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Last Call: EARL 1.0 Schema

2007-03-23: The WAI ERT Working Group released a Last Call Working Draft of EARL 1.0 Schema. Comments are welcome through 20 April. The Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) is a format to exchange, combine, and analyze results from different evaluation tools and checkers. EARL is introduced in the Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) Overview. Visit the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) home page. (Permalink)

23 Mar 2007 by World Wide Web Consortium

HTTP Vocabulary in RDF: Working Draft

2007-03-23: The WAI ERT Working Group has released an updated Working Draft of HTTP Vocabulary in RDF. With these terms, HTTP headers exchanged between clients and servers can be recorded in RDF format. Terms include vocabulary for the HTTPS scheme as well as other extensions to the core specification. Visit the WAI ERT home page. (Permalink)

23 Mar 2007 by World Wide Web Consortium

XQuery Scripting Extension and Version 1.1 Requirements: Working Drafts

2007-03-23: Responding to requests from Working Group participants and the wider community, the XML Query Working Group released two First Public Working Drafts. XQuery Scripting Extension 1.0 Requirements describes goals and requirements for making XQuery 1.0 functional as a scripting language. XML Query (XQuery) 1.1 Requirements describes compatibility and functionality requirements for extending XML Query 1.0. Visit the XML home page. (Permalink)

23 Mar 2007 by World Wide Web Consortium

Notes: XML Query Requirements and Use Cases

2007-03-23: The XML Query Working Group published two Working Group Notes, XML Query (XQuery) Requirements and XML Query Use Cases. The documents are a record of the development of XQuery and its associated specifications. Part of the XML family, the Recommendations are used for data mining, document transformation, and enterprise computing. Visit the XML home page. (Permalink)

23 Mar 2007 by World Wide Web Consortium

EGovernment and the Web: Workshop Report

2007-03-20: The European W3C Symposium on eGovernment Report has been published. Participants discussed specific government and citizens' needs related to eGovernment services, to identify aspects that put Web interoperability at risk and find how governments can deliver better and more efficient services through computer technologies. Held 1-2 February (press release), in Gijón, Asturias, Spain, the symposium was organized by the W3C Spanish Office and Fundación CTIC, and supported by the Principality of Asturias Government. (Permalink)

20 Mar 2007 by World Wide Web Consortium

Hardware-Accelerated SVG

AMD has announced two new mobile graphics chips, the G12 and G40, which they claim can accelerate vector graphics (including SVG) up to 30 times. They demonstrated smooth animation and zooming, and clean anti-aliasing. The chips are slated for release in devices around Christmas 2008.

photo of AMD breadboard

20 Mar 2007 by SVG.org Quick News

Using SVG with Sun Java Studio Creator

The Java heads amongst you may wish to check out this article on using SVG and JSP together: Using Sun Java Studio Creator with SVG.

20 Mar 2007 by SVG.org Quick News

Sketsa SVG Graphics Editor 4.2 released

Kiyut just released Sketsa SVG Graphics Editor 4.2, a cross platform vector drawing application based on SVG. It features various tools for optimizing content creation, giving designers unsurpassed support for creativity. These tools include property palette, source editor, resources editor, SVG specific shape tools, transformation tools, and additional illustration tools. Sketsa uses SVG as a native file format.

Read on for the full story...

17 Mar 2007 by SVG.org Quick News

XML Binding Language (XBL) 2.0: Call for Implementations

2007-03-16: W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of XML Binding Language (XBL) 2.0 to Candidate Recommendation. XBL extends the appearance and behavior of elements in Web formats such as HTML. Elements may be mapped to script, event handlers, CSS, and more complex content models. Content can be re-ordered and wrapped so that for instance, complex CSS styles can be applied to simple HTML or XHTML markup. XBL can be used to implement new DOM interfaces and, with other specifications, to implement arbitrary tag sets as widgets. Read about the Rich Web Clients Activity. (Permalink)

16 Mar 2007 by World Wide Web Consortium

Polish translation of the W3C document “FAQ: Using <select> to Link to Localized Content”

Natalia Fabisz, Andrew Osobka published a Polish translation of the W3C document “FAQ: Using <select> to Link to Localized Content” under the title Zastosowanie elementu <select> do treści lokalnych.

15 Mar 2007 by Translations of World Wide Consortium Technical Reports

Polish translation of the W3C document “Serving XHTML 1.0”

Natalia Fabisz, Andrew Osobka published a Polish translation of the W3C document “Serving XHTML 1.0” under the title Wysyłanie XHTML 1.0.

15 Mar 2007 by Translations of World Wide Consortium Technical Reports

AmanithVG v1.0 Engine Released

AmanithVG engine is a cross-platform OpenVG 1.0 implementation for accelerated vector graphics. AmanithVG is entirely built on top of OpenGL (from 1.1 to 2.0, using extensions where available) and OpenGL ES (1.1 and 2.0) APIs. The new v1.0 build is available on Win32 (x86), MacOS X (universal binary), Linux (x86), and FreeBSD (x86). AmanithVG builds for embedded platforms (Linux embedded, Symbian S60 3rd) are available on request, they have been fully tested on Texas Instrument OMAP2420 and Freescale i.MX31.

Mazatech is now working on an SVG Tiny 1.2 player based on the AmanithVG engine.

13 Mar 2007 by SVG.org Quick News

SVGMap Consortium Founded in Japan

Four Japanese companies have founded the SVGMap Consortium in order to develop browsing software, and server and service infrastructure for the dissemination of Web maps in the SVG Tiny format (with geo extensions). An SVG mobile browser is being developed which supports high performance rendering of large map data, hyper layering functionality, scrolling, zooming, and handling of geo-metadata. The additional functionality is built on top of SVG Tiny 1.2. SVG is a government mandated standard for mobile geodata in Japan (g-contents initiative). The consortium is supported by other companies and research institutions.

More information can be found at http://blog.svg-map.com/2007/03/about_establish.html

13 Mar 2007 by SVG.org Quick News

RDFa Primer: Working Draft

2007-03-13: The XHTML2 Working Group and the Semantic Web Deployment Working Group jointly have published an updated Working Draft of the RDFa Primer 1.0. RDFa expresses metadata in XHTML-compatible constructs and extensions, enabling a new world of user functionality. Changes include new syntax for striping and use of the class attribute to declare rdf:type. Read about HTML and the Semantic Web. (Permalink)

13 Mar 2007 by World Wide Web Consortium

Meet the HTML Working Group chairs in Austin at SxSWi

I enjoyed living in Austin and I like to visit when I can. My last trip was more for MIT research stuff; this time it's W3C business.

I took SxSWi 2007 off my travel schedule when the TAG scheduled a meeting at MIT the week before, but I put it back on when I saw this panel:

The reinventing HTML saga culminated in a big announcement this week: W3C Launches New HTML Working Group. Chris Wilson and I are the co-chairs. Karl Dubost and I are working on the HTML WG page this week.

I fly into Austin Monday, just in time to see the Growth and Evolution of Microformats panel; then I fly home Tuesday. The panel schedule has so much cool stuff from content developers that I would have loved to go for the whole thing... not to mention the music festival.

If you can catch me while I'm there, I'll have some Mobile Web Best Practices flip cards to hand out.

Shawn Henry is presenting Accessiblity: A Report From the Trenches this Sunday. See W3C Talks for some more details.

I have lots of fond memories of Austin; maybe we can make a few more next week?

09 Mar 2007 by QA Weblog

W3C Launches New HTML Working Group

2007-03-07: W3C is pleased to invite participation in the new HTML Working Group, chartered to create the next HTML standard with the active participation of browser vendors, software developers, and content designers. "It's time to revisit the standard and see what we can do to meet the current community needs, and to do so effectively with commitments from browser manufacturers in a visible and open way," said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. At the same time, W3C is chartering the Forms Working Group, the XHTML2 Working Group, and rechartering the Hypertext Coordination Group. Read the press release and visit the HTML Working Group home page, the Forms Working Group home page, and the XHTML2 Working Group home page. (Permalink)

07 Mar 2007 by World Wide Web Consortium

Julian Graham is developing SCSS and libRUIN. SCSS is a...

Julian Graham is developing SCSS and libRUIN. SCSS is a Scheme module for parsing, querying, and emitting style information. libRUIN is a C library that uses SCSS (through GNU Guile) for rendering documents on text terminals (Scheme & C, Open Source)

07 Mar 2007 by Cascading Style Sheets

Polish translation of the W3C document “FAQ: Two-letter or three-letter language codes”

Andrew Osobka, Agata Bogacka, Tomasz Namysłowski, Natalia Fabisz, Евгений Рабчевский (Evgeny Rabchevsky), Jan Długosz published a Polish translation of the W3C document “FAQ: Two-letter or three-letter language codes” under the title Dwuliterowe czy trzyliterowe kody języka.

06 Mar 2007 by Translations of World Wide Consortium Technical Reports

Polish translation of the W3C document “FAQ: Ruby”

Andrew Osobka, Agata Bogacka, Tomasz Namysłowski, Natalia Fabisz, Евгений Рабчевский (Evgeny Rabchevsky), Jan Długosz published a Polish translation of the W3C document “FAQ: Ruby” under the title Ruby.

06 Mar 2007 by Translations of World Wide Consortium Technical Reports

Polish translation of the W3C document “FAQ: Why use the language attribute?”

Andrew Osobka, Agata Bogacka, Tomasz Namysłowski, Natalia Fabisz, Евгений Рабчевский (Evgeny Rabchevsky), Jan Długosz published a Polish translation of the W3C document “FAQ: Why use the language attribute?” under the title Dlaczego stosujemy atrybuty języka?.

06 Mar 2007 by Translations of World Wide Consortium Technical Reports

Mobile SVG at MoMo Sydney Tonight

MobileMonday Sydney's March event's theme will be "rich media content" and will be featuring Mobile SVG as a key enabler technology in that field. Antoine Quint will present an overview of the Mobile SVG ecosystem while Nandini Ramani from Sun and Andrew Emmons from BitFlash will provide live demonstrations of services and demo applications made possible by Mobile SVG. The event is held at the Shelbourne Hotel, 200 Sussex Street at 6:30pm and is free for all to attend.

05 Mar 2007 by SVG.org Quick News

Russian translation of the W3C document “Resource Description Framework (RDF): Concepts and Abstract Syntax”

Евгений Рабчевский (Evgeny Rabchevsky) published a Russian translation of the W3C document “Resource Description Framework (RDF): Concepts and Abstract Syntax” under the title Среда Описания Ресурса (RDF): Понятия и Абстрактный Синтаксис.

04 Mar 2007 by Translations of World Wide Consortium Technical Reports

Balloonist v2.0: Big Update to Handy Comics Layout Software

Version 2.0 of the SVG-friendly comics app includes:

03 Mar 2007 by SVG.org Quick News

When to standardize, especially an RDF API

The HTML 4.01 specification has an IMG element, but there is no normative dependency on the PNG or GIF or JPEG specifications. "What good is an HTML user agent that doesn't support GIFs?!?" you might ask. And you wouldn't be alone. From the early days of W3C, there have been calls for a standard "web browser profile" component specification that listed which URI schemes (http, ftp, mailto, ...) and which formats (HTML 3.2, GIF, ...) and so on a standard web browser should support. It always seemed to me that the market would sort that out by itself and any standard, W3C could put in place, would be perennially out of date and irrelevant.

According to the Web Architecture document, orthogonal specifications are a good thing. In section 5.1. Orthogonal Specifications:

When two specifications are orthogonal, one may change one without requiring changes to the other, even if one has dependencies on the other. For example, although the HTTP specification depends on the URI specification, the two may evolve independently. This orthogonality increases the flexibility and robustness of the Web.

W3C inherited from the IETF a bias for specifying interfaces rather than components; i.e. data formats and protocols rather than software modules. I gather that in TV/consumer electronics, there are useful component standards for Web User Agents. But note that an in-car voice browser or a screen reader or good old lynx doesn't support PNG nor GIF, and while their marketplaces are perhaps smaller than desktop or mobile screen-oriented browsers, they're pretty much first-class citizens as far as W3C specifications, especially Web Architecture, are concerned.

APIs are more like interfaces than components, but they tend to be tied to platforms. The IETF has a cultural bias for on-the-wire formats over APIs, and for good reasons, I think. With OMG specs, at least the early CORBA specs, lots of products conformed to the spec (or at least claimed to) without actually interoperating with each other. It wasn't until the arrival of IIOP, an on-the-wire CORBA format, that the rubber hit the road and the interoperability issues got addressed.

Meanwhile, the IETF's aversion to APIs is not without exception: witness GSSAPI. And the W3C has been doing Javascript APIs in the form of the DOM since the early days of XML. Some argue that the DOM specs are ugly, and I tend to agree. SAX and JDOM and the libxml2 pull API have a more elegant feel. But with DHTML and AJAX, one has to wonder: did the W3C DOM Recommendations do more harm or good? Sometimes a mediocre standard is better than no standard. It's clear to me that HTML standardization does more good than harm, but I don't pretend that the HTML design is a thing of beauty.

W3C also started out with a bias against standardizing programming languages. The principle of least power is a part of the lore that the TAG has recently adopted in a finding. For those reasons, when the Javascript designers were looking for a standardization forum in 1996 or so, I let it go to ECMA rather than arguing that it should be done at W3C. The fact that XSLT is turing-complete went under the radar a little bit at first; the WG was able to negotiate requirements by noting that its intended scope was formatting XML documents, not transformations in general. And I heard many times that people who don't see themselves writing Java programs are happy to develop XSLT transformations. But I had very strong misgivings about crossing that line. By the time I was reviewing XQuery/XPath 2.0 functions and operators, I disregarded any claims about narrow scope and looked at it as the standard library for the new computing platform that it is.

And now with the Rich Client Activity and the Web API WG, we're fully engaged in standardization of Javascript APIs with no pretense about language independence. It remains to be seen whether we're actually going to tackle enough of the security policy issues to standardize a real platform or whether we need to just leave that to the market for a while. But enough of the right people seem to be involved in the work on XMLHTTPRequest to make me think we're doing more good than harm there. I haven't seen enough test cases for my tastes yet, but I gather they're on the way.

I don't do much of Javascript hacking myself, but I gather it's an unholy mess of incompatibilities. "Where was W3C when XMLHTTPRequest was being designed in the first place?" you might ask. Maybe we were asleep at the wheel and we could and should have prevented the mess. But maybe we were in "mostly harmless" or "first do no harm" mode, letting the market establish what's really needed. I was dead set on tackling multi-namespace integration in the first version of XML Schema, but in hindsight it's pretty clear to me that we should have gone a little slower, i.e. started with a smaller scope.

The question of when and whether to standardize an RDF API has been hanging in the air for a decade or so. My personal experience with python APIs for RDF suggests that, for example, there's a core of cwm and rdflib and redland that is the same except for a few coin-toss issues. And there are several mature Java APIs and the tabulator has an RDF store in Javascript. Meanwhile, SPARQL is maturing; maybe, like SQL, the string format of queries (and other operations) is the main thing we need to standardize. A survey on Standardizing a Semantic Web API for Javascript is open. Please let us know what you think.

There are precious few "W3C should never do XYZ" rules that I think are worth setting in stone. While we will naturally attract work that is like what we have done before, any place we can get a critical mass of the marketplace to get together and do the hard work of testing, internationalization, accessibility in a reasonably timely, fair and accountable way is a place where W3C should be able to do more good than harm.

02 Mar 2007 by QA Weblog

W3C is hiring!

There are 4 positions open right now at W3C. It is rare enough to be noted. You are encouraged to send your resume to the appropriate person (not to me). Women applications are welcome.

There are still 3 fellows open positions as well

01 Mar 2007 by QA Weblog

Hungarian office is coorganizer of the next Hungarian Web Conference

2007-03-01: Together with the NJSZT (Janos Neumann Computer Science Association) the Hungarian W3C office organizes a "Webconference in Hungary (Magyarországi Web Konferencia 2007)" the second time. While the office acted last year as a professional partner it organizes this year a W3C track as well. There will be 6 presentations, about Mobile Web, WAI-ARIA, WCAG, Security and Semantic Web. Éva Megyaszai and Máté Pataki from the Hungarian W3C office as well as Thomas Roessler from the W3C team will be among the speakers on this track.

01 Mar 2007 by World Wide Consortium Offices

Martine Roeleveld is new Manager of the Benelux W3C Office

2007-03-01: After working more than six years as manager of the Benelux W3C-Office Frank Roos hands over to Martine Roeleveld. Frank led the office since January 2001 and was responsible for the extension of the former Netherlands to the Benelux office. W3C thanks Frank for all the successful work. Martine worked as Public Relations Officer and Scientific Reporter for the BRICKS research project (Basic Research in Informatics for Creating the Knowledge Society) at CWI (the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands) before. W3C welcomes her as new manager of the Benelux Office and wishes her success in her new work.

01 Mar 2007 by World Wide Consortium Offices

Open Font Library Logo competition

The Open Font Library is proud to announce the commencement of the Open Font Library Logo competition: Artists and designers of all ranges are invited to make a logo to help identify the project. Judging will take place by contributors to the project, Alex Roberts (bovinity), Liftarn, and Zeimusu, who will select the winning logo. The last chance to submit submissions is March 14, 2007 at 11:59 PM PST. After that, the judges will select a logo within five days from the submission closing date.

Read on for the full story...

28 Feb 2007 by SVG.org Quick News

MapViewSVG 6 now available

The MapViewSVG team is proud to announce the release of version 6.0 of MapViewSVG.
MapViewSVG 6 now offers new capabilities such as batch processing, tiling of line layers, statistical functionalities, much better and faster raster layer support etc.

Read on for the full story...

27 Feb 2007 by SVG.org Quick News

Italian translation of the W3C document “CSS Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0”

Gabriele Romanato published a Italian translation of the W3C document “CSS Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0” under the title Note sulle Tecniche CSS per le WCAG 1.0.

26 Feb 2007 by Translations of World Wide Consortium Technical Reports

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