Welcome to the July 2007 newsletter from the Australian W3C Office. Your link to the latest Consortium news and events... 1. Events 2. CSS 2.1 Is a Candidate Recommendation 3. XBL 2.0 Primer: An Introduction for Developers 4. Versioning XML Languages Using XML Schema 1.1 5. GRDDL Is a Proposed Recommendation 6. Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format: Working Draft 7. Access to Relational Databases: Call for Participation 8. Compound Document Formats: Call for Implementations 9. Note: WSDL Element Identifiers 1. Events W3C Australian Office - W3C Special Interest Group Day 26 September 2007 This year, Web Directions are proud to be hosting the W3C’s Special Interest Group day, in conjunction with the W3C’s Australian Office. It’s a whole day seminar covering the latest developments from the World Wide Web Consortium. * 26 September, Sydney, Australia: CSS. Bert Bos gives a lecture at Web Directions South / W3C SIG Day. * 27 September, Sydney, Australia: A new life for old standards. Bert Bos presents at Web Directions South. * 27 September, Sydney, Australia: Web Directions breakfast. Bert Bos presents at Web Directions South. W3CSIG web site: http://www.webdirections.org/program/workshops/#w3csig Writing for the Web Workshop, Perth 28 August 2007 Vision Australia is partnering with respected usability and accessibility expert Dey Alexander to offer a unique Writing for the Web workshop. Dey is co-convenor of the Web Accessibility Network of Australian Universities and is a regular presenter on useable and accessible web writing to the education, corporate and government sectors. Focusing on excellent content writing, this practical workshop complements the Vision Australia Web Accessibility Workshops. Workshop web site: http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/info.aspx?page=1653&event=49 Web Accessibility Workshop Web Accessibility Workshop This full-day workshop run by Vision Australia is targeted at web-development team leaders, corporate communications professionals and business managers, along with content authors, web programmers and designers and web contract managers. This workshop provides 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. Workshop web site: http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/info.aspx?page=1653&event=54 2. CSS 2.1 Is a Candidate Recommendation W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of "Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.1" to Candidate Recommendation. Implementation feedback is welcome through 20 December. CSS is one of the Web's most widely implemented languages. By separating the presentation of style from the content of documents, CSS simplifies Web authoring and site maintenance. CSS 2.1 is derived from and is intended to replace CSS Level 2. A snapshot of usage, the specification brings the language in line with implementations, fixes errata and adds a few highly requested features including the inline-block value for the display property, the color orange and the values pre-wrap and pre-line for the white-space property. Visit the CSS home page. Bert Bos, co-inventor of CSS will be at the W3C special interest group day on the 26th of September 2007 in Sydney. Here is a chance to talk CSS with Bert. http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/CR-CSS21-20070719/ http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/ 3. XBL 2.0 Primer: An Introduction for Developers The Web Application Formats Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of "XBL 2.0 Primer: An Introduction for Developers." This practical guide to using the XML Binding Language introduces both basic and advanced concepts and describes best practices. XBL extends the appearance and behavior of elements in Web formats such as HTML. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity. http://www.w3.org/2006/appformats/ http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-xbl-primer-20070718/ http://www.w3.org/2006/rwc/ 4. Versioning XML Languages Using XML Schema 1.1 The XML Schema Working Group has released an updated Working Draft of "Guide to Versioning XML Languages using XML Schema 1.1." XML Schema 1.1 introduces new features that make it easier to define XML languages which are flexible enough to tolerate later revision in a forward-compatible way. Written for application and schema developers, the guide shows the new mechanisms and illustrates several techniques. Visit the XML home page. http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-xmlschema-guide2versioning-20070720/ http://www.w3.org/XML/ 5. GRDDL Is a Proposed Recommendation W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of "GRDDL" and "GRDDL Test Cases" to Proposed Recommendations. Comments are welcome through 24 August. Linking microformats to the Semantic Web, the GRDDL mechanism is used to extract RDF statements from XHTML and XML content using programs such as XSLT. Read about the Semantic Web. http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/PR-grddl-20070716/ http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/PR-grddl-tests-20070716/ http://www.w3.org/RDF/ http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ 6. Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format: Working Draft The Efficient XML Interchange Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of "Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format 1.0" . EXI is a very compact representation for the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Information Set that is intended to simultaneously optimize performance and the utilization of computational resources. Using a relatively simple algorithm and a small set of data types, it reliably produces efficient encodings of XML event streams. Learn more about XML. http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-exi-20070716/ http://www.w3.org/XML/ 7. Access to Relational Databases: Call for Participation Position papers are due 10 September for the Workshop on RDF Access to Relational Databases to be held 25-26 October in Cambridge, MA, USA, hosted by Novartis. Workshop attendees from the Semantic Web and relational database communities will examine commonalities, distinctions and next steps for expressing relational data in RDF. Read about W3C Workshops and about the Semantic Web. http://www.w3.org/2007/03/RdfRDB/ http://www.w3.org/2003/08/Workshops/ http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ 8. Compound Document Formats: Call for Implementations The Compound Document Formats Working Group has released four Candidate Recommendations: "Compound Document by Reference Framework 1.0," "WICD Core 1.0," "WICD Full 1.0," and "WICD Mobile 1.0." Implementor feedback is welcome through 1 December. A preliminary implementation report is available, and a test suite is under development. The Web Integration Compound Document (WICD, pronounced "wicked") is a device independent Compound Document profile based on XHTML, CSS and SVG. The drafts describe presentation, linking and navigation behavior when multiple documents are combined. Read more about Rich Web Clients. http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/CR-CDR-20070718/ http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/CR-WICD-20070718/ http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/CR-WICDFull-20070718/ http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/CR-WICDMobile-20070718/ http://www.w3.org/2004/CDF/CDR-implementations.html http://www.w3.org/2006/rwc/ 9. Note: WSDL Element Identifiers The Web Services Policy Working Group has published " WSDL 1.1 Element Identifiers" as a Working Group Note. These fragment identifiers and IRI-references, designed to be easy for authors to understand and compare, are for use in Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1 documents. Read about Web services. http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/NOTE-wsdl11elementidentifiers-20070720/ http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/ ________________________________________________________________________ ____ For previous newsletters from the Australian W3C Office please visit http://w3c.org.au/newsletters/ If you are a W3C Member and would like to contribute relevant news please email us at w3c-australia@w3.org If you know of others who would like to receive this newsletter please direct them to http://w3.org.au