TPAC 2007 - Let's start

The mics are being tested in the room. People are slowing joining the room. There will be more than 300 persons participating today to the Technical Plenary Day. It is quite exciting. One of the strong emphasis of the day is about W3C and you, people in the Web communities. There will be designers, people from Web agencies.

The two previous days have been already intense meetings for working groups. I have myself attended part of Web Application Formats, CSS, cross working group discussions about aria attributes and its syntax. Having these meetings in one place help to coordinate a tad quicker than through a round of emails.

For example, the Voice WG had an issue related to their PLS (Pronunciation Lexicon) document which will enter soon in Candidate Recommendation. Kaz asked me about some cases which seemed to be ambiguous. I look at the test case and the assertions they were relying on. Then read the specification to understand the requirements and discovered some wording that if simplified would be less ambiguous. We started by emails. I'm living in Japan, and the participants are in USA and Europe. Each round of emails take 24h. Two days ago, I met Paolo Baggia, the editor of the specification, we discussed about the issues, explained the relationship between the requirements, the test cases and the normative references on XML. In 20 minutes, we had cleared up the issues, discussed a bit more on ideas for helping developers with more materials like primers and FAQ. And I end up knowing two more interesting persons.

Ok there is a new session starting in a few minutes and olivier will talk about it: View from the Outside: Real World Perspectives on the W3C. See the agenda.

Update: If you are taking photos, blogging, etc. use one of these tags "tpac, tpac2007, w3c, w3c_tpac07"

Update 2: There is a live stream of the discussions of the day. It is the first time we are providing this and it will be transcripted in text. This is experimental and there might be issues when doing it.