Technological progress of the past 15 years has helped the World Wide Web get closer to its original vision of a rich information space based on hyperlinking: a Web of data for humans and machines, enabling powerful applications and services. What about the Web Page? It is still the basic model of most of the Web today? Will these advances obsolete it, enrich it, or mutate it? This session gathers experts from various fields and technologies to reflect on and discuss its future.
9 May 2007, 15:30-17:00
W3C Track of the 16th International World Wide Web Conference - WWW2007, to be held at Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in Banff National Park, on 8-12 May 2007, Canada. The session will take place in the Cascade Ballroom of the hotel.
Steph Troeth (WaSP/CloudRaker) was on the lineup but could not attend.
HTML reloaded. There are big changes at W3C regarding how we work on HTML. 'Classic HTML' has been welcomed back to the fold; but it also has two serializations. What does that mean? What changes will there be? How does HTML combine with other formats? And what's happening with XHTML2? This session will explain how the pieces of the jigsaw fit together.
Forms have been an important ingredient in the success of HTML. This talk will take a look back at the history of HTML forms, the emergence of XForms as an XML family member, and WebForms 2.0 as an alternative that proposes incremental extensions to HTML. But what about authors and application portability? The talk will speculate about ways to enable high level authoring tools for forms-based applications, and invite people to take part in defining the next version of HTML Forms.
The Big News? CSS2. Yes, really.
Technology development usually brings new accessibility challenges for people with disabilities. Accessibility support tends to be overlooked initially, and new paradigms present new types of challenges that demand innovative solutions. Recent increased awareness closes this gap, yet the increasing pace of development widens it again. Architecting accessibility features directly into base technologies is a major part of the solution. The W3C's recent work on accessibility of rich internet applications is a response to recent innovations that solves present problems and anticipates future needs. Ongoing research and development is needed to ensure unbroken accessibility as the Web continues to evolve.
The future of the web page holds the same mix of proprietary developments (by way of browsing extensions and new platforms) and web standards as the past did, with a few interesting developments. This session explores directions in web page creation, as well as some of the work under the W3C banner, such as that in the Web Application Formats WG (WAF) and the Web API WG.
After the presentations, the participants of the panel discussed on the topic of the future of the Web page, with participation from the audience.» Discussion Minutes
olivier Thereaux - Session Chair Marie-Claire Forgue - W3C Track Chair