Archives for: November 2009
2009-11-30
13:20:11, by Stephane Boyera, 535 words, 32283 views 
Categories: News, Looking forward, Developing Countries, Current state, Technical
Mobile Web for Social Development Roadmap published
I'm glad that the Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group I have been co-chairing eventually published its mobile Web for social development roadmap, its most important deliverable.
This is finalizing 16 months of hard work and discussions. We hope now to receive comments from different groups including the Web Accessibility Initiative, the W3C Internationalization Working Group, Mobile Web Best Practices, Voice Browser, but also from the community working in the field (NGOs, development agencies, etc.).
I believe this document is an important milestone in the path to extend the frontier of the Web in developing regions. It is the first document published by W3C that investigate the potential of the Web and mobile technologies in the Social Development domain, and identifies technology (and other) gaps to be bridged in the future by W3C, the Web Foundation and others.
It is also in my opinion a useful resource for those in the field willing to mainstream mobile technologies in their project. Having discussed with and visited different organizations deploying mobile content and applications in the field, I have come to realized that many of them have a vision of how ICT can help achieving their own goals/impact, but are missing an overview of the available technology landscape. They are usually moving from the vision to the tools directly: looking at what they can find on the market, and using it. I think that it is critical to add an intermediary step, before moving to the tools, to look at the specific needs, profile and requirements of the targeted end-users, the objective of the application, and the complete life-cycle of the project before choosing a particular (set of) technology(ies). The MW4D roadmap hopes to fill this gap, helping organizations to understand the technology landscape and informing them on the critical factors to consider before choosing one specific option.
Obviously, this is only a first step. They are lots of directions to explore. For instance, the document does not investigate specific application fields, and it would be interesting to understand the specificities of each domain (health, government, education, etc.), to identify patterns or information needs that are relevant to these domains, and how to address them. The current roadmap also focuses on using mobile phones to access content, but not to author or deliver content. If mobile phones are really the “computer for Africa”, it is critical to investigate how these devices could become an authoring platform, or a delivery platform (e.g. hosting a web server to deliver content and share information with surrounding clients).
This are only a few examples of potential future items for our group. The group just got an extension till the end of February 2010 to build a new charter, and define its future. Note that the MW4D IG is a public Interest Group, and does not require W3C membership to participate. See details on how to join the MW4D IG.
Therefore, I encourage everybody interested in this topic to join the group, the mailing-list and the bi-monthly teleconferences to participate in the work on this future new charter.
I also encourage everyone to read the published MW4D roadmap and provide feedback!
StephaneMW4D Roadmap Published
The MW4D IG published on November 17 2009 its Mobile Web for Social Development Roadmap. This document summarizes the work of the group since its creation in June 2008.
It describes some of the current challenges of deploying development-oriented services on mobile phones. It suggests the most promising directions for lowering barriers to developing, deploying and accessing services on mobile phones and thereby creating an enabling environment for more social-oriented services to appear.
Automated tests creation for WebIDL-based specifications
A growing number of W3C specifications describe JavaScript APIs using WebIDL, including HTML5, XmlHTTPRequest, the Geolocation API, and the many other APIs in development in the Web Applications and Device APIs and Policy Working Groups.
WebIDL allows to define these interfaces with their methods and properties in an abstract language, while giving specifics on how they have to be implemented in EcmaScript (JavaScript’s official name).
Using that abstract language makes it possible to automatically generate a number of test cases to check the specified interfaces are correctly implemented (or as often, correctly specified!): I discovered a few weeks ago the great WTTJS tool that does exactly this — it takes a WebIDL definition, some indications on how to instantiate the declared interfaces, and it then generates a bunch of test cases that can easily be used directly in browsers.
For instance, after having extracted the WebIDL from the Geolocation API using the WebIDL checker, I got a set of test cases that allowed me to find out that the Geolocation API was not clear enough on defining which interfaces were supposed to be directly instantiable — this has now been partially corrected in the latest Editors draft.
The WebIDL specification is still evolving, and as a result, not all its constructs are currently supported in WTTJS, so running it on a WebIDLs fragments that use the latest syntax capabilities will likely require some light hand edits; but it certainly remains a great tool to help in the development of JavaScript specifications. Thank you, Wakaba!
2009-11-28
SKOS Primer translated to Spanish
2009-11-26
Minutes and resolutions 2009-11-25
The CSS WG looked, among other things, at the stability of the Backgrounds and Borders module and an issue with replaced elements and 'run-in' in CSS 2.1.
- Resolved: The WG will request Candidate Recommendation status for Backgrounds and Borders.
- Resolved: There is no ambiguity that an image can be 'run-in'. No additional text is needed.
There was also news about Selectors: after seeing the number of implementations, the Director agreed to give the specification Proposed Recommendation status. The review period will start in a few days.
The POWDER Working Group is now closed
2009-11-25
Minutes and Resolutions November F2F TPAC Santa Clara
Drop Shadows and Filter Effects
- Discussed drop shadows and what inner shadow is.
(Tab:
the shadow is cast by a negative of the alpha channel, then clipped to the actual alpha channel
) - Discussed applying effects like drop shadows and opacity to different
parts of the box. (fantasai:
The pieces we'd need to address, in various combinations: background layers, border (one piece), content (one piece)
) Only adjacent layers would need to be composited together. Drop shadows would then paint immediately below the composited layer. See also fantasai's message on this topic. - It seems likely the SVG
filters spec and the
filterproperty would be able to address these use cases, particularly if parametrized canned filters were added for commonly desired effects and CSS targets were added e.g. as described by roc. - This topic will be further discussed with the SVGWG possibly on the public-fx@w3.org mailing list.
Media Queries for HTML5 Video
It is proposed to add media queries to <video> and then
to also define queries for the user's special needs. These new media queries
will go into a new media queries module.
CSS2.1 Test Suite Status
Reviewed status of CSS2.1 test suite. Still on track wrt roadmap. fantasai has a rough coverage report, but is missing many of Microsoft's tests because they don't have the right metadata. (Microsoft's management is preventing Arron from correcting the tests.)
Selectors
- Reviewed intention of default attribute wording so that it can be clarified.
- Reviewed implementation reports and checked a few more implementations
- Resolved: Advance to Proposed Recommendation for Selectors Level 3. [Disposition of Comments] [Implementation Reports]
CSS3 Color
- Resolved: Drop section 3.1.1 from CSS3 Color.
- Resolved: Add
color-correctionproperty with valuesdefaultandsrgbwheredefaultis UA-defined andsrgbcorrects untagged images to sRGB. - See also David Baron's follow-up message proposing something different.
display: run-in
Worked through issues summarized in Bert's email
- Resolved: Accepted proposal at the bottom of this email.
- Resolved: Add "The content of replaced elements is not considered in the CSS rendering model." to the definition of "replaced element".
- Filed CSS2.1 Issue 142.
- Resolved: Run-ins inherit from their document parent,
not their sibling. It is explicitly undefined in 2.1 what happens with
parent/sibling
::first-linesand run-ins.
Size to Fit for text
Reviewed examples of copyfitting by changing the font size and various past proposals for addressing some of the use cases. Intentions can be split into:
- Size each line of text individually until it fills the line box.
- Size up the entire paragraph as one unit until the longest line fills its line box.
dbaron proposes a copyfit property to trigger these behaviors. An alternate
proposal is to incorporate this into text-justify.
Related behaviors were mentioned: specifically, triggering justification on the last line only if it's longer than a certain threshold; and specifying a minimum length for the last line, which would trigger whole-paragraph justification if the last line were not long enough.
Conclusion is to add some notes to css3-text and leave it for the next active editor to deal with.
CSS3 Multicol
- Resolved: Advance css3-multicol to CR. [Disposition of Comments]
Grid, Flexbox, and Template Layout Interactions
- Discussed interaction of layout models.
- Discussed triggering fallback based on UA support.
- Resolved: Remove note about interaction between grid and tables.
- It's not clear how to make progress on these drafts.
font-variant and font feature support in CSS
John Daggett proposes adding subproperties to font-variant
for allowing access to the more common OpenType features. font-variant
would become a shorthand for font-variant-ligatures,
font-variant-alternates, font-variant-caps,
font-variant-numeric, font-variant-position.
There some concern about fallback behavior for subscript and superscript features, and winding up with either a complete loss of semantics or a double-sub/superscript rendering.
John notes that OpenType has language-sensitive rendering, and proposes allowing an explicit choice of typographic language different from the content language.
There's concern about exposing alternate glyphs from a generic mechanism such as font-variant, because the choices are very font-specific. Proposals include dealing with it in @font-face; and pairing the glyph set number with the font name so that it only triggers on that font name.
Otherwise the WG is mostly in agreement and pressures jdaggett into putting his proposal in the editor's draft. :)
text-overflow: ellipsis
Resolved: Only horizontal overflow triggers for text-overflow: ellipsis. Add a new keyword for handling ellipsis due to vertical overflow (where the ellipsis appears on the last line only).
Discussed other issues with text-overflow, including:
- Interaction with
overflow, whether it prevents overflow, whether it requiresoverflow: hidden, what happens withoverflow: scroll, how that makes sense with floats, etc. - Where and how the ellipsis is drawn, how it interacts with surrounding text
- What happens with overflowing blocks in the vertical ellipsis case
- Whether the ellipsis is an indication of content you can't see or content you can't reach
- What happens when you scroll, does the ellipsis get drawn on the other side, too? both sides?
- Interaction with bidi, whether the ellipsis causes logical clipping in place of visual clipping
- Whether the behavior you want for ellipsizing text you can scroll to is different from the behavior for ellipsizing text you can't get to, and other potential reasons for different behaviors
Apparently some of these questions were resolved over lunch.
Full minutesTransitions, Transforms, and Animations
- Apple would like a few sample tests in an appropriate format to begin writing test suites. dbaron offered to help with that.
- Reviewed behavior of inherited properties and how inherited transitions don't trigger new transitions.
- Discussed effects of batched layout updates and flushing on transitions, and the resulting unpredictability in behavior.
- Expecting another WD soon, then LC afterward for Transitions and possibly for 2D Transformations; 3D Transforms and Animations both need more work.
Administrative
- Reviewed our Last Call comments for MathML for CSS. Bert didn't find much to comment on. Stretchable characters is something we might need to look at in the future. John Daggett has some comments on font variations vs. Unicode codepoints.
- Discussed modularization and profiles; the questions raised are all answered by the Snapshot. The only complaint was that it's not visible enough, which will be solved when the Snapshot enters CR.
- Next F2F scheduled for March 29-31 hosted by Apple in Cupertino.
13:26:38, by Richard Ishida 
, 27 words, 69364 views Categories: Miscellaneous, Highlight, w3cWebArchitecture
Internet Governance Forum Poster
The fourth annual IGF Meeting was held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt on 15-18 November 2009. The W3C Internationalization Activity had a poster [PDF] at the event.
A Final Act
The POWDER Working Group was formally closed yesterday, 24th November, 2009. The WG homepage is now locked and, until and unless another group updates the work, that really is the end of the process. But there were two more things that happened yesterday as well.
First was that the PICS Recommendations were marked as superseded by POWDER. The listing of documents on the Current Status page for PICS now includes links to the relevant up to date documents (not all of which are within POWDER) and each of the Recommendations themselves includes a prominent message that it has been superseded. PICS was a major piece of work right at the very beginning of W3C and many of its features are still apparent within POWDER. A comparison of the two is available separately.
The second event yesterday took place at at the European Commission in Luxembourg: the (successful!) final review for the Quatro Plus project. This project provided much of the impetus for the development of POWDER and it is fitting that these two final events took place simultaneously.
Looking back through the later posts in this blog, I see a glaring omission so let me correct that right away. Many individuals and the companies for which they work contributed to POWDER, many of them over a sustained period of time from initial identification of the problem through to the eventual solution. The danger in listing people is that you forget someone but let me do my best to list correctly the people who have made substantial contributions and/or given critical support at different times during the development process. My personal and sincere thanks to:
- Shadi Abou-Zahra
- Dan Appelquist
- Tim Berners-Lee
- Tim Boland
- David Booth
- Steve Bratt
- Dan Brickley
- Jeremy Carroll
- Kostas Chandrinos
- Alan Chuter
- Kendall Clark
- FOSI
- Max Froumentin
- Fabien Gandon
- Ivan Herman
- Zeph Harben
- Vangelis Karkaletsis
- Cédric Kiss
- Kazuhiro Kitagawa
- Kjetil Kjernsmo
- Stasinos Konstantopoulos
- Antonis Kukurikos
- Charles McCathieNevile
- Libby Miller
- Pantelis Nasikas
- Liddy Nevile
- Diana Penetcost
- Andrea Perego
- Addison Phillips
- Eric Prud'hommeaux
- Jo Rabin
- Thomas Roessler
- Dave Rooks
- Kai Scheppe
- Michael Schneider
- Noboru Shimizu
- Ghislain Silluame
- Kevin Smith
- Ralph Swick
- Paul Walsh
- Stuart Williams
- Matt Womer
And, to the person/people I forgot to mention, my sincere apology.
Now all that's left to do is to exploit the technology. Asked to sum up what POWDER does, for Semantic Web folk I can do no better than to quote Dan Brickley explaining it to Brian McBride: "It solves the About Each Prefix problem." A slightly richer summary of POWDER might be: it allows you apply common RDF descriptions, such as Dublin Core metadata, CC licences, trustmarks and more, to whole groups of resources. It can be processed as XML or OWL (noting a semantic extension) and the output is always regular RDF triples.
Hope you find it useful.
2009-11-19
Talk slides: Standards-based Translations with W3C ITS and OASIS XLIFF
On November 5th, Christian Lieske and Felix Sasaki gave a talk entitled Standards-based Translations with W3C ITS and OASIS XLIFF at TCWorld, Wiesbaden, Germany.
The slides are in PDF. The presentation describes ITS and XLIFF, the two standards which are important for proper internationalization and localization of XML. Topics include a discussion of general benefits of standards-based internationalization and localization, an introduction to both standards and how they help to achieve such benefits, and an explanation of the relation between the two. A highlight was the introduction of a tool for round-tripping from an XML-document with ITS information to XLIFF, and the integration of translated material from XLIFF back into the original XML. [search keys: talk-2009 talk-sasaki] talk-lieske]
Updated article: Styling using language attributes
The major change was the addition of detailed information about use of CSS selectors with xml:lang, but there were many other edits (see the list below). Translators should consider retranslating the whole tutorial. [search keys: qa-css-lang]
The article was updated as follows:
- added section "Using CSS selectors with xml:lang"
- the title was slightly changed
- information about browser support was replaced with a link to test results (updated)
- various edits throughout to improve readability
- removed the paragraph that says that generic class or id selectors work best, since support for selectors has significantly improved
- updated various links and added links to new materials.
2009-11-18
The Pythia casts mobileOK spells
Web authoring tools ease publication process. Simplicity comes with some loss of control over the generated content. There is hardly anything an authoring tool user may do to improve her content when the W3C mobileOK Checker reports that pop-up windows should not be used. So what?! I do not have any of these pop-up links in my content!
The underlying theme can be updated, but this approach works up to a point when e.g. the post would best be split into multiple pages when delivered on mobile devices. Authoring tools that do not provide content adaptation mechanisms need to be extended to be able to serve mobile-friendly content to mobile devices.
I have been working on an open-source suite of tools written in PHP lately, named mobileOK Pythia, designed to help generate mobileOK content and more generically speaking to help adapt content to fit the properties of the requesting device. Here is a short overview of the outcome of this work. More information (including crucial information about the choice of Pythia as a name ;)) can be found in the documentation of mobileOK Pythia.
This work is part of the MobiWeb 2.0 project supported by the European Union's 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7).
Plug-ins for WordPress and Joomla!
From a user's point of view, the visual and hopefully useful outcome of this work is the creation of the mobileOK Pythia plug-ins for WordPress and Joomla! that make it possible to generate mobileOK content with these tools.
The plug-ins feature:
- Device identification: based on WURFL, an open-source DDR published as an XML file, and accessed through a standard DDR Simple API interface.
- Content adaptation to fit the properties of the requesting device in terms of e.g. screen size, script support, page size limit.
- Theme switching: possibility to switch to a more mobile-friendly theme when the requesting device is identified as mobile.
- POWDER: a machine-readable mobileOK claim for the Web site can be automatically created and served using a POWDER document. The POWDER document is made discoverable through the addition of a
LinkHTTP header field as decribed in the POWDER Primer. - W3C mobileOK Checker link: a link to the W3C mobileOK Checker is added next to the authoring input form to be able to assert the mobile-friendliness of the created content while it is being written.
- mobileOK theme: a mobileOK template may be installed with the plug-in.
The development of a third plug-in for Moodle has started but it is still work in progress.
There exist other plug-ins that provide similar functionality (see for instance WordPress Mobile Plugin, WordPress Mobile Pack, Mobilebot 1.0 or WAFL: Mobile Content Adaptation). mobileOK Pythia separates tool-specific functionalities from tool-agnostic libraries to ease porting to other tools. In particular, the plug-ins wrap the same extensible libraries:
- AskPythia to identify and retrieve the properties of the requesting device.
- TransPythia to adapt content based on the properties of the requesting device.
AskPythia
AskPythia is an open-source conforming implementation of the Device Description Repository Simple API in PHP. It is not a DDR but a wrapper to existing DDRs.
AskPythia ships with an implementation on top of the WURFL database that maps WURFL capabilities to properties defined in the Device Description Repository Core Vocabulary standard. Support for other DDRs is welcome!
Check AskPythia's documentation for more information.
TransPythia
TransPythia is a transcoding library that adapts content (HTML, CSS, images) based on the capabilities of the requesting device. The library ships with a set of transcoding actions that are particularly adapted to mobile devices and that may be extended as needed.
Main transformations are:
- Images conversion and adaptation: adapts images to match the requesting device's list of supported image formats and to fit the screen size. Removes images that cannot be converted or that are still too big for mobile consumption after conversion.
- Pagination: a generic pagination algorithm that may be used to paginate HTML pages or HTML fragments when the requesting device is identified as a mobile device.
- Tables linearization: to remove nested tables and linearize tables when the requesting device does not support them.
Check TransPythia's documentation for more information.
Feedback
If you would like to comment, contribute, report bugs or simply tell us what you think, you are very welcome! Feel free to send an email to the public-mobile-dev@w3.org mailing-list (with public archives).
SKOS Reference translated to Chinese
2009-11-17
First Draft of Mobile Web for Social Development Roadmap Published
The Mobile Web For Social Development (MW4D) Interest Group, part of the Mobile Web Initiative, has published a Group Note of Mobile Web for Social Development Roadmap. This document describes some of the current challenges of deploying development-oriented services on mobile phones. It suggests the most promising directions for lowering barriers to developing, deploying and accessing services on mobile phones and thereby creating an enabling environment for more social-oriented services to appear.
2009-11-10
Automated testing of a browser engine
“The cornerstone of all testing done on the core of the Opera browser is our automated regression testing system, named SPARTAN. The system consists of a central server and about 50 test machines running our 120 000 automated tests on all core reference builds. The purpose of this system is to help us discover any new bugs we introduce as early as possible, so that we can fix them before they cause any trouble for our users.”
2009-11-09
Minutes of October 29 teleconference published
The MW4D IG held its 28th teleconference on October 29 2009.
The approved minutes are available at http://www.w3.org/2009/10/29-mw4d-minutes.html
Previous meeting minutes are available from the teleconference archives
2009-11-05
W3C Cheatsheet for developers
I’ve been working over the past few weeks on a nifty little tool that summarizes a number of W3C technologies, including the Mobile Web Best Practices, in a mobile-friendly format, called the W3C Cheatsheet.
See my post in the W3C blog to learn more about it, and send your feedback!
Public feedback solicited for Transcoding Guidelines and Mobile Web Application Best Practices
The review period for the two Last Call working drafts published by the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group last month ends tomorrow. This is a reminder that the public community is invited to review and comment the drafts:
- The Guidelines for Web Content Transformation Proxies provides guidance to implementers of Content Transformation proxies as to whether and how to transform Web content. This version is the result of returning the document to Last Call based on public feedback received during the first review period.
- The Mobile Web Application Best Practices specifies Best Practices for the development and delivery of Web applications on mobile devices.
Comments should be sent to the public-bpwg-comments@w3.org mailing-list (with public archives). Thanks in advance!
2009-11-04
TPAC Lightning Talk
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