World Wide Web Consortium
TPAC 2007: W3C Technical Plenary / Advisory Committee Meetings Week

Description: Whether you're a Web designer, developer, usability specialist or work in any one of the myriad jobs that go into making great Web sites, it's clear that the W3C has significant influence on how you work. Whether it's via the specifications that go into the software and agents that you use daily, or as the cornerstone of educational material, the W3C is involved somewhere in the process. But it's clear that there's been a gap between the real-world and the internal workings of the W3C. As Working Groups such as HTML 5 and CSS become more open, so must our conversations open. In this session, the W3C will have the opportunity to listen to real-world perspectives, respond to criticisms and praise and keep alive the ongoing commitment to authentic conversation and active community participation.

Moderator: Molly E. Holzschlag (Web Standards and Practices Education and Outreach, Molly.Com, Inc.) [slides]

Presenters and Topics:

• Patrick Haney (Harvard)
• Matthew Oliphant (MathWorks)
• Stephanie Troeth (CloudRaker)
• Aaron Gustafson (Easy! Designs, Inc.)
• Q&A

Description: Regardless if evolution or revolution, the Web has become a highly interactive space of applications and interfaces. What are the challenges and opportunities to address the key technical issues?

Moderator: Al Gilman (Invited Expert, Chair of PFWG)
Organizer: Shadi Abou-Zahra (W3C)

Presenters and Topics:

• Anne van Kesteren (Opera Software)
• Rotan Hanrahan (Mobileaware Ltd)
• Henri Sivonen (Mozilla Foundation)
• Richard Schwerdtfeger (IBM)
• Q&A

Description: Presenters will provide strictly-monitored 3-minute talks on topics that range from interesting, informative, controversial or all of the above. The audience will have the opportunity to engage in a lightning question and answer period following each presentation.

Moderator: Rotan Hanrahan (MobileAware)

Presenters and Topics:

• T.V. Raman: What Determines Successful Standards?
• Debbie Dahl: Speak, See, Write: Multimodal Interaction on the Web
• Serge Haumont: dotMobi
• John Schneider: Efficient XML Interchange (EXI)
• Phillip Hallam-Baker: How to stop linkspam
• Q&A

Description: What should it mean to "open" a Working Group's participation to the public both from a daily work perspective and a Process point of view? What are the changes, the dangers, the positive aspects and the limits?

Moderator: Daniel Glazman (Disruptive Innovations)

Presenters and Topics:

• Deborah Dalh(Conversational Technlogies) [slides]
• Art Barstow (Nokia) [slides]
• Ian Hickson (Google)
• Paul Cotton (Microsoft) [slides in PDF]
• Q&A

Description: Using URIs (as opposed to plain strings) either directly or as a means of scoping (eg. namespaces, profiles) grounds extensions in URI space. This enables decentralized extensibility and it enable 'follow-your-nose' style discovery of information about extensions. Over time the W3C Technical Architecture Group has come across several example of extensions that are not grounded in URI space and the difficulties that causes. Of particular recent interest are the possible deprecation of extensibility attributes from HTML5, a proposal to add a form of namespaces to HTML5, and the use of unqualified/scoped class attribute strings as semantic tags in microformat definitions.

Moderator: David Orchard (BEA) [slides in PDF]

Presenters and Topics:

• Tim Berners-Lee (W3C) [slides]
• Dan Connolly (W3C) [slides]
• Ian Hickson (Google) [slides]
• Chris Wilson (Microsoft) [slides]
• Q&A

Description: Presenters will provide strictly-monitored 3-minute talks on topics that range from interesting, informative, controversial or all of the above. The audience will have the opportunity to engage in a lightning question and answer period following each presentation.

Moderator: Rotan Hanrahan (MobileAware)

Presenters and Topics:

• John Schneider: ECMAScript for XML (E4X)
• Charlton Barreto: Web 20-20: Architecture for the New Internet
• José Manuel Cantera Fonseca: Mobile search
• Håkon Wium Lie: How web fonts can change the face of the web
• "TP Decides"
• Q&A

Description: The availability of video content is increasing rapidly over the Web and consumer demand will explode in the upcoming years. What will be the impact of video on tomorrow's Web?.

Moderator: Philippe Le Hegaret (W3C) [slides]

Presenters and Topics:

• Jon Alper (WGBH) [slides]
• Håkon Wium Lie (Opera Software) [slides]
• Jason Gaedtke (CableLabs) [slides]
• Q&A

Description: "Cracks and Mortar": The Web works like a large, complex building, with many interlocking parts. The specifications fit together to provide a firm foundation for new developments. Cracks in the foundation can be a sign of failure, or can be deliberately left for expansion. We discuss some examples. [slides]

Moderator: T.V. Raman (Google)

• Q&A