Use the submission form to add a new talk (member only link)
Last year, we introduced server-side XForms as the most promising way of making XForms a short-term reality on the web.
In this year’s presentation, we discuss how this promise has materialized with hybrid Ajax-based open source implementations, and we demonstrate the most exciting capabilities of XForms running on today’s deployed web browsers.
We not only show how XForms fulfils its initial promise of becoming the next generation web forms, but also how it serves as a general-purpose dynamic user interface technology.
Finally, we show that hybrid XForms implementations effectively offer an abstraction layer over Ajax technologies, thereby greatly simplifying the implementation of common Ajax use-cases and giving XForms a place of choice in the “Web 2.0” ecosystem.
Il World Wide Web, l’ invenzione che più ha rivoluzionato la nostra vita negli ultimi anni, nasce dall’ intuizione di Tim Berners-Lee, che peraltro ha sempre affermato che il Web è il frutto di un lavoro collettivo, e da un’ incredibile serie di sviluppi di ricerca e tecnologici. I principi ispiratori della proposta iniziale sono ancora vivi e attuali, e il Semantic Web è la realizzazione di un sogno che appariva impossibile.
Nella nascita e successiva travolgente diffusione del Web hanno giocato un ruolo fondamentale un’ impostazione tecnica e umana che ha privilegiato e valorizzato il lavoro collettivo e il rispetto reciproco, e una forte attenzione ai valori umani.
As one of the important provider of IST Standards, in the area of Web technologies (XML, http, HTML, CSS, WAI, etc), the international World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is well positionned to give its opinion on the matter of Open Standards definition.
W3C follows a process that promotes the development of high-quality standards. This process has evolved over a period of ten years, from a very rough consensus building approach of writing specifications, to a formal set of obligations that promote fairness, responsiveness, and progress: all facets of the W3C mission.
Using the W3C process as a model, we present the set of requirements that a provider of technical specification must follow to qualify for the adjective Open Standard.
The Ubiquitous Web aims to make it much easier to create distributed Web applications that work across a wide range of devices. It combines high level declarative application models and Web based approaches to accessing local and remote services and binding them as part of application sessions.
Considering that HTML is the world's most popular document format, it is seriously ill-fitted for information representation purposes.
After an enormous effort in the 90's to undo the damage caused by mixing content and presentation, it seems like that message is now coming through.
But there is still a long road to navigate. The tools you use for content delivery can greatly affect what you can achieve, and the amount of work you have to put in to achieve it.
Do we really want to re-author a site for each type of device that is likely to use it? What are the best ways to meet the challenges of multi-lingual environments and accessibility?
Work is ongoing at the World Wide Web Consortium W3C on producing markup languages that meet the needs of modern web content, and this talk describes the approach used, and in particular how XHTML2 and XForms meet the challenges of structured content, single authoring, accessibility, and device independence.
If you are a designer, developer or author working on a website that may be translated or adapted for users in other countries or languages, you need to ensure that you don't build in substantial barriers to localization. If you think that the translation vendor or localization team can take care of things for you when the time comes, you really need to hear this talk. We will use examples to examine some of the things that must be designed into the site, rather than treated as an afterthought, if it is to be successfully deployed in more than one language or country.
The Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) work at the W3C, led by Yves Savourel, defines a standard to support better internationalisation and localisation of schemas and XML documents (both existing and new ones). The standard proposes a set of data categories, for which it then defines implementations as a set of elements and attributes. It also provides examples of how ITS can be used with popular existing markup schemes such as DocBook and DITA, and in three schema languages, XML DTDs, XML Schema, and RELAX NG.
The first version of the standard is nearing completion. It addresses how to identify translatable vs. non-translatable content, localisation notes, terminology references, directionality of text, language markup, inline elements, and ruby annotation.
The aim is to ensure that XML formats support features needed for international use and for efficient localisation. It should also make the job of vendors easier by standardising the format and processing expectations of localisation-related markup items, and allowing translation tools to more effectively identify how content should be handled.
The talk will use examples to acquaint you better with ITS and its relevance to the localisation community.
The demand for automated or assisted Web service discovery and invocation prompted the development of the Web Services Policy framework (WS-Policy), a general purpose framework for expressing requirements, capabilities, and general characteristics for invoking a particular Web service, such as security or reliability requirements. The WS-Policy language is limited to AND and OR and functions named by QNames. Simple boolean logic allows one to discover equivalent policies and to test whether a particular connection conforms to a given policy.
While any language with AND, OR and named functions subsumes WS-Policy's expressiveness, the most interesting are those that are, intuitive, sound, and extensible. A variety of current schema (W3C XML Schema and OWL) and query languages (XQuery and SPARQL) meet these requirements to varying degrees. This paper will demonstrate and contrast expressions of Web service policies in these languages.
SPARQL and XQuery are query languages for two data different models. The current definition of WS-Policy does not presume any particular expression of service or library capabilities into any data model. All that's required is that some mechanism be able to recognize a policy and verify compliance of the available software modules. For example, this could be hard coded into an agent. Query languages like SPARQL and XQuery are designed to intuitively expression boolean logic. Using, for instance, SPARQL to express policies implies a mapping of agent capabilities into an RDF graph. Likewise, expressing agent capabilities in XML allows one to query them with XQuery.
We will describe the ways in which these languages all exceed this simple AND, OR, named function expressivity and discuss the applicability of this extra expressivity to describing Web service policies, or Web services in general. Importing this expertise from other domains informs us about potential policy expressivity. We will identify additional use cases met by adopting this additional expressivity.
When talking about Web 2.0 technologies such as Ajax, not many think about XForms. However XForms, a W3C recommendation since 2003, is gathering momentum as the same technology that enables Google Maps also allows deploying complex but user-friendly enterprise forms to the majority of deployed web browsers (including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera) without the need for plugins or other client installation.
In this presentation, we introduce XForms technology, explain the basics of Ajax-based XForms, and show how you can use open-source software to implement end-to-end forms solutions based on standards such as XForms and XML, while using cutting-edge technology like Ajax to make your forms user-friendly and easy to deploy.
The presentation will conclude with a series of demonstrations based on open source software.
This paper will consider design issues in the construction of schemas and schema languages for textual resources intended for linguistic computing, computational linguistics, and computer philology. The emphasis will be on SGML and XML vocabularies and schema languages for specifying them, with occasional reference to other systems.
Like any good metalanguage, a good schema language must support good design at the language level. Good language design practices should be encouraged, bad practices should be discouraged or (if the metalanguage designer is ambitious) made impossible. (As Orwell writes, "The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.") And to be useful, the metalanguage must allow the language designer to express their design decisions, preferably clearly, preferably concisely.
Some design issues of importance for markup languages will be outlined.
In the ideal case, the schema for a language provides a formal recognition criterion which recognizes every sequence which we wish to accept as a sentence in our language, and does not recognize any other sequence. In less ideal cases, it may be necessary to live with some discrepancy between the language as we imagine it and the formal definition we work with. Is it better to under-generate? Then we can be sure that every sequence recognized by the schema is truly acceptable, at the cost of having some intuitively plausible utterances fail to be recognized by the schema. Or is it better to overgenerate? Then every acceptable sequence will be recognized, as will some number of non-sensical, unacceptable sequences. Which is preferable depends on the purpose of the schema: schemas serving as a contract between data producers and data exchange partners have one role; schemas used primarily to provide automatic annotation of the data have another; schemas which express our understanding of a corpus, in the form of a document grammar, have yet another. The notions of descriptive and prescriptive grammar also play a role.
The feel of a markup language depends, more than anything else, on the designer's choice of element types. Will there be chapter, section, and subsection elements, or a single generic 'div' element with an attribute to distinguish the kind of textual division involved? Some aspects of this fact are obvious. Will element types be chosen to reflect typographic distinctions? Rhetorical and compositional distinctions? Linguistic phenomena? Equally important - and far more difficult to resolve satisfactorily - is the desire to capture both concrete details of the document (leading often to fine-grained distinctions among element types) and regularities visible only at a more abstract level. If the markup language provides a wide variety of phrase-level element types (as conventional document-oriented language often do), how can we capture generalizations true for all phrase-level types (e. g., in a stylesheet, or in a scholarly annotation). If the markup language were to provide only a single phrase-level element (with an attribute, perhaps, to allow us to distinguish different kinds of phrases), then such generalizations would be easier to capture. But the details of the text would be somewhat more cumbersome to capture. The choice of concrete or abstract structures has serious implications for validation of the data, at least with current validation technologies. Microformats, as currently used in some HTML, provide a useful concrete illustration both of the design issues involved and of the validation issues.
One of the issues most keenly felt by some designers and users of markup languages is that of ontological commitment. Providing names for things can be, and usually is, interpreted as entailing a claim that the things named actually exist, or can exist. It is not always easy to reach agreement, within a design team, about the nature of the ontological commitment involved in defining a particular element type, or a particular attribute value. And vocabularies intended for wide use must reckon with the possibility that different members of the target user community will have different and conflicting ontological leanings; sometimes the ontological commitments of a vocabulary are left intentionally vague.
When existing material is digitized, an interesting pattern of variability in the material is sometimes found. In a given dictionary, for example, or in a collection of dictionaries, most articles may follow a fairly simple pattern; some will be more complex; a few will be simply anomalous. What should the schema author do? We can write a document grammar that captures the regularities in the vast majority of cases, at the cost of declaring some small portion of the material invalid. We can write a more forgiving document grammar that accepts everything in the corpus, at the expense of failing to capture the regularities which dominate the material in practice; the problems of over- and under-generation recur here in different guise.
SGML and XML are readily interpreted as describing trees; other markup systems are most conveniently understood as serializations of other data structures. What is to be done when the 'natural' data structure for our material doesn't seem to match the data structure of the markup system? Also - can we perform schema validation without trees? Is it possible for a schema to be incorrect? Is it desirable for it to be falsifiable in principle? Some errors of schema design are worth noting and warning against:
Design issues at the language level are only half the problem, though. There are also design issues at the metalanguage level. Metalanguage designers continually trade off expressive power against tractability of validation and other processes. Convenience features for schema authors compete for attention with the simplicity and regularity that make a schema language easier to implement. Should the schema language (and by extension most schema-informed processes) be monolithic or modular? If modular, do the modules form a sequence of layers or are there interactions more complex? How does one best serve the maintainability of the schema? What operations on schemas would it be useful to support? How should the schema language go about supporting openness and extensibility in schema-defined vocabularies? How do we suport extensibility in the schema vocabulary itself? Examples will be drawn largely from the experience of the last decade in the design, implementation, and use of XML Schema 1.0 and 1.1.
The Semantic Web has now reached a level of maturity that allows large enterprises to adopt the technology. The standards landscape is increasingly well developed, with RDF and OWL already being W3C standard recommendations, and GRDDL, SPARQL and SAWSDL looking likely to follow shortly. There is also an increasing array of robust software products that use Semantic Web technology, which greatly assists with any implementations.
This tutorial will focus on three areas. Firstly, it will provide a brief introduction to the core Semantic Web standards, including RDF, OWL, SPARQL and SAWSDL. It will then provide a comprehensive survey of the many Semantic Web tools that are currently available. The final section and the primary component of the tutorial will describe several real world implementations of applications enabled by the Semantic Web technologies.
Examples of real world implementations will focus on specific examples selected from the domains of life sciences, health care, GIS, government, technology, and financial services. They will describe the use of Semantic Web technology to support a number of key capabilities including data integration, search, and analysis. The presenters will describe why Semantic Web technology was chosen for the implementations, and the resulting benefits including empirical observations and analysis when available. They will also highlight some of the valuable lessons and development patterns that were learnt while working on Semantic Web implementations.
The theme for this year’s XTech conference is “The Ubiquitous Web”. As the web reaches further into our lives, we will consider the increasing ubiquity of connectivity, what it means for real world objects to connect to the web, and the increasing blurring of the lines between virtual worlds and our own. Dave Raggett will chair the Ubiquitous Web Day. XTech 2007 is co-hosted by W3C.
Speaker: Shawn Henry, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), and author of Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design
Description: In this session Shawn will highlight recent developments in accessibility guidelines for Web sites, Web applications, evaluation tools, authoring tools, and browsers. Learn how these impact your Web projects now and how they provide flexibility for the future.
Shawn will answer your questions about Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG), User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG), and the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite (WAI-ARIA). She'll talk about how WAI develops accessibility guidelines through the W3C process, upcoming milestones for 2.0 versions, and how you can contribute to W3C's work.
She’ll also touch on the relationship between accessibility and usability, the role of accessibility standards, and designing positive user experiences for people with disabilities.
Mobile phones are now commonplace, and Moore's law is slashing the cost for adding connectivity to device microcontrollers. This is opening up opportunities for applications in homes, offices, shops, mobile and automotive etc. The challenge is how to develop applications involving a diversity of devices, product generations and networking technologies, whilst preserving security and privacy.
W3C is applying technologies such as markup, event-driven scripting, and the Semantic Web to enable an ecosystem of developers, device vendors, network operators and websites. This talk will explain how W3C intends to reduce the cost for delivering an effective user experience across a wide variety of devices and browsers, and how to fulfill the promise of ubiquitous networked devices through standards for device coordination and remote user interfaces.
Web サイトを構築するにあたり、標準に準拠しているかどうかを、制作の最終段階での確認のみに頼ることがしばしば見受けられます。しかし最終段階での確認だけでは、エラーが頻発した場合など、標準に準拠させるための修正作業が膨大になり、うんざりしてしまうことこの上ありません。
本セッションでは、W3C の専任スタッフ自らが、Web サイトを構築する際に求められる品質確保の方法について焦点を当てます。クールな Web サイトの構築にも一役買う、実践的な技術手法や利用可能なツールについてご紹介いたします。
When developing a Web site, we often rely on checking standards at the end of the creation and development process. Web standards are then perceived as a burden. During this session, we will focus on how to introduce quality in your Web projects. We will focus on practical techniques and tools that will help you to build cool Web sites.
Copying yet another soccer schedule or flight itinerary into a computer's calendar by hand, one field at a time, will eventually drive anyone insane. The Web made exchanging documents easier, but there's been little progress for data.
There is hope - with the emerging hCard and hCalendar microformats, data can flow seamlessly from web pages into my calendar and contact tools. The trick is to encode the data in HTML, using the class attribute to say what it is. But wait... why encode this in HTML? Why not use an XML vocabulary for contacts and calendar information? Or Semantic Web technologies like RDF and the Web Ontology Language (OWL)?
In fact, all of these have been tried. In this session, we'll explore what works and why, looking at both the social and the technical factors that will determine what we use in the future and how we use it.
XML offers several advantages over competing formats for data interchange. XML vocabularies can be defined formally, using schema languages (DTDs, XSDL, Relax NG, ...), which in turn makes it possible to find large classes of errors by purely mechanical means. Software to consume valid XML data can be simpler and cheaper to write and maintain, because defensive programming is less necessary.
And XML's explicit start- and end-tags make it much easier to detect and ignore material not needed by a particular process. As new processes are added, new information can be added to an XML message format without disturbing existing software.
At least, that's the theory. In practice, combining validation and easy versioning of your XML vocabularies has proven hard.
This talk outlines some basic problems involved in versioning XML vocabularies and talks about ways to address them. Particular attention will be paid to several features of XML Schema 1.1 which make it easier to define XML vocabularies which can in fact be revised while preserving backwards and forwards compatibility: weakened wildcards, open content, not-in-schema wildcards, multiple substitution-group heads, extension of all-groups, default attribute groups, and conditional inclusion of elements in schema documents.
It is vital that the Web is accessible given its increasingly key role in education, employment, government, commerce, health care, recreation, and more. Accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web, and accessibility also makes websites more usable to older people with changing abilities due to aging, people with low bandwidth connections and older technologies, and people using mobile devices and new technologies.
This presentation discusses the current state of web accessibility and explores how we can each play a role in ensuring that the future Web enables greater participation in society instead of creating additional barriers. We'll look at responsibilities in several areas, including: higher education - from incorporating web standards and accessibility in curriculum, to providing effective technical systems to support education for all, to researching solutions to improve the future of the Web; government; and industry, along with the opportunities for positive return on investment (ROI) in accessibility efforts.
Through real-world examples, Shawn will demo specific accessibility barriers and solutions, provide an update on Web accessibility standards and regulations, and provide resources for more information. Come learn how to make your website more usable to more people in more situations.
This workshop provides approaches for making your website more usable to more people in more situations -- especially people with disabilities, seniors, and people using the web on their mobile phone. Shawn will put standards and guidelines in perspective, and show you a new method for developing effective accessibility solutions efficiently.
We'll go through:
Along the way we'll look at specifics, such as providing scalable text (and we'll answer, "What about a text size widget?"); marking up headings, lists, and such; wording headings and links; forms; data tables; linearization (that is, reading order) issues; and JavaScript/Ajax issues.
This is a beginners to intermediate level workshop for anyone involved in web creation.
Using a badly-designed web page that still is displayed correctly on most desktop browsers:
The message:
