Web Design and Applications - W3C

ITS 2.0 showcase 18 June: participate in person or online. Get your seat soon!

2013-06-12T14:07:41+00:00

The recently announced Internationalization Tag Set 2.0 showcase event in Dublin now allows for remote participation. Please register by 17 June 6 p.m. UTC. We will provide dial in details to registered
participants. The number of remote participants is limited and we choose on a first-come, first-served basis – get your seat soon!

Come to the Internationalization Tag Set 2.0 Showcase

2013-06-03T21:31:56+00:00

On 18 June the MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group holds a showcase event in Dublin about the upcoming Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 specification. Group participants demonstrate implementations for authoring ITS 2.0 data categories, for using them in localization workflows, and for improving machine translation or other language technology processes with ITS 2.0. Participation is free, but registration is required.

Four W3C projects into Google Summer of Code 2013

2013-06-03T14:53:49+00:00

Google has just announced the accepted projects for the Summer of Code 2013. W3C was granted four slots.

First of all, I'd like to thank all the students who participated as well as the mentors, particularly Manu Sporny who helped a lot with the proposals. The selection process was tougher than we had expected: we have had about 50 proposals and we decided to focus only on 8 of them. We think that 4 slots is good for us, as it's a good balance between the 8 strong candidates/proposals and the fact that this is our first participation, so we can learn from it. We feel sorry for those who were not accepted and we hope that they'll stay engaged in the W3C community.

Here are the students who were accepted and what they will be working on:

Gábor Kövesdán will refactor the Validator.nu project so that the validator will be a standalone reusable Java component
Joseph J Short will adapt the Internationalization (i18n) checker so that it is a modularised, easy to deploy API, which can be run by itself or integrated into other (Java) applications
Vikash Agrawal will work on several applications around JSON-LD to help developers integrate with Schema.org and the LinkedIn API, among other things
Tao Lin will extend the RDFa play tool for helping the web developers mark up their pages with RDFa for better UI experience, with dozens of predefined examples and an example submission module

Those are really exciting projects that the Web community is waiting for. I personally can't wait to see our students getting started :-)

W3DevCampus - a trainer's perspective / HTML5 online course

2013-05-27T15:28:55+00:00

Last week, at the WWW2013 conference in Rio de Janeiro, I gave the HTML5 tutorial within W3C's tutorial track. I met one of my online students who told me how good the course was. That made my day, believe me :-) In the picture, from left to right: Marie-Claire Forgue (Head of W3C Training - W3DevCampus), Michel Buffa (trainer), Rivka Niesten (online student of the HTML5 March 2013 training course). Photo Credit: Jessikah Niesten.

I'm Michel Buffa, professor at the University of Nice, in the south of France, and researcher in the WIMMICS group from I3S/INRIA laboratory, which research is focused on Semantic Web and Linked Data. With this blog post, I want to share my incredible experience as W3DevCampus trainer.

I have been teaching HTML5 to my master students since 2010, and after my HTML5 tutorial at last year's WWW conference, Marie-Claire contacted me to develop and run a W3C HTML5 online course, as part of the W3DevCampus program.

I started to write this course in September 2012 and it actually took a lot of time to complete it. I had to turn the material I had been using at the University into a full featured and structured course and suited for online learning, develop many new interactive examples (nearly 90 of them, most running on the jsbin.com online IDE). I did my best to cover the HTML5 specification with the W3C staff helping me stay tuned with regards to the latest developments.

The course started on 13 March 2013 and lasted 6 weeks. It was my first course with the W3DevCampus, and while I was hoping it would meet everybody's expectations, I discovered what a good reward it was when I started to interact with the 80 registered students. At the beginning of each week, a new chapter was made available, and during this week students read the course content, ran the examples, and interacted in the forum. Each time someone posted a message in the forum, I got an email alert. I did my best to help students but students also helped each other.

HTML5 is composed of new elements, new attributes but also new JavaScript APIs. JavaScript beginners worried a lot at the beginning but soon I made sure to propose different assignments to ensure students would be able to keep up. Three out of the four assignments had different subjects: one for JavaScript beginners, one for people with basic JavaScript knowledge and one for people fluent in JavaScript.

In the new version of the course, that will start on 3 June 2013 (register asap! - there is one week left), we also added a new section "JavaScript for beginners, what you need to know" that will be helpful - no worries, it will take less than an hour to get into it. Also, some courses will have different difficulty indicators. For example, if you are interested in HTML5 client side persistence, but are not going to write applications that need a transactional database, you might jump over the IndexedDB part. Again, no worries, this will not make you fail the assignment as we'll provide another subject more suited to your interests/JavaScript level.

There have been around 300 posts in the forum, I got nearly 100 personal emails which I tried to answer promptly. It took me a lot of time but I really loved the experience, having instant feedback from the students.

At the end of the course, students had to fill in an evaluation form. We took into account many of their suggestions, such as adding a section about JavaScript for beginners. All in all, it seems that everything went really fine. Some students even opened a thread to thank me about how awesome a teacher I have been (thanks so much guys, I had such a big smile for the whole day after that!).

Some comments told us that some chapters have too much content while some others said they really appreciated the full coverage of the HTML5 features in those same chapters. So we decided to add some online help to guide students such as "you might jump over this section if you do not need that...", etc.

Next is to send the certificates of completion to students who successfully passed all assignments. Quite a nice success rate. I'm now looking forward to the next course session, to start next week!.

Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 Second Last Call Working Draft

2013-05-21T15:58:40+00:00

The MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group has published a second Last Call working draft of Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0.

The draft implements all changes since the previous publication of 11 April 2013. There are no remaining open issues. The Working Group is planning to finalize ITS 2.0 now: this is your last time to provide feedback! The Last Call period ends 11 June.

ITS 2.0 provides metadata to foster the adoption of the multilingual Web.

Requirements for Hangul Text Layout and Typography Draft published

2013-05-14T15:38:14+00:00

The Internationalization Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Requirements for Hangul Text Layout and Typography and is looking for feedback.

This document describes requirements for general Korean language/Hangul text layout and typography realized with technologies like CSS, SVG and XSL-FO. The document is mainly based on a project to develop the international standard for Korean text layout.

Please send comments to public-i18n-cjk@w3.org (subscribe, archives) by 14 June

A Korean version of the document is also available (한국어 텍스트 레이아웃 및 타이포그래피를 위한 요구사항), but the English version is the authoritative version.

Rome MultilingualWeb workshop report now available

2013-05-14T12:52:17+00:00

A report summarizing the MultilingualWeb workshop in Rome is now available from the MultilingualWeb site. It contains a summary of each session with links to presentation slides and more detailed scribing done on site in Rome. Links to video for each session will be posted soon.

With approximately 150 attendees, the Rome Workshop focused on the theme “Making the Multilingual Web Work” and emphasized information about the best practices and standards that help content creators and localizers ensure that the World-Wide Web lives up to its name, across boundaries of language and culture. Attendees heard from a variety of perspectives, with fruitful dialogue between various stakeholder groups involved in trying to expand the multilingual scope of the Web.

Taking place over two days (12 and 13 March, 2013) at the headquarters of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Workshop featured twenty-four conference-style presentations, seven poster presentations, and an “open space” discussion that featured six breakout sessions focusing on key topics that emerged during the Workshop. In addition, it showcased technology implementations of the forthcoming internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 standard.

The Workshop was sponsored by the EU-funded QTLaunchPad project and Verisign. It was run by the MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group.

FEISGILLT 2013 to showcase upcoming ITS 2.0 standard

2013-05-07T16:37:42+00:00

FEISGILLT 2013 will showcase the upcoming Internationalization Tag Set 2.0 standard, together with closely related, core localization standards like XLIFF. FEISGILTT 2013 is the preconference event of Localization World, London 2013

. W3C members will get 20% discount for FEISGILTT. FEISGILTT participants are entitled to a 10% discount when registering for the main conference. However, registering for the main conference is NOT required to register for FEISGILTT.

The CSS WG updated the Working Draft Selectors Level 4

2013-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

The CSS WG updated the Working Draft Selectors Level 4

New article: Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm basics

2013-04-29T19:14:49+00:00

Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm basics is a repackaging of the initial part of “What you need to know about the bidi algorithm and inline markup” as a standalone article. It provides a gentle introduction to the behaviour of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, and helps you understand why bidirectional text in Arabic, Hebrew, Thaana, Urdu, etc. behaves the way it does.