Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 15:50:17 +0100 To: chair_dev@www2005.org Subject: Devday submission Cc: "tvraman@almaden.ibm.com" From: "Steven Pemberton" Organization: CWI/W3C XHTML2: The Accessible, Usable, Device Independent, Semantic World Wide Web HTML is the world's most successful data format, being used in an extraordinary wide range of circumstances, across a wide range of devices. Despite its success, there are still a number of problems associated with it. For instance * Usability: Research has shown that usability is the second most important property of a website after good content. It is therefore important that the markup language support this. * Accessibility: HTML was not designed for accessible use, and so to use it properly, guidelines have to be followed to make the content properly accessible. * Device independence: Even though it is an obvious use case, it is extremely difficult to single-author pages so that they will work over a wide range of devices * Semantics: with the emergence of the semantic web, there needs to be integral support for better semantics within web pages. * Frames: While composing pages from other pages is an obviously needed functionality, the design of frames leaves much to be desired. * Forms: HTML Forms have formed the basis of the e- commerce revolution, but after a decade of experience we now know how to improve them. XHTML2 has been designed to address these, and other, problems with HTML. The result is recognisably still in the HTML family, but with a much cleaner foundation. This devday session will introduce XHTML2, giving special emphasis to the major functional change, XForms. XForms like its predecessor is a forms vocabulary for hypertext documents. But the dynamic interaction provided by Web documents means that a well-designed forms vocabulary immediately becomes the underpinnings for the creation of light-weight Web Applications. The XForms design of separating out the data into an XML instance, modeling this through XML Schema and additional declarative constraints, binding an abstract UI to this model, and finally submitting the collected data as an XML instance is the final step in the evolving Web Application model that started over 10 years ago with the advent of DHTML and the ability to create "bouncing balls" in HTML pages. We will demonstrate several implementations, and discuss implementation issues, authoring issues, and content management issues. Presenters: Steven Pemberton is a researcher at the CWI in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has been involved with the web from the beginning, organising two workshops at the first web conference in 1994. He is chair of the W3C HTML and Forms working groups, and co-author of amongst others HTML4, CSS, XHTML, XForms and XML Events. T. V. Raman is an accomplished Computer Scientist with over 10 years of industry experience in research and advanced technology development. During this time, he has authored 3 books and several scientific publications; his work on auditory interfaces was profiled in the September 1996 issue of Scientific American. He has leading edge expertise in auditory interfaces, scripting languages, Internet technologies including Web server applications and Web standards. Raman participates in numerous W3C working groups and authored Aural CSS (ACSS); in 1996 he wrote the first ACSS implementation. Raman has been actively participating in defining XML specifications for the next generation multimodal WWW including XForms, XML Events, and XHTML+Voice (AKA X+V). In 1995, he released the first version of Emacspeak --- a speech-enabling extension for Emacs using the Lisp advice feature.