W3c News & Articles

The W3C (news, site) has been busy. They've released seven documents related to HTML, one of which is of interest to anyone working with HTML and another to anyone involved with the semantic web.

We know it’s frustrating when you come across a website that’s less than functional, full of accessibility barriers. How often do any of us take action? Those days are over.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) wants you to take action when you come across an inaccessible  website. They are encouraging users to tell organizations how important it is that their websites are accessible.

To help you do so, they’ve published a guide called Contacting Organizations about Inaccessible Websites. Currently in draft form, the guide offers tips for approaching the suspect site and how to describe the problem in a non-intimidating, but helpful manner. There are even sample emails and links to additional resources to help you and the offending party learn more about accessibility and its role on the Internet.

The W3C is also soliciting input from users. You can leave your ideas for the guide and your experiences dealing with inaccessible websites via their blog or through the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Interest Group’s public discussion at wai-eo-editors@w3.org list (users need to subscribe first). Comments are due by February 3.

HTML 5 (news, site) is the fifth major revision of the web's core language and it has been designed to support the rapidly changing Web 2.0 world we live in today. Let's take a little tour of what this latest version means for web development.

Mobile seems to be where the future is and the W3C (news, site) is guiding us there with its latest set of guidelines and best practices.

In a First Public Working draft entitled Usage Patterns For Client-Side URI parameters, dated April, 2009, the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) is set to formalize client-side URI patterns with an eye on soliciting community feed-back.

Last week the World Wide Web Consortium (news, site) announced a new standard that connects simple knowledge organization systems (SKOS) like classifications, taxonomies, folksonomies, etc. with the linked data community.

The bridge allows SKOS to assist in managing large collections of data in the form of books, historical artifacts, news reports, blog entries, etc.

The last time we covered the W3C's efforts to address CSS 3 it was in relation to typography and web fonts. Now, the same Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of CSS3 module: Multi-column layout.

With the planned Fall 2009 release of a feature-rich up-grade to its Text Mining Engine (TME), Nstein Technologies (news, site) is taking semantic metadata firmly into the world of Web 3.0.

For anyone that is not aware already, Nstein is a global specialist provider of solutions in the online media and web publishing world. TME 5.0, the company says, will include enhancements to linguistic abilities, Web 3.0 compliance and a number of new tools that will give users greater control over semantic metadata.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (news, site) is back at work, this time developing best practices for the development and delivery of web applications on mobile devices.

Developed by the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group as part of the Mobile Web Initiative, each best practice is intended to be a possible measure towards "the goal of providing as rich and dynamic an experience as possible on a mobile Web browser."

On the whole, the best practices relate to the appropriate technologies and techniques to use for managing a Web application's data. Here's a glimpse into some of the recommendations made by the working group.

The W3C Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has released the latest version of the Candidate Recommendation CSS Specification -- CSS 2.1. The newest version corrects some errors in the previous version and adds some features that have been highly requested.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Surprise! Twitter Has a High Churn Rate
• W3C Releases Standardized Widgets 1.0 APIs and Events
• Do You Twitter At Work? Hide It!
• Your Company May Need A Social Networking Policy

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• W3C Creates Social Web Incubator Group
• Twitter Violates Privacy By Revealing User Info
• Flutter: The New Twitter
• Monitor Conversation With ConvoTrack

The World Wide Web Consortium's OWL (Web Ontology Language) Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of the "OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Document Overview." Go ahead. Grab a dictionary. We'll wait.

This document is the first in an exciting thirteen volume escapade through the syntaxes, sub-languages, along with other details behind OWL 2 and its differences from OWL 1.

Friday is a good day to have a laugh at Microsoft's expense - don't you think. Thought so.

So they finally decided to get with the compatibility program with Internet Explorer 8. But they may have drug their heels just a little too long and now they are paying the price.

According to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft has released an Internet Explorer (IE) 8 incompatibility list. This is a list of websites that do not render probably when IE is run in standards mode. The list has a whopping 2400 websites on it and it is getting updated on a regular basis.

Perhaps what is so amazingly funny (or not so funny, depending on who you talk to) is that the incompatible websites are not your average joe, no one really looks at them anyway, websites. Here's a few examples of the websites that are not compatible:

• microsoft.com
• google.com
• yahoo.com
• wikipedia.org
• flickr.com
• wordpress.com
• adobe.com
• facebook.com
• apple.com
• youtube.com

This is a downloaded a list and there's a version for XP users and a version for Vista users.

The list is used by your IE8 browser to allow you to opt-out of viewing any website on that list in standards mode. There's also a button that allows you to add websites to the list.

Now we understand that IE8 is only out as a Release Candidate, but come on, even their own site doesn't run properly in standards mode?

What exactly did Microsoft do for standards in IE8? Enhancements to the standards include:

• Standards support (CSS/HTML): Data: URIs, the abbr tag, CSS generated content; Display: table CSS properties, fixes for a number of CSS and HTML parsing bugs
• Standards support (DOM) and AJAX : IE8 contains an enhanced and standardized DOM as well as support for AJAX with features like DOM: Storage, Cross Document Messaging (XDM) and the Selectors APIs
• Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) Specification: IE8 will also support the new ARIA specification from the WCAG. Things like support for ARIA Markup and DHTML Extensions for Accessibility are included.

Want to understand Microsoft's compatibility view better? Read it here.

So while Mozilla fights with its mobile browser and Google brings on Pre-Beta 2 of Chrome, the browser wars rang on. Problem is, no one seems to be fighting on the same battlefield.

As the W3C works to ensure the Web is available to all people on any device, they have been hard at work releasing guidelines and standards. This week they published a new standard enabling interactions beyond the traditional keyboard and mouse.

Meet EMMA, the Extensible MultiModal Annotation specification.