Abstract for “XForms 1.1”:
XForms 1.1 XForms is a new technology being widely adopted by industry: even though it was designed for forms, as the name suggests, it is capable of, and is being used for, much more. It has been adopted by Open Office for use in its ODF Document Format, and Yahoo! has recently announced its use on their new mobile platform Blueprint. Industry experience is showing that using XForms can greatly reduce the amount of work needed: one company reported that a task that in the past needed 150 person-years needed only 10 person-years with XForms. The advantages of XForms include: * It improves the user experience: XForms has been designed to allow much to be checked by the browser, such as types of fields being filled in, or that one date is later than another. This reduces the need for round trips to the server or for extensive script-based solutions, and improves the user experience by giving immediate feedback to what is being filled in. * It is XML, and it can submit XML. * It combines existing XML technologies: Rather than reinventing the wheel, XForms uses a number of existing XML technologies, such as XPath for addressing and calculating values, and XML Schemas for defining data types. This has a dual benefit: ease of learning for people who already know these technologies, and implementors can use off-the-shelf components to build their systems. * It is internationalized. * It is accessible: XForms has been designed so that it will work equally well with accessible technologies (for instance for blind users) and with traditional visual browsers. * It is device independent: the same form can be delivered without change to a traditional browser, a PDA, a mobile phone, a voice browser, and even some more exotic emerging clients such as an Instant Messenger. This greatly eases providing forms to a wide audience, since forms only need to be authored once. * It is easier to author complicated forms. The presenter is one of the authors of the XForms specifications, and is Forms Activity lead at the W3C. This tutorial introduces XForms step-by-step. It covers essentially all of XForms except some technical details about events, and no more than a passing reference to the use of Schemas. It particularly deals with what is new in XForms 1.1, which is currently at candidate recommendation phase, and is being implemented for several browsers. Emphasis is on how to improve the user experience, and how XForms improves accessibility and device independence, and makes the author's life easy in producing a better experience.
Abstract for “Why you should have a Website”:
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis postulates a link between thought and language: if you haven’t got a word for a concept, you can’t think about it; if you don’t think about it, you won’t invent a word for it. The term “Web 2.0” is a case in point. It was invented by a book publisher as a term to build a series of conferences around, and conceptualises the idea of Web sites that gain value by their users adding data to them. But the concept existed before the term: Ebay was already Web 2.0 in the era of Web 1.0. But now we have the term we can talk about it, and it becomes a structure in our minds, and in this case a movement has built up around it. There are inherent dangers for users of Web 2.0. For a start, by putting a lot of work into a Web site, you commit yourself to it, and lock yourself into their data formats. This is similar to data lock-in when you use a proprietary program. You commit yourself and lock yourself in. Moving comes at great cost. This was one of the justifications for creating the eXtended Markup Language (XML): it reduces the possibility of data lock-in – having a standard representation for data helps using the same data in different ways too. As an example, if you commit to a particular photo-sharing Web site, you upload thousands of photos, tagging extensively, and then a better site comes along. What do you do? How about if the site you have chosen closes down (as has happened with some Web 2.0 music sites): all your work is lost. How do you decide which social networking site to join? Do you join several and repeat the work? How about geneology sites, and school-friend sites? These are all examples of Metcalf’s law, which postulates that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes in the network. Simple maths shows that if you split a network into two, its value is halved. This is why it is good that there is a single email network, and bad that there are many instant messenger networks. It is why it is good that there is only one World Wide Web. Web 2.0 partitions the Web into a number of topical sub-Webs, and locks you in, thereby reducing the value of the network as a whole. So does this mean that user contributed content is a Bad Thing? Not at all, it is the method of delivery and storage that is wrong. The future lies in better aggregators.