The W3C was created in October 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee (picture shown) when he left the European Orginization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN, who he had collaberated with to make the W3C).

Right now, the World Wide Web Consortium has a goal to standardize the web, making it accessible to users in different cultures, using more resources and beating physical limitations.  W3C is hosted by three universities (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The French National Research institute in Europe, and Keio University in Japan).  2 principles that guide W3C’s work are “Web for All”, and “Web on Everything”.  The vision of W3C involves participation, sharing knowledge, and thereby building trust on a global scale.

W3C functions as a member organization (due to its importance both in scope and in investment) and some of the well known members apart of this orginization are as follows:

Each web standard that goes through W3C has a specific 7 part approval system.  These standards can be related to HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, XSL, XML Schema, XPath, XQuery, DOM, SOAP, WSDL, RDF, SMIL, and more.  The standardization process consists of the following 7 steps:

1. -W3C receives a Submission
2. -W3C publishes a Note
3. -W3C creates a Working Group
4. -W3C publishes a Working Draft
5. -W3C publishes a Candidate Reccomendation
6. -W3C publishes a Proposed Recommendation
7. -W3C publishes a Recommendation

[More information on this 7 part process can be found here]

For web design and applications, the W3C has standards for building and rendering web pages, including HTML, CSS, SVG, Ajax, and other Web Application technologies.  Web Architecture focuses on the foundation technologies and principles which sustain the Web, including URIs and HTTP.  W3C also has standards for XML Technology, mobile device technologies, and browsers.

In addition to the classic “Web of Documents”, W3C is helping to build a technology stack to support a “Web of Data” (data as found in databases).  The official W3C web page reads “The ultimate goal of the Web of Data is to enable computers to do more useful work and to develop systems that can support trusted interactions over the network.”

]]> http://restructure.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/howto-make-your-blog-images-more-accessible/ Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:00:19 +0000 Restructure! http://restructure.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/howto-make-your-blog-images-more-accessible/

This tutorial explains how bloggers can make their images more accessible for people with visual impairments by adding ‘alt-text’. While most web accessibility tutorials assume that the all creators of web content code in raw HTML, it is 2009, and most bloggers today probably do not know HTML.

This tutorial also assumes that the blogger uses a blogging software (such as WordPress) and creates web content through a graphical interface. While this tutorial uses WordPress examples, the vast majority of this tutorial is applicable to any blogging software, content management system, and even to those who build webpages from scratch.

Tutorial

Understanding how to add ‘alt-text’ requires understanding how to edit a post in HTML mode, as well as understanding the structure of a HTML tag. These two prerequisites will be explained first. The content of this tutorial consists of the following sections:

1. Accessing the HTML of your post
2. Understanding HTML tags
3. Adding ‘alt-text’ to images

Note that if you are only a blogger and you do not create WordPress themes or Blogger templates for your blog, then you do not have complete control over the HTML of your blog layout. Some blog layouts—such as the current theme of my Restructure! blog at WordPress.com—are less accessible than others, because the designers did not take accessibility issues into consideration. However, as a blogger, you still have control over the HTML of your posts, which would make at least the content of your posts more accessible.

1. Accessing the HTML of your post

In WordPress, when you compose or edit your post, you can access the HTML source by clicking on the “HTML” tab, which is pointed to by the big blue arrow in the following screenshot:

After you click on the HTML tab, you should see the HTML source of your post:

You can create or edit a post in HTML mode, including adding features to your post to make it more accessible.

2. Understanding HTML tags

HTML consists of HTML tags, which have the basic form:

<TAG />

or

<TAG>something goes here</TAG>

Some tags take first form, and other tags take the second form. An example of a tag that takes the second form is the following:

It is extremely difficult to imagine how somebody with "credentials" as an academic or intellectual could believe that it is acceptable for him to contradict himself, and believe, further, that <em>contradicting himself makes him intellectually superior to his logically-consistent peers</em>.

The ‘em’ tag is used to emphasize a part of the text, and appears in italics in a standard graphical web browser.

Attributes

Other tags have attributes. A tag with an attribute has the basic form:

<TAG X="a value for X" />

or

<TAG X="a value for X">something goes here</TAG>

For example:

In February, <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2009/05/06/hospital-charges.html">two security guards in Toronto allegedly beat an aboriginal man</a>, sending him to the hospital with three broken ribs and a punctured lung.

The ‘a’ tag is called an anchor tag, and is usually used to hyperlink text and make it link to another webpage. The anchor tag has the attribute ‘href’, and href has the value of “http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2009/05/06/hospital-charges.html”.

More than one attribute

However, a tag can have more than one attribute, and they are of the form:

<TAG X="a value for X" Y="a value for Y" Z="a value for Z" />

or

<TAG X="a value for X" Y="a value for Y" Z="a value for Z">something goes here</a>

Here is an example of the anchor tag with two attributes:

In February, <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2009/05/06/hospital-charges.html" title="Criminal charges unlikely against security guards accused of beating aboriginal man">two security guards in Toronto allegedly beat an aboriginal man</a>, sending him to the hospital with three broken ribs and a punctured lung.

In this example, the anchor tag has two attributes, ‘href’ and ‘title’, which have the values of “http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2009/05/06/hospital-charges.html” and “Criminal charges unlikely against security guards accused of beating aboriginal man”, respectively. Attributes must have particular values, e.g., the ‘href’ attribute must have the value of a web address or e-mail address, etc.

If a tag has more than one attribute, the order of the attributes does not matter.

<TAG X="a value for X" Y="a value for Y" Z="a value for Z" />

is equivalent to:

<TAG Y="a value for Y" Z="a value for Z" X="a value for X" />

For example:

In February, <a title="Criminal charges unlikely against security guards accused of beating aboriginal man" href="http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2009/05/06/hospital-charges.html">two security guards in Toronto allegedly beat an aboriginal man</a>, sending him to the hospital with three broken ribs and a punctured lung.

is equivalent to the earlier example of an anchor tag with two attributes.

3. Adding ‘alt-text’ to images

In practice, in its most basic form, the HTML for inserting an image into your post looks something like this:

<img src="http://restructure.wordpress.com/files/2009/11/blackface_universitytoronto_racism.jpg" />

The ‘img’ in the ‘img’ tag stands for ‘image’. The attribute ’src’ stands for ’source’, which is the web address of the actual image file. This way of inserting images into your post (i.e., having only the ’src’ attribute) works in graphical web browsers, but it is technically incorrect, because the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) says that an ‘alt’ attribute is required. The W3C requires that the img tag must have an ‘alt’ attribute not because they are trying to make things more difficult, but because the presence of the ‘alt’ attribute would make things easier for people who have visual impairments and browse the web using screen readers, for example. ‘Alt’ stands for ‘alternative’, i.e., the alternative to the image.

Thus, the proper HTML for inserting an image into your post, in its most basic form, requires both a ’src’ attribute and ‘alt’ attribute, and looks something like this:

<img src="http://restructure.wordpress.com/files/2009/11/blackface_universitytoronto_racism.jpg" alt="Photo of U of T students in blackface ''Cool Runnings'' Halloween costumes" />

The value of the alt attribute is a text description of the image. In my example, I attempted to describe the image for someone who cannot see the photo. I probably should have also noted that there were five costumed young men, consisting of four young white men with their faces painted brown, and one young black man with his face painted chalk white.

If you have a WordPress blog and you view the HTML of your post using the WordPress post editor, the img tag would probably look messier, because it has additional attributes:

<img src="http://restructure.wordpress.com/files/2009/11/blackface_universitytoronto_racism.jpg" alt="Photo of U of T students in blackface ''Cool Runnings'' Halloween costumes" title="Blackface stirs debate" width="400" height="300" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-8000" />

You can ignore the other attributes of the img tag by leaving them alone; you do not have to understand them, as long as you know that they are other attributes of the img tag.

To make your image more accessible, you just add or edit the ‘alt’ attribute of the img tag so that the value of the ‘alt’ attribute is a useful text description. Remember, the order of the attributes does not matter, so if the ‘alt’ attribute does not exist, you can add it to the end, or wherever.

When I say that you can “just” add or edit the alt attribute, I mean that the process of adding or editing the alt attribute is fairly straightforward if you know how to edit HTML. Ensuring that your text description is “useful” is not as straightforward, as translating an image into relevant text is a creative skill, and there is no one right way to do it. Your text description does not have to perfectly and completely describe the image, as that is impossible. However, one way to evaluate the appropriateness of your image is to see how your post looks like in the text web browser Lynx (Lynx for Windows / Lynx for Mac).

More examples

Here is another example of an img tag with an alt attribute. In this example, the image is of a bar graph:

<img class="size-full wp-image-1602" title="How Americans voted" src="http://restructure.wordpress.com/files/2008/11/howwevoted.jpg" alt="White Americans, 43% for Obama, 55% for McCain, and 2% for Other. Black Americans, 95% for Obama, 4% for McCain, and 1% for Other. Latino Americans, 67% for Obama, 31% for McCain, and 2% for Other. Asian Americans, 62% for Obama, 35% for McCain, and 3% for Other. Other Americans, 66% for Obama, 31% for McCain, and 3% for Other." width="580" height="185" />

As you can see, the value of the alt attribute is a description of the percentages displayed on the graph. The image description conveys the relevant information; the value is not just “Bar graph”.

However, sometimes an image is decorative and extraneous to understanding the text of the post. In this case, you can set the value of the alt attribute to an empty string (“”):

<img src="http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/1961/canadianimmigrationface.jpg" class="alignright" alt="" />

If the image is decorative, it is better to have an alt attribute with an empty value than to omit the alt attribute altogether. If an image is unnecessary, it is better for the screen reader to ignore the image than to read out the file name of the unviewable image, which is what would happen if the alt attribute is omitted.

Checking your work

You can check if you added the alt-text correctly by viewing the post, right-clicking on the image, and choosing “Properties” in Firefox. If you are using Internet Explorer or another web browser, you would check the alt-text in a similar way.

Why I made this tutorial

Brownfemipower (BFP) at Flip Flopping joy! recently criticized a Bitch Magazine post on web accessibility. Among other things, BFP writes:

The “description” (from the bitch article) about how to write good link text made no sense to me at all, and didn’t include how make a link text to begin with. So I know I won’t be doing that any time soon.

My first reaction was also, “How hard could it be?”, but then I clicked the link, and it was a link to a W3C guidelines page, which is something that I did not expect to be linked from a blog about social issues and intersectionality (and not about code). After all, W3C guidelines are intended for coders, not bloggers who are not blogging about code.

While conventional wisdom would require that bloggers know HTML to be competent in what they do, this is no longer reasonable or necessary. Bloggers do not have to know the basics of a HTML document, such the ‘body’ tag and ‘head’ tag. Bloggers who want to make their posts more accessible only need to know the structure of an XML tag, and how to implement specific HTML tags, such as img.

In any case, the length of the tutorial section of this post demonstrates that “step 2″ of the Bitch Magazine post How to make your blog accessible in five not-very-complicated steps is actually quite complicated, which is BFP’s point. It was fairly complicated for me to write this tutorial, since I wanted to break down “add ‘alt-text’ to images” to specific actions instead of vague, conceptual instructions that assume the reader knows how to view and read the HTML source of a webpage. For the original author of the five steps, “step 2″ was not-very-complicated, because her description was very poorly written as a “how-to”. The lack of code snippets makes the post appear more user-friendly and not-very-complicated, but hand-wavy, high-level explanations about HTML are unhelpful to most people.

However, I am someone who has had years of experience with HTML, so perhaps I am also assuming too much background knowledge in some areas of this tutorial. What do you think? Is my lengthy post on alt-text better than the web accessibility post at Bitch? Does a post littered with code snippets in monospace font with syntax highlighting scare off non-technical readers? Which one results in more bloggers learning how to add alt-text to their images?

The Concept: -

The world wide web consortium (W3C)’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is an effort to improve the accessibility of the world wide web (www or web) for people with disabilities. People with disabilities may encounter difficulties when using computers generally, but also on the web. Since people with disabilities often require non-standard devices and browsers, making websites more accessible also benefits a wide range of user agents and devices, including mobile devices, which have limited resources.

Apparently, the one group that needs to be thinking about the issue more than most are web designers and developers. If the article from cnet is any indication it appears that that these folks are thinking about more on the front-end rather than being reminded and having to retro-fit sites later.

The article is about yahoo’s Victor Tsaran, blind since the age of five. Tsaran knows how much time web designers spend agonizing over color and font-width choices when laying out an application. So when he started yahoo’s accessibility push two years ago, he had a tough time arousing sympathy for engineers grousing about how much extra time was needed to create accessibility features.

Fortunately for Tsaran, yahoo’s accessibility manager, he’s running into that problem less and less. Web designers are starting to take accessibility as seriously as button placement or heading layout when they develop their products, improving the web experience not only for people like Tsaran but for a normal web user.

Acting quickly with WAI standard, google recently rolled out a service that will let Youtube users add captions to their videos, and believes that as the web moves more from an era of presentation to an era of two-way “data-driven” communication, accessibility becomes even more important.

Now the statistics: -

Cnet reveals that 60 million people in the U.S can’t use a computer to get on the internet in the normal fashion. Targeting them, a mix of screen reader software, keyboards with special buttons, and even motion-sensing web cameras must take the place of the mouse and QWERTY keyboard.

Now this can cause problems for web designers who rely too heavily on mouse navigation, or who design pages with special multimedia effects that look cool only to the people that can see them. Users of screen readers a software that essentially reads out loud a description of text, links, and buttons on a page find trouble due to use of CAPTCHA’s and Flash Intros. But again for them, simple photos or images can also create problems if the web publisher hasn’t added an ALT or uses more images or graphs instead of text to represent data.

The good news is that most of these problems aren’t as much technology issues as design issues; content created with things like flash can be made accessible if designers start off with that principle in mind.

According to Yahoo making a web site accessible to as many people as possible isn’t just the right thing to do, it also makes business sense. Especially when people over 65 are increasing their use of the internet, taking an extra care for WAI during design and publishing should be a compulsory.

The Verdict

So as the web roars forward with HTML5 standards being debated, and more and more advances there is a reason beside just fairness that should make businesses stand up and take notice of web accessibility concerns.

So where are you with accessibility issues for your site? Have you given them consideration? Why??

Mainly because, in order to do business with the U.S. government, companies must comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which insists that electronic and information technology products sold to government agencies be designed with disabled employees in mind. Yeah, it’s already a requirement to do work with the government!

Courtesy: – Cnet

NIk!

Part two of two posts (find part one here)

CIO.com has an informative article on “Five New Technologies That Will Change Everything.” I’m breaking this particular link into two posts because two of those techs deserve individual attention because of the sea-change they are going to create in your computing and browsing experience respectively.

This post is on the latest HTML version — HTML5. The idea behind HTML5 is creating a standard that allows every web page to look essentially the same regardless which browser, or platform (computer, mobile device, etc.), the user is viewing the page with/on. A lofty goal considering how the browser wars have been fought since IE and Navigator tussled way back in the last century, but here’s to the success of HTML5.

From the link:

Web pages built with HTML5 will display the same on any browser–desktop or mobile.

Hulk VI was great, but what should you watch this evening? Before heading off to work in the morning, you click to some trailers on a movie Website, but you don’t have time to watch many. So you use your mobile phone to snap a picture of the 2D barcode on one of the videos; the phone’s browser then takes you to the same site. On the commuter train to the office, you watch the previews over a 4G cell phone connection. A few of the movies have associated games that you try out on your phone, too.

Remember when every Website had a badge that read “optimized for Netscape Navigator” or “requires Internet Explorer 4″? In the old days, people made Web pages that worked best with–or only with–certain browsers. To some extent, they still do.

The new flavor of the HTML–the standard program for writing Web pages–is called HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language version 5); and HTML5 aims to put that practice to bed for good.

Specifically, HTML5 may do away with the need for audio, video, and interactive plug-ins. It will allow designers to create Websites that work essentially the same on every browser–whether on a desktop, a laptop, or a mobile device–and it will give users a better, faster, richer Web experience.

Instead of leaving each browser maker to rely on a combination of its in-house technology and third-party plug-ins for multimedia, HTML5 requires that the browser have built-in methods for audio, video, and 2D graphics display. Patent and licensing issues cloud the question of which audio and video formats will achieve universal support, but companies have plenty of motivation to work out those details.

In turn, Website designers and Web app developers won’t have to deal with multiple incompatible formats and workarounds in their efforts to create the same user experience in every browser.

This is an especially valuable advance for mobile devices, as their browsers today typically have only limited multimedia support. The iPhone’s Safari browser, for example, doesn’t handle Adobe Flash–even though Flash is a prime method of delivering video content across platforms and browsers.

“It’ll take a couple of years to roll out, but if all the browser companies are supporting video display with no JavaScript [for compatibility handling], just the video tag and no plug-in, then there’s no downside to using a mobile device,” says Jeffrey Zeldman, a Web designer and leading Web standards guru. “Less and less expert users will have better and better experiences.”

Makers of operating systems and browsers appear to be falling into line behind HTML5. Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Opera, and WebKit (the development package that underlies many mobile and desktop programs), among others, are all moving toward HTML5 support.

For its part, Microsoft says that Internet Explorer 8 will support only parts of HTML5. But Microsoft may not want to risk having its Internet Explorer browser lose more market share by resisting HTML5 in the face of consensus among the other OS and browser makers.

HTML5 is now completing its last march toward a final draft and official support by the World Wide Web Consortium.

(ESPECIALES WWW2009 Conference)

Según Yochai Benkler, profesor de leyes y director del Berkman Center for Internet & Society de la Universidad de Harvard, la conceptualización de la idea de la ‘Gobernanza de Internet‘ gira en torno a tres ‘capas’ de gobierno o ‘gobernanza’: la primera, la capa de la ‘infraestuctura física’ a través de la cual tienen lugar los desplazamientos de información; la segunda integrada por el ‘código’ o capa ‘lógica’ que gestiona el control de la infaestructura y, la tercera es la capa de ‘contenido’ que contiene la información que circula a través de la red.

Tecnópolis UPV ha asistido a la IV Reunión del Foro de la Gobernanza de Internet, cuyo capítulo español se reunió hace pocos dias en Madrid, realizando un Debate sobre la Gobernanza de Internet, en coincidencia con la Conferencia mundial WWW del W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) -que se celebraba por primera vez en España- y que, además, conmemora el 20 aniversario de la invención de la Web por Tim Berners-Lee.

Esta semana Tecnópolis UPTV ofrece las visiones sobre el presente y futuro de  Internet (y su Gobernanza), que dieron en dicho Debate, dos de los padres de Internet: Vinton Cerf, el líder del desarrollo del conjunto de protocolos TCP/IP (Protocolo de Control de Transmisión (TCP) / Protocolo de Internet (IP), esenciales en Internet, y Tim Berners-Lee, al que se conoce como ‘inventor de la Web’.  Tim y su grupo desarrollaron en el CERN en Ginebra lo que por sus siglas en inglés se denominan: Lenguaje HTML (HyperText Markup Language) o lenguaje de etiquetas de hipertexto; el protocolo HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol); y el sistema de localización de objetos en la web URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

En el programa se ofrece también parte del Debate sobre la Gobernanza de Internet que tuvo logar en el IGF Spain, en el que Héctor Pérez, ingeniero de telecomunicaciones por la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, emprendedor y fundador de la start-up Arpamet dialogó con Tim Berners-Lee y Vinton Cerf.

El Partido (politico) de Internet

Héctor Pérez Arenas, también es co-promotor del Partido de Internet que promueve el trasladar el concepto de La Larga Cola (The Long Tail) de Chris Anderson a la política, en primer lugar, en España. En este programa de Tecnóplis UPTV, Héctor describe la visión que este partido quiere desarrollar dentro del mundo de la política española. El Partido de Internet promueve regenerar la democracia en cada cámara del parlamento (incluyendo el europeo), planteando unas listas abiertas cuyos electos deberán comprometerse a votar en cada momento lo que decidan -’entre todos’- sus votantes a través de internet mediante su DNI electrónico (y no cada cuarto años, sino de forma habitual y cotidiana), posicionándose sud electos en concreto en cada votación importante. Es una novedosa propuesta que está ahora en constucción o en fase Beta – según la terminología de Tim O’Reilly para la Web 2.0. Héctor, afirma que todo el sistema de tecnología para poder realizar la transacciones electrónicas de este partido será realizado con software libre para garantizar la transparencia y la no-dependencia de los sistemas privados propiedad de las empresas multinacionales.

Esta entrega de Tecnópolis UPTV se emite el miercoles 7 de Octubre der 2009, de las 13.30 a 14.30 h. y de 21.30 a 22.30 h. y el domingo 11 de Octubrecon el mismo horario (horas de España).  La televisión de la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia emite en abierto en el área metropolitana de Valencia, por el canal 45 UHF; en TV por cable en España, por el canal 989 de Ono y, por el satélite Hispasat para Iberoamérica.

Para ver el programa ahora mismo,  clickear sobre el gráfico:

So I’ve spent the past 3 weeks learning the basics of XHTML and am now onto tackling CSS (note: if you don’t know what they are, you should). I treat it as a language. Just like any other language, syntax, location, and spelling matters. However, the worst case scenario in speaking French with a native speaker is that they may not understand what you’re saying. but at least have a gist of what you mean, whereas in HTML, if one word is wrong or a symbol is omitted, your whole site may be effected.

My roommate Arthur has been the motivation for me learning. He makes a killing designing websites for bands and record labels; in fact, he’s so busy that he needs he needs help. I was fascinated as I used to watch him at work because web design is both an art and science. SOOOOO I took it upon myself to learn design to help him aside from the fact that it’s a great skill to learn. You not only don’t have to pay someone to set up your site, but you also can get paid by someone else to do it for them. Win win situation is you ask me.

Why do I bring it up on music blog? Good question. Bands benefit immensely from having great sites. Concert footage. Audio streaming. Podcasts. Twitter feeds. Chatboards. Contests. All that and more is a direct connection with your fans. Fans care as much about your tourdates as they do about what’s in your fridge. You want to create a sustainable community of fans. Sustainable in the sense that the site won’t sizzle in popularity and cool down just as quick as you published it. Keeping it fresh and updated keeps the fans coming back.

Check the analytics to see where people are going on your site. What pages are getting the most traffic? How long are they staying there? All this data will tell you a lot about your fans’ web browsing habits, so don’t take it lightly.

Also, the layout of your homepage is crucial. After seeing Arthur from planning to creating his sites, I know how much effort goes into the color of a background, for example, even to the most minute shade of yellow. In addition, you have to assume that most people won’t scroll down, so what is at the top of homepage is (debatably) THE MOST IMPORTANT part of your site. It’s like choosing the first song for your new album; first impressions do have an impact. It determines whether they want to keep listening to another song or, in this case, click on another page on your site.

Basically, as I’m learning about how to create websites, I’ve noticed the little things that make a site unique, eye-catching, and interactive. So do yourself a favor, pick up a copy of Building a Website for Dummies or check out the World Wide Web Consortium for an online-based tutorial.  It’s a pain in the ass, but the result is most definitely worth the hassle.

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tim Berners-Lee is still inventing … (teabreak.pk)
• Are you ready for the Semantic Web? (socialmediatoday.com)
• Facts about the Web’s Creation (sciam.com)

The World Wide Web Consortium is an international association founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web), since October 1994. It has many offices all around the world, the central one being hosted by MIT/CSAIL in the USA.

The W3C is in charge of establishing web standards and developing programs related to them (such as the markup language XML). It was created to get developers all over the world to agree to following a set of principles that would be supported by everyone. Thanks to this, the inconsistencies between webpages would disappear, and accessibility and compatibility to different kind of platforms would increase.

The social value of the Internet consists in its capability to facilitate the communication and help us share our knowledge. One of the main goals of the W3C is to make these advantages available universally, regardless of aspects like language, geographical location or which hardware is used. In their own words, “we work toward a Web for Everyone”.

References:

• World Wide Web Consortium (2009, January 28). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved February 05, 2009.
• About W3C: Goals (2008, February 01). In w3.org, by Ian Jacobs.Retrieved February 05, 2009.
• ¿Qué es el W3C? (2006, April 25). In W3C: Consorcio World Wide Web, by Alicia Monsalvo Miguel. Retrieved February 05, 2009.
• Accesibilidad en páginas web (2001, November 16). In maestros del web, by Joaquín Gracia Murugarren. Retrieved February 05, 2009.

Right before Christmas the videos from the ISWC2008 conference were released. (Nice Christmas present from Tim Finin and his colleagues…) So I re-listened to the panel discussion “An OWL 2 Far?”. It is always good to listen to such discussions after a few months and, shall we say, with a slightly cooler head… It is clear from the discussion (and I guess all parties can agree on that) that the different views on OWL still generate passionate feelings and discussions…

A few weeks after the conference a bunch of OWL documents were published; I also had a blog on a particular profile of it, namely OWL-RL (one of the issues discussed quite vehemently at that panel, including by yours truly…). What is slightly surprising is that, in contrast to the passions raised there, not many comments have been submitted to the Working Group yet (look at the public archive of the mailing list). This is the time to do this, though: the OWL 2 documents are in Last Call in the W3C process, ie, this is when the technical design is getting finalized. The Last Call period ends on the 23rd of January, which is not that far away… So, please, if you have concerns or issues, or even if you just want say what a wonderful work that is, speak up now!

A markup language is an artificial language that uses a set of annotations to text that give information about the structure of the text or how it must be displayed. There are more than one markup language but, probably, the most popular ones are the HTML and the XML because of their massive use in the World Wide Web. Both of them have its origin in the SGML but after analysing them we can find some differences:

1. The XML (eXtensive Markup Language), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), it is a language conceived to ‘describe’ information. The main aim of XML is to help us organizing contents, what makes it also recommendable and portable to other types of applications. By contrast, the HTML (HyperText Markup Language), developed by Berners-Lee in 1991, was conceived to ’show’ information. Its main function is to help us giving contents a format and present them through a navigator.
2. Another special characteristic of the XML is that it is an open language. When we are working with the XML markup language we are allowed to create and determine our own tags and document structures. By contrast, with the HTML all tags have been predefined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
3. In the XML markup language each one of the tags always executes the same function so it is important to respect them. Besides, XML tags are considered ‘case sensitive’, what means, for instance, that it is not the same to write <B> or <b>. For all these reasons, the XML markup language is helping us to be more organized because due to the great tolerance of navigators, markup languages were gradually becoming a bit chaotic.

After the appearance of the XML, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created the XHTML (eXtensive HyperText Markup Language) to integrate in one system the benefits of the XML and HTML at the same time.

References:

• HTML. (2008, December 17). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:51, December 18, 2008, from
  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=HTML&oldid=258572477
• XML. (2008, December 17). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:51, December 18, 2008, from
  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=XML&oldid=258500078
• María Jesús Lamarca Lapuente. (2006). Hipertexto: El nuevo concepto de documento en la cultura de la imagen. Tesis doctoral. UCM. Retrieved 21:02, 2008, December 18, from
  http://www.hipertexto.info/documentos/lenguajes_h.htm
• Christian Van Der Henst S. (2003, November 11) ¿Cómo se diferencia el XML del HTML? In Maestros del Web. Retrieved 21:03, 2008, December 18, from
  http://www.maestrosdelweb.com/editorial/xmlvshtml
  
• Miguel Ángel Álvarez. (2001, June 21) Diferencias entre HTML y XML. In Desarrollo Web. Retrieved 21:08, 2008, December 18, from
  http://www.desarrolloweb.com/articulos/459.php
• Carolina García Cataño y David Arroyo Menéndez. (2002). Biblioteca Digital y Web Semántica. BiblioWeb de SinDominio. Retrieved 21:12, 2008, December 18, from
  http://biblioweb.sindominio.net/telematica/bibdigwebsem/bibdigwebsem.html
  

(This is my proposal for the answer to the third question published in the Moodle forum: identifique por lo menos tres propiedades del lenguaje XML que lo distingan de HTML y otros tantos fenómenos que se hayan propiciado tras su implantación.)

Te paso el boletín BENED especial de Navidad 2008. Viene cargadito de cosas para que no nos aburramos estos días…

yo destacaría algunos de los trabajos recogidos… a saber: el Horizon 2008, The current landscape, opportunities, challenges and tensions y el APEI sobre Web social 2008.

Lo dicho… buena lecturaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has launched a new version of its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standard, making it easier to understand and test by firms wishing to comply.

WCAG 2.0 updates the standard originally published in 1999 and is organised under four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Compliance is measured at three levels: A, AA and AAA.

“It can be applied to any technology used on the web and allows the opening up of all types of content for people with disabilities,” said Judy Brewer, head of the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. “We expect it to become the unifying standard for web accessibility internationally.”

The new version improves on WAGC 1.0 by broadening the types of technologies, sites and languages covered by the standard. It has also been developed with more international input, and can be tested via automated and human evaluation, according to Brewer.

“This enables people to know when they’ve met the requirements, and was one of our goals as we had strong demand for this,” she added.

“There is an extensive array of materials to support developers’ needs, proven design approaches on how to meet the WCAG, and a framework for developers to innovate and still meet the requirements.”

By :- Chicago Website Design

A few days ago W3C launched its validator donation program (see also Olivier’s extra blog on this). The Semantic Web community might think that this is relevant for HTML, CSS, etc, only, but this is not so. The same validator program of W3C also includes the RDF and the Feed validators; also, the HTML validator has also been upgraded recently to handle the RDFa+XHTML DTD. (Although it is not required by RDFa to use this DTD, it is a good idea to have it there if you want to be sure about the validity of your file.) Ie, even if you are interested in the Semantic Web only (which I do not believe is anybody’s case, actually), you should consider the program…

ago

We are honored to have been invited to write a case study about Faviki and the idea behind semantic tags for the W3C Semantic Web Activity website.

The goal of W3C SW case studies is, primarily, to help the Web community at large understand and appreciate the advantages of possibly using Semantic Web technologies in real applications. It was a challenge to write a document that should convince (often skeptical) IT  managers and other technology people that there can be made some interesting applications based on SW technology.

I tried to show the benefits of  using the semantic tags and described how they are used in Faviki. The key idea of the case study is that the semantic tags, as an intersection point of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web, have the potential to enable much faster evolution of the Web by providing a solid foundation from which the Semantic Web can grow soundly.

I already wrote on this blog about the need for a tag evolution back in May, so I was happy to present the idea, that has matured in the meantime, to a wider audience.

Many thanks to Ivan Herman for this opportunity and the comments which helped make the entry better.

Also, a big thank you to Maja, Sebastian and Rod for their suggestions.

World Wide Web Consortium released the first working draft for HTML 5 this year in January. It is a fifth major revision of the HTML we all use every day. When HTML 5 is expressed in XML, it is called XHTML 5. The current version of HTML is 4 which developed in 1999.

Apple, Opera, and the Mozilla Foundation – major browser vendors – came together as a group called Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WhatWG) to build up an updated and upgraded version of HTML. W3C took note of these developments and started its own next-generation HTML effort with many of the same members.

This new version HTML 5 also goes under the name Web Applications 1.0 and it would be immediately familiar to existing HTML programmers. There are no namespaces or schemas. Elements don’t have to be closed. Browsers are forgiving of errors. A p is still a p, and a table is still a table. At the same time, we would come across some new and confusing elements. Our div remain, but now HTML includes section, header, footer, and nav as well. em, code, and strong are still present, but so are meter, time, and m. img and embed continue to be used, but now there are video and audio too. However, closer inspection by the html programmer would reveal that these elements aren’t that different. This can also be an effort to make HTML more developer friendly; the datagrid controls seem similar to those of ASP.NET in name and possibly functionality too.

It was explicitly designed to degrade gracefully in browsers that don’t support it. It provides real benefits to programmers today while promising even more for future page visitors.

But remember that HTML 5 is still a draft and this draft may not be finalized for years, work on HTML 5 continues. Perhaps it will be in our browsers in December 2010.

» View draft recommendation

W3C:n eli World Wide Web Consortiumin kotisivu on päätynyt Suomen poliisin suodatuslistalle. Suodatuslistaa siis ylläpitää poliisi, eivät yksittäiset operaattorit.

Sivusto on ollut blokattuna ainakin DNA:n ja Mikkelin Puhelimen (MPY) palveluissa.

Sivuston esto ei ole levinnyt muille suomalaisille operaattoreille siitä syystä, etteivät ne ole vielä ottaneet käyttöönsä uusinta versiota poliisin suodatuslistasta.

“W3C eli World Wide Web Consortium on kansainvälinen yritysten ja yhteisöjen yhteenliittymä, joka ylläpitää ja kehittää WWW:n standardeja tai suosituksia kuten W3C niitä kutsuu. Sen perusti vuonna 1994 WWW:n keksijä Tim Berners-Lee, joka toimii nykyisinkin W3C:n johtajana. Konsortiolla on noin 360 jäsentä.

Konsortion päämaja on Massachusetts Institute of Technologyn tiloissa Yhdysvalloissa. Muut instituutit, joissa W3C:llä on tutkimusta, ovat ERCIM Ranskassa ja Keio University Japanissa. Lisäksi W3C:llä on useita aluetoimistoja eri maissa.” -Wikipedia

Ainakin DNA on myöhemmin poistanut sivuston listaltaan.

• Finnish ISP thinks W3C.org is a child-porn site

HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the prodominate markup language for most webpages. HTML describes the stucture of text such as links, headings, paragraph, fonts, etc. HTML is written with tags (angle brackets). It’s a way of describing how a set of text and images should be displayed to the viewer.
For tutorials on HTML click (here).

XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language),  a markup language has the same depth of expression as HTML,  but also conforms to XML syntax, which was designed to transport and store data . XML is an extensible markup language that was developed to retain the flexibility and power of HTML while reducing most of the complexity.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. CSS is also a W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Standard.
CSS can be used locally by the readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layouts, and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content. This separation can improve content accessibility and make the webpage more user friendly and avoid repetition within the webpage.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is increasingly worried about how his creation is being used to spread lies, hoaxes and urban myths. No doubt when he witnessed for the first time the communication of the http client and server over the Internet, Berners-Lee did not have visions of YouTube and Facebook.

“On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable,” and can be deeply damaging, he said.

This is something I never really put much thought to until now. But imagine being the inventor and looking at what it has become. With all the misinformation, hoaxes and dumb fads that are propagated through the Internet, this is a far cry from his vision of sharing of information to create a smaller, more informed world. There was no way that the CERN Large Hadron Collider was going to cause a black hole. The smartest people in the world knew that, but Mr. I-Have-A-Website clearly did not get that memo. Worse still is the use of the Internet by predatory types – whether it be to lure their prey, or to display their works online. I am sure we can all think of many recent examples of young and old using the Internet do harm to others.

Tim Berners-Lee With Huge Monitors

I love these ultra-brilliant scientific types though, because they are scientists this makes them so open to new possibilities, which in turn gives them enormous amounts of faith in the potential of humanity. Unfortunately, not only is the Internet the New Religion but it is the means for the transmission of that religion. Being a demi-god is a lot easier if no one ever sees how all too human you are, so the whole cult frenzy thing is bound to happen.

He has apparently unveiled a new foundation that will give websites a label for trustworthiness. This, I am not so sure about. After all, you might not trust an anarchist newsletter online, but I would. But he is also working towards a more open, free web to ensure Internet for all, and he is opposed to the tiered domain names, so these just may go as well. More to come I suppose.

Hi Folks,

You might have noticed this logo on some websites . Well, this logo means that the page you are surfing is created according to the norms given by W3C, for creating a XHTML Page. W3C has also given standards for HTML, XHTML, CSS and FEED.

Read the full article here.

http://www.w3.org/

Mission: “To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.” — From About the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

W3C has published more than 110 W3C Recommendations.

“In order for the Web to reach its full potential, the most fundamental Web technologies must be compatible with one another and allow any hardware and software used to access the Web to work together. W3C refers to this goal as “Web interoperability.” By publishing open (non-proprietary) standards for Web languages and protocols, W3C seeks to avoid market fragmentation and thus Web fragmentation.” — From About the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Picture: part of the piece of paper we discovered.

WHAT WE DISCOVERED TODAY IS HUGE. Glad we made it back.. it was pretty exciting. We went to the Bilderberg Hotel in Amsterdam this morning as some Google employees should have a meeting today. We wanted to interview some of them and confront them with some critics heard over the internet about Google and the public’s privacy concerns. We decised to secretly film some of the members entering the building, which you’ll see later this week.. we try to get the video online as soon as possible.

Pictures: Google CEO Eric Schmidt arrives in his car in front of the Bilderberg Hotel Amsterdam.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt arrived first, obviously holding some very important papers, you can see them on the photos in this blog post. After that, several other members of the Google staff – we don’t know their names yet – arrived at Bilderberg’s.. WHAT THEN HAPPENED WAS REALLY REMARKABLE! One of them dropped his papers.. HE DROPPED IT, just in front of us, several meters from our standing point. They quickly got the papers together and went inside, but guess what……

THEY LEFT SOMETHING.. a piece of paper with some notes about what they are planning to discuss.. which made us VERY UPSET. The piece of paper made true what we already thought about the so-called ‘company who wants to make ALL information free available for everyone’. One of the Google credos is ‘Focus on the user and all else will follow’, well now they WILL do that, and are going too far also.

Pictures: Eric Schmidt walks anxiously to the entrance of Bilderberg.

Google plans a ‘New Web’

Google has plans to work together with Microsoft and the World Wide Web Consortium (which we discovered yesterday). But also Mozilla and AOL are involved. And.. because of the secrecy of all this (and the cars parked at Bilderberg’s) we believe the GOVERNMENT is involved too.

What are they trying to do? Well, the document tells us there must be some kind of a ‘New Internet’, where those 5 companies are working together to re-arrange the way the Internet works. We don’t know every detail yet, sorry. But this one is big, very big.

What we then discovered is a temporarily website about this project, it is called The New Web Project. What we can see now is just an announcement of ‘The New Web Project‘ that will be launced ’soon’. When that actually happens.. we don’t know. But have you EVER seen the Google and Microsoft logos together on an official released website? We don’t. And we don’t think it’s a good idea to let two of the biggest computer networking companies working together, let alone 5 of them.. what will become of the smaller ones? Eaten by the big fish? Is this another prove of the monopolistic ideas Google has? And WHY are they meeting in Amsterdam? Is the Dutch government involved too? Or is it just a ‘random’ country like the meeting (probably about the same topic!) this week in Belgium?

We have discovered a lot more, but don’t want to tell everything, YET. Just wait for our video to be put online this week, we’ll discover what Google is trying to do fully. For now we just want you to check www.thenewwebproject.com every day to see what is going on around here. Please also follow us at this blog and Twitter for the latest updates!