QA News for the year 2002

2002-12-09: How to properly specify character sets. A question is submitted by WaSP members to W3C's QA Team for information, the QA Team gives an answer based on Specifications and examples if needed. The first release has been published and explain how to properly specify character sets. Please comment on the public-evangelist mailing list.

2002-11-26: New Generation of the W3C Markup Validator Released. W3C is pleased to announce an upgrade to the W3C Markup Validation Service. Changes include improved result pages, accessibility fixes, restructured code and design, and more MathML, XHTML and SVG support. Feedback is welcome. The announcement names contributors and has release notes.

2002-11-17: "Month in QA", October 2002. The October issue (sixth issue) of the friendly summary of the activity on the QA mailing-lists, "weekinQA (now MonthinQA)" has been published.

2002-11-08: Three QA Working Drafts updated. The Quality Assurance Working Group has updated three Working Drafts in its seven-part QA Framework: the Introduction, Process and Operational Guidelines; and Specification Guidelines. See also the roadmap of publication for the QA framework.

2002-10-23: New W3C Markup Validator. The beta version of the W3C Markup Validator has been released. Addition of XHTML 1.1, SVG, XHTML 1.0 2nd Edition, accessibility features are part of the major improvements. You can send bug fixes.

2002-10-15: "Weeks" in QA, September 15-30, 2002. The fifth release of "Week in QA" has been published. The new issues on Specification guidelines have been raised and listed.

2002-09-27: QA Publication Roadmap. The schedule for publication has been published to help you to identify the next milestones of the QA WG.

2002-09-27: "Weeks" in QA, September 1-15, 2002. The fourth release of "Week in QA" has been published. You will find some information about the demonstrations that will be done at the QA F2F in Tokyo, about the definition of the testability and the clarity of the Specification Guidelines, etc.

2002-09-12: "Weeks" in QA, August 2002. The fourth release of "Week in QA" has been published. You will find some information about the discussions around the QA Framework specifications guidelines and various other items discussed in August on the QA Activity mailing lists.

2002-08-28: Publication of the updated Specification Guidelines (part of the QA Framework). The QA Working Group has released the second published Working Draft of QA Framework: Specification Guidelines with major revisions on the organization and content of the guidelines. Comments are welcome on the publicly archived QA mailing-list. The principal goal of this document is to help W3C Working Groups in writing clearer, more implementable, and better testable technical reports. The Working Group explicitely seeks feedback on some issues, specifically atomicity of modules, levels minimality, modules-levels, levels-profiles, legacy specifications.

2002-08-28: New Article: Buy standards compliant Web sites. As part of the QA Interest Group Education and Outreach mission, a new article has been published to describe how adding standards compliance in a Web site requirements lists helps getting a better final product. This article is aimed at managers and deciders who delegate their Web site creation to another entity. Public feedback is encouraged on it to the publicly archived mailing list public-evangelist@w3.org.

2002-07-28: QA Resources. You now have two new sections in the QA Web space: QA Library (The "almost" authoritative list for documents, texts, and documentation published in the QA webspace at W3C.) and QA Toolbox (QA Tools, Validators, Tests, maintained at W3C).

2002-07-10: DOM Sidebar. Philippe Le Hégaret has created a DOM Sidebar for your Mozilla based browser that will give you a complete reference of the DOM.

2002-07-05: Web Standards Education and Outreach @ W3C. The W3C QA IG has just started a forum to promote W3C standards and help evangelists, authors, teachers to improve the quality of materials related to the W3C Web Standards. A public mailing list public-evangelist@w3.org is available and publically archived.

2002-06-18: A journey through standards. Mark Pilgrim has started an explanation of useful techniques to make your website conform to W3C standards like choosing a doctype or specifying the language of your documents.

2002-06-12: XML Test Suite. The XML Conformance Test Suite has been released by the W3C. The suite contains over 2000 test files that any developer can download free of cost and use to test the conformance of an XML processor to the XML Recommendation.

2002-06-11: Week in QA, 27 May - 9 June 2002. The second release "Week in QA" has been published. You will find some information about testable assertion tagging for W3C specifications, glossary and updates on the Matrix.

2002-06-11: WASP Phase II. The WASP has relaunched with a new statement. Welcome back!

2002-06-11: The Matrix in XML and RDF. There's now two new versions of the QA Matrix the XML version (look at the source to see the details) which is complete, and an RDF extraction of it.

2002-05-30: Week in QA, 13-26 May 2002. The first "Week in QA" has been published. You will find information on QA glossary, Letters of Conformance, Flavors of Conformance considered Harmful.

2002-05-29: CSS Test Suite documentation. The CSS working group published the official documentation for the format of all CSS test suites. The format is known in the working group as the "TNG" format. It is the intention that all future CSS test suites adhere to it.

2002-05-20: Third QA F2F Meeting. The next QA F2F meeting will be held in Montreal, on June 13-14, if you want to participate, read the logistics information. The QA F2F will be hosted by the Computing Department of Montreal University, with the help of Michel Robitaille (chef des laboratoires, DIRO).

2002-05-15: The QA Working Group has released four new Working Drafts. The QA Framework: Introduction has been completed with two new documents. These drafts introduce the goals and structure of the overall W3C Quality Assurance (QA) framework and include a the Operational Guidelines for promoting and facilitating the quality practices of W3C Working Groups, the Specification Guidelines for helping W3C Working Groups in writing clearer, more implementatable, and better testable technical reports and the Operational Examples and Techniques, which presents examples and describes the techniques of operational aspects of quality practices within the W3C's Working Groups. Please send comments to www-qa@w3.org, the publicly archived list. Visit the QA Working Group home page.

2002-05-05: RDF Test Cases Update. A new version of the RDF Test Cases has been published.

2002-05-05: QA People at the 11th WWW Conference.. If you are participating to the 11th WWW Conference in Hawaii. You can meet the people of the QA Activity. So, if you want more information, if you have input, or if you just want have a nice chat, feel free to contact one of us: Daniel Dardailler (QA IG co-chair) Karl Dubost (QA WG co-chair), Dominique Hazael-Massieux, Lofton Henderson (QA WG co-chair), Olivier Théreaux. You can also attend a talk about the QA work on Friday, 10 May 2002, 10:30-12:00 at the W3C Track.

2002-04-18: Quality Tips for Webmaster. A list of quality tips are developed to help people to understand W3C technologies and correct the most common mistakes. You can send you own quality tips for webmaster following the process.

2002-03-18: W3C tutorials. W3C's mission is to develop and promote technologies for the Web. If the development of these technologies goes through the publication of technical reports, these specifications are usually not the easiest place to discover how to actually use these technologies. When possible, the actual developers of the technologies publish the related tutorial on W3C site.

2002-02-20: DOM Conformance Test Suite, Level 1 Core. The first version of the DOM Conformance Test Suite for Level 1 Core has been released by the DOM Test Suite Group. The DOM TS aims at helping implementors test their implementations' conformance with the W3C DOM Level 1 specification.
This work, launched by W3C and NIST, is a publically developed and open framework to test the DOM Level 1 Core implementations. Read about the Document Object Model (DOM) Conformance Test Suites, where you can also download the DOM TS distribution.
Comments are appreciated and need to be sent to www-dom-ts@w3.org (online archive)

2002-02-15: W3C Glossary and Dictionary requirements. Olivier Théreaux <ot@w3.org> is collecting early ideas, both technical and operational, for a project of combined "glossary" and "dictionnary" for W3C. It will help to improve the quality of W3C specifications and ease the life of translators.

2002-02-15: From HTML to XHTML, recipes?. A new article has been written by Jeffrey Zeldman on A List Apart with the title Better Living through XHTML that will help you do that, by examining tools that can assist you in converting to XHTML and verify that you’ve done it correctly and with a little care and feeding, XHTML will help your sites work better in more browsers and devices, thus reaching greater numbers of readers, now and for years to come. This article is must to read for any Web designers or Web developers.

2002-02-04: W3C's QA Working Group has released a first public Working Draft framework guidelines, including two documents: an Introduction giving the goals and structure of the overall framework, along with the Process and Operational Guidelines for promoting and facilitating the quality practices of the W3C Working Groups.
Comments are welcomed in www-qa@w3.org, the publicly archived list of W3C's QA Interest Group.

2002-01-21: An interesting resource about Conformance and compatibility for CSS: The Code Style CSS2 media monitor subsection is a collection of articles, browser compatibility charts and test pages for media dependent stylesheets. This document is a table of contents for this subsection and provides links to all the documents in the set.

2002-01-18: Last Call WD for XFORMS 1.0 The Last Call Working Draft of XFORMS 1.0 has been released. Comments are welcome. It has been added to The Matrix.

2002-01-15: CSS3 Selectors Test Suite. The CSS working group has released the CSS Selectors Test Suite written by Daniel Glazman and Ian Hickson for the CSS3 Selectors.

2002-01-10: QA WG Progress. The QA working group will release soon a first Working Draft of their documents.

2002-01-01: Happy QA New Year. The QA Activity wishes an happy new year of Quality. We invite you to follow the activity on the QA Working Group pages and QA Interest Group pages.