Welcome to the January 2006 newsletter from the Australian W3C Office. 

As some of you may be aware, the Australian W3C Office is now hosted by
the CSIRO ICT Centre in Canberra. With the transition of the Office in 
October '05 circulation of the monthly newsletter has been overlooked 
and we do apologize for this. Now that our administrative procedures 
are in place we can assure you that monthly circulation will continue. 

1. Events 
2. 15th Anniversary of the Web
3. W3C Hosts Feed Validation Service
4. W3C to Internationalize and Secure Voice Browsing
5. W3C Continues ICANN Participation

1. Events
Web Accessibility Workshops, Melbourne - 1,2 February 2006, 
Canberra - 14, 15 February 2006.

   These full-day workshops, delivered by Andrew Arch & Brian Hardy from
   Accessible Information Solutions at Vision Australia, are targeted at 
   web-development team leaders, corporate communications professionals 
   and business managers, along with content authors, web programmers 
   and designers and web contract managers.

   These workshops provide a thorough overview of accessibility issues 
   and how to address them. It covers the World Wide Web Consortium's 
   Content Accessibility Guidelines and their implementation and a 
   consideration of assessment tools and techniques. A basic knowledge
   of HTML is assumed for the standard workshop but not for the less 
   technical one.
   For further information visit: http://www.visionaustralia.org.au

Open Road Conference, Melbourne 6-7 February 2006.
   Richard Ishida  Internationalization Activity Lead, and chair and
   staff contact for the GEO Working Group (Internationalization 
   Guidelines, Education and Outreach will present at the Open Road 
   Conference in Melbourne. Note, Richard has also offered to speak in 
   Canberra on Februray 10. More details will follow regarding venue
   and time.
   Conference Web site: http://www.openroad.net.au/conferences/2006/

AusWeb06, Noosa Lakes Resort, Noosa. 1-5 July 2006.
   The 12th Australasian World Wide Web Conference will again offer a 
   programs of pre-conference tutorials and workshops, a core program 
   of national and international keynotes, refereed papers, a poster 
   session and several post conference Special Interest Group Sessions.
   AusWeb is an IW3C2 Endorsed Regional Conference.
   Conference Web site: http://ausweb.scu.edu.au

WWW2006 Scotland on May 22nd-26th 2006.
   Not exactly local, but this is the big one. The Fifteenth 
   International World Wide Web Conference will be held in Edinburgh, 
   Scotland on May 22nd-26th 2006. The conference is one of the leading
   forums for both academics and industries to present, demonstrate, 
   and discuss the latest ideas and developments about the Web.
   Conference Web site: http://www2006.org/ 

2. 15th Anniversary of the Web.
   The first Web server at CERN went online on Christmas Day, 1990.
   When asked why, Tim Berners-Lee said 'I wasn't thinking 
   historically, but I had already been working on it for some time
   and it just seemed appropriate'. The first web server in the UK, 
   at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, did not go online until 
   1992, by the end of which year there were 50 servers worldwide. 
   W3C itself was founded in Dec 1994 at MIT, the European host for 
   W3C was introduced in 1995 and celibrated its 10th anniversary 
   this year, while the UK Office for W3C was the first office, 
   opened in 1997. Today W3C has over 400 members who can contribute
   to the development of W3C recommendations for technologies to use
   on the WorldWide Web. 

3. W3C Hosts Feed Validation Service.
   Service, a free online tool open to creators of syndication feeds 
   in formats such as RSS and Atom. Based on 'feedvalidator', and 
   adding a SOAP Web service interface for interactive programming, 
   the tool is useful for automatic or batch syntax checking. This 
   service joins the existing pool of free, open source tools offered
   by W3C to the Web development community to help build a better 
   World Wide Web.

   W3C Feed Validation: http://validator.w3.org/feed/

4. W3C to Internationalize and Secure Voice Browsing.
   Following the Workshop on Internationalizing the Speech Synthesis
   Markup Language (SSML), W3C announces new work to extend SSML to 
   Asian and other languages and to add speaker verification. Speaker 
   verification is "the best biometric for securing telephone 
   transactions and communications," said Ken Rehor (Vocalocity) 
   Chairman of the VoiceXML Forum and participant in the W3C Voice 
   Browser Working Group. 
  
    SSML: http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis/
    Voice Browser Activity home page: http://www.w3.org/Voice/

5. W3C Continues ICANN Participation.
   W3C is pleased to announce the nomination of Daniel Dardailler, 
   W3C Associate Chair based in Europe, as W3C liaison to the Internet
   Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Board of
   Directors. Thomas Roessler will serve on the 2006 ICANN Nominating
   Committee (NomCom). W3C's involvement in ICANN and in the
   post-WSIS forum, soon to be launched, should help preserve the
   operational stability of the Internet and the Web in a transparent
   and open way while ensuring its unfragmented growth based on
   contributions from the international community.

     Nomination: http://www.icann.org/general/bylaws.htm#XI-A-2.7
     WSIS: http://www.w3.org/2005/10/dd-wsis-tp.html

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