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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.