RFC 3470 "Guidelines For The Use of Extensible Markup Language (XML) within IETF Protocols", Scott Hollenbeck, Marshall Rose, Larry Masinter, Jan 2003.
RFC 2972 "Context and Goals for Common Name Resolution", N. Popp, M. Mealling, L. Masinter, K. Sollins, October 2000.
RFC 2938 "Identifying Composite Media Features", G. Klyne, L. Masinter, September 2000.
RFC 2854 "The 'text/html' Media Type", L. Masinter, D. Connolly, June 2000.
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.
RFC 2616 "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1" R. Fielding, J. Gettys, J. Mogul, H. Frystyk, L. Masinter, P. Leach, T. Berners-Lee. June 1999.
RFC 2532 "Extended Facsimile Using Internet Mail." L. Masinter, D. Wing. March 1999.
RFC 2542 "Terminology and Goals for Internet Fax." L. Masinter. March 1999.
RFC 2534 "Media Features for Display, Print, and Fax." L. Masinter, D. Wing, A. Mutz, K. Holtman. March 1999.
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 2388 "Returning Values from Forms: multipart/form-data." L. Masinter, August 1998.
RFC 2368 "The mailto URL scheme." P. Hoffman, L. Masinter, J. Zawinski. July, 1998.
RFC 2324 "Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)." L. Masinter. April 1, 1998. This has a serious purpose -- it identifies many of the ways in which HTTP has been extended inappropriately.
RFC 1867 "Form-based File Upload in HTML." E. Nebel & L. Masinter. November 1995.
RFC 1738 "Uniform Resource Locators (URL)." T. Berners-Lee, L. Masinter & M. McCahill. December 1994.
RFC 1737 "Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names." K. Sollins & L. Masinter. December 1994.

Talks & Other Publications

A sample of past presentations and other documents:

(12/07) HTTP: how we got here and where we should go, comments for HTTPbis working group at IETF 70, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
(3/06) A System for Long-Term Document Preservation, Larry Masinter and Michael Welch; appeared in Archiving 2006.
(10/03) Introduction of Tim Berners-Lee for Computer History Museum award.
(8/03) Position on the Binary Interchange of XML Infosets for the W3C workshop on Binary Interchange of XML Information Item Sets.
(3/02)Presentation, Delivery Context in Internet Protocols, and Position Paper, for W3C Device Independence Workshop on Delivery Context.
(3/01) History of Internet Personal Appliances in IETF. Short talk at IETF IPAC (Internet Personal Appliance Control) session.
(4/00) The Future of Web Standards and Technologies. Brief overview, for "Engineering the Web" symposium at Sun Microsystems in Boston and AT&T Web Week.
(4/00) Internationalization of URLs, a summary for the Internationalized Domain Name working group.
(1/00) Issues using HTTP in Protocols, at Open meeting on XML in protocols.
(9/99) Problems URIs don't solve. Presentation at TWIST 99, The Workshop on Internet-scale Software Technologies, Internet Scale Naming.
(7/99) Keynote Address: Building Internet Systems of Lasting Value. (Available as powerpoint and PDF).
(9/98) Tutorial: Internet Technologies for Digital Libraries. (available as a directory of pdf files).
(4/98) Tutorial: Internet Standards for the Web, Part I and Part II, with notes, for 7th World Wide Web Conference.
(97) Internal Xerox newsletter about 'documents.com' project (hosted software as service).
(10/96) Internationalization and Multilingualism in Web Standards (in Powerpoint and HTML).
(96) Standards and all that, talk at the IBM Almaden New Paradigms for Using Computers workshop.
(3/96) Digital Libraries, Document management, and the World-Wide Web presentation for Multi-Media Japan.
(1/96) Document Images on the Internet for 1/96 SPIE conference.
(11/95) PARC Forum, "Document Management and the Net". Most of the info is in the much smaller html version.
(96) Tutorial, The State of Web Standards, WWW5 conference (also in PowerPoint).
(10/95) Document Management and Electronic Commerce for International Conference on Electronic Commerce.
(6/95) INET'95: Document Management, Digital Libraries and the Web. There's also a newer draft available than what went into the online proceedings.
(3/95) Rich Interaction in the Digital Library. CACM, April 1995.
(12/94) Collaborative Information Retrieval: Gopher from MOO at INET'94. This application won coolest application at GopherCon '93.
(1986) CommonLoops: merging Lisp and object-oriented programming, OOPLSA '86. Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications.
(1988)Larry Masinter. Common LISP Cleanup. A description of the process of "cleaning up" the Common Lisp standard, including the invention (!) of the "Issue List". See Wikipedia article and cleanup proposal template.
(1982) Richard P. Gabriel, Larry Masinter. Performance of Lisp Systems. 1982 ACM Symposium on LISP and Functional Programming.
(1981) Warren Teitelman, Larry Masinter. The Interlisp Programming Environment. IEEE Computer, April 1981.
(1980) Larry Masinter, L. Peter Deutsch. Local Optimization in a Compiler for Stack-Based Lisp Machines. 1980 Lisp Conference. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 1980.
(1980) Larry Masinter, Global Program Analysis in an Interactive Environment (PhD thesis).
(1973) H. Brown, L. Masinter, An Algorithm for the Construction of the Graphics of Organic Molecules, Stanford Computer Science Department, STAN-CS-73-361, 1973.
(1972) H. Brown, L. Masinter, L. Hjelmeland, Constructive Graph Labeling Using Double Cosets, Stanford Computer Science Department, STAN-CS-72-318, 1972.

Standards Activities

In the W3C, I've participated both in technology development and in policy. I've helped evolve the Internet and the web through contributions and leadership in standards groups. In the Internet Engineering Task Force I've mainly worked in the Applications Area.

I was elected to the W3C Technical Architecture Group for a two-year term (Jan 2009-2011). I'm hoping to help evolve the web architecture to be more relevant to the future of the web as now being wrangled between various proprietary forces.
I sometimes interact with the W3C HTML Working Group.
W3C Advisory Board (1998-2001) and (past and currently) IETF/W3C coordination group, the liaison group between IETF and W3C.
I was chair of the (first) HTTP working group. We developed HTTP/1.1 (now a Draft Standard). HTTP/1.1 improves the performance and reliability of the web significantly, and I'm proud to have led the group. There is a new HTTPbis working group which is updating the specification to include errata and fix some other problems.
I was chair of URI working group, working toward defining standards for locating, naming, and describing resources on the Internet. The URI working group closed after defining standards for URLs, although the work continued, revising the URI registration process, bringing the URI specification to Full Standard status, and updating the definitions of several URI schemes.
I was involved with the formation of the WebDAV working group and the development of specification; originally a spin-out of the HTTP working group in 1996. For example, I helped organize the first WebDAV Interoperability testing event.
In the Internet Fax Working Group, I authored several RFCs. As part of the work on Internet Fax, I also participated various ITU-T activities.
I was a member of the W3C XForms working group as it was formed out of the HTML group. Originally, I developed file-upload in HTML and participated in other forms design issues.
I helped start standards work on Common Name Resolution. At the time, I was also on the technical advisory board of RealNames.
Content negotiation is a mechanism by which communication can be made effective through translation and filtering. Work on content negotiation parameters and protocols happens in the CONNEG Working Group, as well as in the W3C. I wrote some of the RFCs and designed some of the protocol elements.
I was active in Internet Printing, URNs, HTML over mail, electronic commerce, content negotiation, caching and proxy, spatial location protocols, Internationalization, use of character sets in Internet protocols, etc.