Australian W3C Office
Australian W3C Office Hello and welcome to the latest newsletter from the Australian W3C Office.
by Charles McCathieNevile, WAI In November the Australian W3C Office was a sponsor of the I-Cubed Web Accessibility Summit, bringing together about a dozen speakers on accessibility from Australia and overseas, including Charles McCathieNevile and Karl DuBost from the W3C Team, Hoylen Sue from the W3C Australian Office, and speakers including Jason White, co-chair of the W3C WCAG working group, Liddy Nevile, Tom Worthington, Terry Laidler, Graham Innes and others.
More than 100 representatives of content providers, commissioners, and designers attended the two day summit. Presentations included the legal landscape in Australia, the recent case about the Sydney Olympics website, the role of standards in accessibility, and the value and importance of accessibility both to individuals and to commercial enterprises. On the second day of the summit more technical issues were covered, including looking at the W3C WCAG guidelines - http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10 - and how to apply them to an example website, and future directions for accessibility in a number of areas.
Many thanks to Election.com and Multimedia Victoria for their sponsorship of the event, and to I-cubed, in particular to Shar McMillan and Janine Mawhinney, for the coordination and organisation of the event. Following the feedback received this workshop may be repeated several times next year in different cities.
The number of papers submitted to WWW10 topped 400 compared to the 282 submission for Amsterdam. This indicates the level of interest in next year's Conference in Hong Kong.
Four Keynote Speakers have so far been lined up:
· Tim Berners-Lee, W3C: after his remarkable performance in Amsterdam as the after lunch discussion coordinator on Developer's Day, Tim returns in the more conventional role as Keynote Speaker. No doubt in Hong Kong the focus will be on the Semantic web initiative.
· John S. Chen, Sybase: John is Chairman, CEO and president of Sybase with global responsibility for setting the company's strategic direction. John is a native of Hong Kong and has an Electrical Engineering degree from Brown University and a Masters from California Institute of technology.
· Chris Jones, Microsoft: Chris is Vice President of the Client Group in the Windows Division and has responsibility for developing the next generation of Windows desktop operating systems.
· Keiji Tachikawa, NTT DoCoMo: Keiji is President of NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile telecomms operator and one of the great successes in bringing the Web to mobile phones. He is the author of several books on the future of the communications and information industries.
WWW10 runs from May 1-5, 2001. The week before both the Eighteenth International Unicode Conference (UC18) and the 9th IFIP 2.6 Working Conference on Database Semantics (DS-9) will take place in Hong Kong. The WWW10 Conference Committee has worked closely with UC18 to schedule the events in consecutive weeks, enabling participants to attend both conferences, with a weekend in between to enjoy Hong Kong.
In addition the refereed papers tracks, the Conference will have tracks devoted to Culture, E-Commerce, Law, Web and Society, Internationalisation, and of course the W3C Track.
The seminars held in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra on W3C's Web and XML Specifications were extremely successful with over 400 people attending the events. A copy of the slides is available at: http://w3c.dstc.edu.au/eventsOz.html
The Australian Office hopes to run two similar events again next - one in each half of the year.
The Australian W3C Day will be held in Sydney on the 7th May 2001 at the Four Points Sheraton Hotel at Darling Harbour. The event provides overviews and information on what is happening in the various W3C domains. Ivan Hermann, W3C Head of Offices will open the day and then follow with a presentation on XML related standardization. Dean Jackson from CSIRO and W3C's SVG Working Group will give a talk on the latest developments in SVG, and Graeme Innes from Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission will discuss the implication of the Federal Government's Disability Discrimination Act on webpages. We will keep you informed as more presenters join the programme.
On 13 November, DOM Level 2 became a W3C Recommendation. DOM is the Document Object Model that provides a platform and language neutral interface to access and update dynamically a document's content, structure, and style. DOM level 1 provides these facilities for documents written in HTML 4.0 and XML. DOM level 2 extends the XML support, by providing features such as namespace support, and support for Cascading Style Shetts (CSS). The DOM Level 2 CSS API gives a script author the ability to dynamically reformat content from scripting languages such as JavaScript while the Events API enables the creation of user interfaces that are rich and interactive and run across a range of platforms and devices.
by Dr Renato Iannella, Member W3C Advisory Board and Chief Scientist, IPR Systems Pty Ltd
The W3C Advisory Committee meeting was held in Boston (Nov 28-30) and is an important part of W3C's agenda for information exchange with its Members. The AC meetings, held every six months, consists of formal presentations from the Domain and Activity leads covering their progress in the last 6 months and what they plan for the next 6 months.
The first day included reports from the Chairman on the overall progress of W3C and others on W3C's Information System Tools development, Web Accessibility Initiative overview with a indepth look at WAI's Education & Outreach program. The User Interface Domain overview included a detailed talk on the Internationalisation Working Group and the role they play reviewing all Working Groups' (WGs) documents to meet global acceptance.
A highlight of day one was discussion on the proposed Technical Architecture Group (TAG) and the important role it will play in developing W3C's Architecture document and resolving potential technical conflicts. Also the W3C is organising a Technical Plenary in Feb 2001 where most WGs will meet together for a week to enable closer collaboration amongst the WGs members.
The second day included the Communications overview and the Technology & Society (T&S) Domain overview. The Communications talk raised the issue of is W3C is a "standards body"? The T&S talked in detail about the proposed Semantic Web Initiative which will include updates to the RDF WGs and an advanced development program to implement some of the ideas on W3C services. W3C has received funding from DARPA to assist in resourcing the Semantic Web development work. Also announced was the W3C Digital Rights Management Workshop to be held on 22-23 January 2001. The Architecture Domain overview included the latest status and progress with the DOM and the new XML Encryption WG.
Finally, the Director gave his perspective for the two days entitled "From State back to Protocols". He looked at how the User Interface (such as voice, forms, instant messaging) has lead to the need for "state" and how the new XML Protocols work will help in this area. He asked what the technology future lies ahead in 5 years. Not bandwidth but "always online" was one reply.
For companies and organisations who are members of the W3C, the complete set of slides from the AC meeting are available from: http://www.w3.org/Member/Meeting/2000ac/November/Agenda
The next AC meet will be held on 30 April - 1 May 2001 in Hong Kong (in the same week as the WWW10 Conference).
After the great increase in Membership over the last two months, things have returned to normal with only a few additional members bringing the total to 481. Who will be the lucky 500th Member? New Members this month are:
· Cyberwork Solution, Inc: this Taiwan-based company is involved in empowering .com companies by providing a variety of services including Online Publishing, Virtual Community, Multimedia Service, Internet System Integration Enterprise Application- Knowledge Management, Document Management, and Communication Management.
· Persistence Software: based in San Mateo, with the mission to be The Engine For E-Commerce, their PowerTier 6.5 Application Server caches corporate application data to speed business transactions, while their Dynamai product caches application-generated web content to speed Internet transactions. Persistence products yield scalability, and enable streamlined development of global systems. The company's patented caching application servers currently accelerate processing for some of the world's most demanding web sites and financial service systems, including iPIX, Reuters Instinet, Wofex, Cisco, FedEx and ShopNow.com.
· Shinka Technologies AG: this Berlin company sells the Shinka XDK (XML Development Kit) which is a toolkit for the development of XML based Enterprise Portals. Based on standard application server technology, the Shinka XDK supports advanced transformation, manipulation, and processing of XML data.
· Zero-Knowledge Systems, Inc.: this Montreal-based company develops privacy solutions via its Managed Privacy Services (MPS) product, a toolkit of technologies for controlling and protecting data. Their Freedom Network allows users to create Nyms (pseudonyms), wrap their internet traffic in multiple layers of strong cryptography and send the internet traffic via a series of privacy enhanced detours (The Freedom Network) to disguise where the traffic originates. Freedom empowers Internet users to surf the Web, send email, chat and post to newsgroups in total privacy without having to trust third parties with their personal information. Zero-Knowledge was PC World's most promising Internet newcomer for the year 2000.
Many thanks to the UK W3C Office, Renato Iannella from IPR Systems and Charles McCathieNevile for contributions.
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