I'm always amazed by how good and dedicated all these individuals are to the W3C mission. This is true for those you know, the front line Working Group Technical staff contact, but W3C is working because of all administrative and system people.
]]>Most of the software companies deploy all kind of technologies in theirs products. They do it to get more market shares. Sometimes the technology is getting traction in the development world. Other companies have a few choices:
All of these solutions have issues ranging to patents, licenses, implementations bugs, interoperability, collective consensus. But fortunately some of them after a while will reach the W3C and get into a Working Draft at least, and hopefully a Recommendation. Canvas (Apple) and XMLHttpRequest (Microsoft) are following this pattern.
In this case, W3C is often perceived (mostly by software implementers) as a slow organization, not being on the edge and not creating innovation. Another part of the community thinks that it is good that W3C has his head on his shoulders and standardized only market proof technologies. Standards mean here stability of the market.
A group of companies have an interest in technology. They feel there is a need to develop a market or they have an issue which needs an interoperable technology to bring stability in the market. The W3C Activity and related Working Groups are created. Sometimes they will use the deliverables of an incubator group, of a workshop or even from W3C Member submissions. In the best case, the Working Draft documents are published at a regular pace with the relevant implementers in the Working Group.
It is a long process to reach agreement, to solve the issues. Each working draft is published openly under the patent policy. The public sees all the evolution of the technology, phase that they could not see in the first case. They often draw high expectations, followed by sometimes disappointement to see things being stalled, not going fast enough or not evenly implemented. CSS, XML, SVG are examples of this pattern.
W3C is often perceived not realistic by some Web communities which can't use the technology right away. Somme communities feel that W3C is a leading organization exploring markets and creating the base of a new architecture. Standards mean here innovation for the market.
Both cases will bring bad and good karma to W3C. There are more than one community, sometimes they are quite disjoint or with a very different culture, approach with regards to the technology. And honestly, I'm not sure there is one solution that would satisfy everyone. But at least, I know that until now, the W3C Process has been flexible enough to accomodate a lot of different cases and needs. Under the market and the communities needs, the W3C Process has evolved. Remember the patent policy debates for example.
In my 8 years of working here, I come to think that W3C is a social platform for developing Open Web Standards.
]]>I'm always amazed by how good and dedicated all these individuals are to the W3C mission. This is true for those you know, the front line Working Group Technical staff contact, but W3C is working because of all administrative and system people.
]]>Over the last few months, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has been going through a process to ensure that WCAG 2.0 can be implemented. Developers and dsigners from around the world gave WCAG 2.0 a "test drive" in their own Web content.
The result: Successful implementations in a wide range of sites including education, commerce, government, and a blog; in languages including Japanese, German, English, and French; and using a wide range of technologies including scripting, multimedia, Flash, and WAI-ARIA. You can get the nitty-gritty details from the Implementation Report.
We learned more about how people use WCAG 2.0 and got additional feedback that resulted in a few changes from the previous publication.
Now that WCAG 2.0 technical material is stable and is proven implementable, there's one more step: submit WCAG 2.0 Proposed Recommendation to W3C Members for final review and endorsement. That takes us into December.
Over the next few weeks we'll also be updating existing WCAG materials and providing new materials to help transitioning to WCAG 2.0; for example, a printable version of WCAG 2.0 at a Glance and more WCAG 2.0 presentations.
But you don't need to wait for any of that. There are a lot of reasons to start implementing WCAG 2.0 right away. See "What are the benefits of using WCAG 2.0?" in the WCAG 2 FAQ.
Note that the best place to start with WCAG 2.0 is not necessarily the technical standard itself. Instead start with:
As always, we welcome suggestions for improving these supporting documents, and we encourage translations. Each document has an e-mail address for comments, which is often in the footer, e.g., "Feedback welcome to wai-eo-editors@w3.org."
Thanks for all the support moving WCAG 2.0 towards completion. We look forward to seeing more websites and web applications meet WCAG 2.0.
]]>If you are not in Mandelieu, you may not get the whole experience and will miss the great corridor discussion during the coffee breaks, but you can still listen to, and participate to the discussions: tune in to the audio soundcast of the presentations, and join the live discussion and scribing on IRC (join channel #tp on irc.w3.org:6665 )
]]>Yesterday in the WebApps (Web Applications) Working Groups, a discussion has started about a normative reference from XMLHttpRequest to HTML 5. XMLHttpRequest is the technology used in AJAX applications on the Web. XMLHttpRequest is more mature and in the final stages for going to last call and hopefully in a few months a W3C Recommendation. HTML 5 is still in high development and not stable at all. There is still work to do on it. Two options were proposed:
There is no formal Process requirement on this, because it is highly dependent on the type of the technology and its level of maturity. The W3C Process Document is here to help and be flexible to many use cases, and not be a hurdle. There is an internal W3C Technical Report publication processes. When a document is moving to Proposed Recommendation, it has to satisfy all exit criterias of Candidate Recommendation. In this document, we can read
Evidence that dependencies with other groups met (or not)
Does this specification have any normative references to W3C specifications that are not yet Proposed Recommendations? Note: In general, documents do not advance to Recommendation with normative references to W3C specifications that are not yet Recommendations. Is there evidence that additional dependencies related to implementation have been satisfied?
What does it simply mean? Normative references to moving targets are dangerous.
]]>Meet Zakim, RRSAgent and Trackbot, 3 home made bots which are essential to W3C Working Group life and are the chairs angels.
The W3C TPAC 2008 is happening in the south of France near the city of Cannes. The hotel is not close from any fiber optics, which gives certain challenges when you need to provide network for a lot of geeks with their computers working for one week on Web technologies. Vivien Lacourba, W3C staff, gave me a few details about the network.
Orange, the company providing the network, installed a router with 4 ADSL lines (1 Mbs uplink and 6 Mbs downlink each). There will be around 365 participants during the week, with an expected peak of 275 persons. The wifi should be accessible pretty much from everywhere on the conference site.
Let's hope that everything will work well and without troubles. If you had troubles with the network during the meeting, contact Vivien Lacourba (see the photo). He will try to help you.
]]>Just had lunch with some members of the CSS Working Group, they are the only people meeting today. The big show is starting tomorrow.
There were discussions about test cases with Anne and Elika. I discussed a bit of Montreal with Murray Malloney and Steve Zilles (Adobe). Daniel Glazman also shared with me some ideas around W3C gears such as t-shirts. I know that many people would be interested by a W3C shop and we have been testing stuff around this idea for months. We also discussed about the future of validators. Standards Suck released an initial video post explaining the W3C Technical Plenary.
Everything is already set or just in the process of being finished. Active, active, if you like the organization during the meeting, don't forget to thank Amy, Alexandra, Coralie and Kanako.
Let's start. And don't forget to follow and participate to the online discussions Photos, Messages, blogs, blogs.
]]>A W3C workshop is an event organized by W3C where all interested parties are invited to participate, provided they submit a position paper summarizing their views on the topics of the workshop.
In this case, the focus of our workshop will be around social networks, certainly one of the hottest topics on the Web; we have determined a list of topics we would like to discuss during this workshop, ranging from technical matters to business questions, with a few highlights on interoperability across social networks, social networks on PC vs on mobile, and a review of existing social networks initiatives.
Our goal here is to bring as many people around the table to foster discussions in this very rich environment, and try to evaluate what are the industry's needs.
Given the initial reactions of the various parties we contacted to constitute our program committee for the workshop, I'm pretty confident the workshop is going to be very fruitful, and I am hoping many others will find this an exciting opportunity!
Are you interested to participate? If so, please review the call for participation, and submit a position paper (typically 1 to 5 pages long) before November 20. Feel free to contact me at dom@w3.org to get more details on the workshop.
]]>If you read these lines and you do have an application that you would like to submit, please contact me or the dedicated email address: member-sw-case-studies@w3.org!
On a somewhat similar line: there is also a Wiki page that gives information on Semantic Web tools (not applications but, eg, David Provost’s report concentrates on those, too). This is a public Wiki, everyone can add new tools there; please do!
]]>Not many servers handle HTTP PUT in a simple way. There is a good reason behind that. The HTTP specification defines an abstract model for modifying and managing an information space. The "physical action" are unrelated to the use of HTTP verbs. HTTP means create or update a resource. As Roy Fielding put it in 2006:
FWIW, PUT does not mean store. I must have repeated that a million times in webdav and related lists. HTTP defines the intended semantics of the communication – the expectations of each party.
The protocol does not define how either side fulfills those expectations, and it makes damn sure it doesn't prevent a server from having absolute authority over its own resources.
What does it mean for an application which is really Web aware? Let's imagine that you have an information space (Web site), called MyIsland, available at http://MyIsland.example.org/. You are working with a photo manipulation software. You have set the levels, contrasts, saturation of an image. You resized the photo, which is an object.
You are ready to create a resource to the information space. Let's say that your resource will be identified in the information space by http://MyIsland.example.org/somewhere/coconut. You can now send to the server a request to create the resource in the information space and the image (entity enclosed with the request).
What the server, which is a software, does with the object is not driven by HTTP at all. The server manages the information space (a list of URIs) depending on the requests from clients. The application could store the object on the filesystem, in a database, decompose the image in a series of mathematical equations, to send an email to someone that a new resource has been created, to print it in a real printer, to do a zillion of things additional to the fact that the resource has been created.
It means that later on, if someone does an HTTP GET on this information space at this URI, he/she will receive back the object coming from somewhere. Similarly, the HTTP GET is not a way to say "read this file on the filesystem", but just give me the information designated by this URI. What the server does in the backend is entirely up to the software. It could be reading a file in the system, it could generate on the fly back the image because it had stored all the equations, a zillion of things.
In the following weeks, I hope I'll get time to give you a bit of code to handle HTTP PUT on your Web server and use Amaya with it. If you have links to online documentation on how to do it practically please leave a comment.
PS: So far I have these:
]]>
I do mistakes very often. English is not my mother tongue. I try to fix spelling mistakes as much as possible. Still, my English grammar is still behind. Oh, not looking for any excuses, I do mistakes in French too. But I'm glad that our brains have a very robust parsing mechanism which helps us to recover from broken sentences (bad spelling and clumsy grammar). Just imagine for the experiment, that your brain was not able to parse any sentences that would not be grammatically correct. How many sentences in our daily conversation are 100% correct? Not that much.
At W3C, we take meetings minutes (a lot) of discussions happening over a phone. During these teleconferences, there are people from different nationalities, different accents, different levels of English and on top of that in different time zones (fatigue). Still the scribe (minute taker) writes down, most of the time, correct English sentences after parsing them. The scribe creates a serialization of what he heard, but modifies it to be correct.
An HTML 5 Tidy library could do the same thing. It could parse a broken document and create a DOM following the HTML 5 parsing algorithm. Then it could serialize it (writes it down) following the HTML 5 content model. That would create a conformant HTML 5 document.
This is an important part of the process. What you hear is not what you write. You are stricter, once you have recovered the meaning. The same way what the HTML 5 Tidy library has parsed is not what it will serialize. Let's take a practical example with the infamous center element.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<title>a broken document</title>
<center><p>I want to be in the center of the page.</p></center>
</html>
The innerHTML view (using HTML 5 Live DOM viewer) is:
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<title>a broken document</title>
</head>
<body>
<center><p>I want to be in the center of the page.</p></center>
</body>
</html>
But the document will be invalid and the message given by the experimental HTML 5 validator instance will be
Validation Output: 1 Error
# Error Line 4, Column 7: The center element is obsolete..
Why? Because nowhere in the content model of HTML 5, the center element is defined. You can't write an HTML 5 conformant document containing the center element. An HTML 5 Tidy library would emit only elements which are compatible with the HTML 5 content model. In this case that could be
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<title>a broken document</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>I want to be in the center of the page.</p>
</body>
</html>
Some people will argue that everyone will want different rules. Indeed that is possible. Some will want to have double quotes around attributes, some single quotes. And if we take into account the set of documents which have complex mixed markup, it will indeed create a lot of headaches. But it's why I think it would be interesting to define a set of basic rules for emitting HTML 5 after it has been parsed.
Some might propose solutions of the following type for the center element.
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<title>a broken document</title>
</head>
<body>
<p style="text-align:center;">
I want to be in the center of the page.
</p>
</body>
</html>
Daniel Glazman proposed recently something quite similar for HTML attributes, inline style or style rules.
Are there any engineers which would be ready to take the challenges of designing an HTML 5 Tidy Library (and the canonic rules to fix the output) using the content model of HTML 5? I showed recently that there will be less document validating with the HTML 5 doctype than with their current doctype. Henri Sivonen rightly commented that HTML 5 content model was stricter than previous versions of HTML. This will not leverage the adoption of conformant HTML 5.
An HTML 5 Tidy Library (even not perfect) would help people to move forward. If there are no benefits, people will continue to use HTML 4.01 and/or XHTML 1.0 because, in the end it doesn't matter,
The slideshow tool and the computer are only for editing such as film editing. This is the last step of the process and a minor one. Oh… and last but not least, slides are very good for your talk and quite useless after your talk, quickly they become either outdated or lacking the context of your speech. A final hint…
32 of the 487 URLs passed validation (6.57%).
So today I decided to take the January 2008 list of web site and to send them to the beta instance of html 5 conformance checker. I created a very simple python script (As usual if you are in horror with my code, any kind suggestions to improve it is welcome). Be careful you will need to install httplib2. The file alexa.txt contains the list of uris, one by line. To be sure to check against html 5, I forced the html 5 doctype.
import httplib2
import time
h = httplib2.Http(".cache")
f = open("alexa.txt", "r")
urllist = f.readlines()
f.close()
for url in urllist:
# wait 10 seconds before the next request - be nice with the validator
time.sleep(10)
resp= {}
url = url.strip()
urlrequest = "http://qa-dev.w3.org/wmvs/HEAD/check?doctype=HTML5&uri="+url
try:
resp, content = h.request(urlrequest, "HEAD")
if resp['x-w3c-validator-status'] == "Abort":
print url, "FAIL"
else:
print url, resp['x-w3c-validator-status'], resp['x-w3c-validator-errors'], resp['x-w3c-validator-warnings']
except:
pass
Before I give the results, repeat after me 10 times : html 5 Conformance checker is in beta, which means not stable and in testing. html 5 specification is a Working Draft, which means highly to change. The test is only on the home page of the site.
The January 2008 file contains 485 web sites. 23 (4.7%) could not be validated. Most of the time, the site was too slow. Only 4 (< 1%) sites were declared valid html 5 by the conformance checker. If Henri Sivonen could do the same thing with his instance of html 5 conformance checker that would help to know if my results are silly or in the right envelop.
]]>and many other interesting participants and speakers. I have given the names of these 4 persons, because it will be a unique opportunity for you to talk with them about W3C matters.
]]>