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For many years companies have collected feedback from customers through means such as comment cards and toll‐free telephone numbers. The feedback data can be used by companies to track quality, locate quality problems, and identify suggestions for improvement. Gathering feedback from customers has become a recent but prevalent phenomenon on the Internet. Many companies designate an e‐mail address for submitting comments and questions. Companies with information on the World Wide Web frequently include a feedback form that customers can complete on screen and send at the click of a mouse. This article considers current practice and the potential for customer feedback collection over the Internet. The nature of Web‐based feedback forms is compared to corresponding features of conventional (paper) comment cards. Explanations for differences are supposed, and future prospects for Web‐based feedback are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an update on previous surveys that have looked at the quality of HTML documents on the worldwide web. Previous surveys have indicated that the quality of HTML documents tends to be quite poor, with most documents containing defects.

To determine the extent of this problem, the paper undertook a large‐scale study of HTML document quality among the most popular web sites (approximately 100,000).

This paper found that the vast majority (over 95 per cent) of web sites did not adhere to the worldwide web consortium standards for HTML.

This study represents a single investigation over a short timeframe. Hence, ideally the study needs to be replicated in the future to help generalise the findings.

Such poor quality may jeopardise the security or usability of a web site, making the site's users vulnerable to malware attacks. This poor level of quality has drastic implications for web usability and security.

This new survey undertook a more extensive examination of popular web sites than previous surveys.

This paper aims to deal with some design issues of web applications using partial orders to enhance their navigability and extensibility.

The paper uses a static web applications model as a deterministic labelled transition system in which states are html pages and transitions are urls.

By using this model it is possible, on the one hand, to characterize the temporal evolution of a web application and, on the other, to classify web applications into several types according to the way the information is organized over the web application. This classification captures interesting properties related to the navigability and extensibility of web applications.

These ideas are applied to develop a simple web application, namely, a small virtual museum based on approximations of original paintings. Moreover, based on the extensibility characterization, the virtual museum is extended with different paintings approximations, while preserving navigability properties as well as browsing of paintings' approximations of higher quality resolution.

The results of this work provide useful and practical insights into the design of web applications that ensure navigability and extensibility properties.

A new form of “museum” has emerged which takes advantage of the Internet′s seemingly limitless format options for electronic presentation and ability to tailor in‐depth presentations to niche audiences. Constraints of ownership and geographic location are lessened as Internet‐based museums point to sources across the globe. Collections which are physically impossible to construct are being mounted electronically. Offers a sampler of museums and galleries around the world which are making use of WorldWide Web or Gopher servers.

There is a widespread perception that, in terms of web‐technology, XML is going to be the ‘next big thing’. Given the amount of comment that it has generated, it seems to be on its way to achieving that status. But how much of the praise should be taken at face value, and how much of the hype is credible? In the following article we examine some of the claims made about the importance of XML and consider how far the enthusiasm about it can be justified. Will XML cause a revolution that will change the way that everyone uses the Internet, whether as searchers or data creators? Or is it a tool for certain types of e‐commerce and large‐scale markup, which may not have a significant impact on the majority of web users?

Most e‐commerce web sites use HTML forms for user authentication, new user registration, newsletter subscription, and searching for products and services. The purpose of this paper is to present a method for automated classification of HTML forms, which is important for search engine applications, e.g. Yahoo Shopping and Google's Froogle, as they can be used to improve the quality of the index and accuracy of search results.

Describes a technique for classifying HTML forms based on their features. Develops algorithms for automatic feature generation of HTML forms and a neural network to classify them.

The authors tested their classifier on an e‐commerce data set and a randomly retrieved data set and achieved accuracy of 94.7 and 93.9 per cent respectively. Experimental results show that the classifier is effective and efficient on both test beds, suggesting that it is a promising general purpose method.

The paper is of value to those involved with information management and e‐commerce.

This paper outlines the evolution of World Wide Web protocols. The paper reviews the original protocols developed for the web, in addressing, transport and data formats. A review of developments of the protocols is given, including developments of web data formats (HTML 4.0, cascading stylesheets and XML), transport (HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/NG) and addressing (URLs). The paper describes how the web initially lacked a metadata architecture and outlines the emergence of a metadata architecture for the web. The paper includes a review of web technologies which have a social impact on our society, including the Web Accessibility Initiative, the Digital Signature Initiative and the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published public draft proposals for HTML 4.0. While the W3C does stress that at the moment they are only draft proposals, it also expects that after a period of public and Member review, the HTML 4.0 specification will be endorsed as a new W3C Recommendation.