Australian W3C Office

Hello and welcome to the newsletter from the Australian W3C Office. This edition includes news about regional activities, HTML, DOM and WAI activities. A copy of this newsletter will also be available on the Australian W3C Office site at: http://w3c.dstc.edu.au/

1. Regional Activities
   
2. New Australian Member
   
3. User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Become a W3C Candidate Recommendation
   
4. W3C HTML Validation Service Upgraded
   
5. W3C Morocco Office Launches Arabic Home Page
   
6. DOM Level 3 Core Working Draft Published
   
7. RDF Test Cases Working Draft Published
   
8. XPointer Becomes a W3C Candidate Recommendation
9. Refactoring RDF/XML Syntax Working Draft Published
   
10. New W3C Members
    
11. About this newsletter
    

1. Regional Activities

# Web Accessibility Workshops – Melbourne and Canberra

Vision Australia Foundation and VICNET are running a series of half-day Web Accessibility Workshops in Canberra (27/9 & 28/9). Details: call Andrew Arch on 03 9864 9282 for cost and registration information.

# Web Accessibility Event – Melbourne

A public web accessibility event will be held in Melbourne in November in conjunction with an internal W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Working Group Meeting. Speakers at the event will include Charles McCathieNevile, Wendy Chisholm and Jason White (Co-Chair of WCAG). More information about the event will be available in the next newsletter.

# Australian Semantic Web Workshop – 11 December, University of Adelaide, Adelaide

The Australian Semantic Web Workshop is a one day event held in association with the Artificial Intelligence ’01 Conference. This workshop is intend to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in the Semantic Web. Those working in cognate areas such as knowledge acquisition, computational linguistics, document processing and information retrieval, artificial intelligence and multimedia will be interested in this event.

URLs:

VICNET: http://www.vicnet.net.au
Australian Semantic Web Workshop: http://www.dstc.edu.au/Tech_Transfer/Events/SemanticWeb.html
Overview article on the Semantic Web: http://www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html Semantic Web Activity: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
WAI: http://www.w3.org/WAI/

2. New Australian Member

Plugged In Software produces innovative information discovery products for legal research and litigation, including Email Discovery. Plugged In's information discovery products are based on the Tucana Intelligent Connections framework.

URLs:

Plugged In Software: http://www.pisoftware.com/

3. User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Become a W3C Candidate Recommendation

W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (UAAG) to Candidate Recommendation. This document provides guidelines for designing user agents that lower barriers to Web accessibility for people with visual, hearing, physical, and cognitive disabilities. Comments are invited through December. The companion Techniques Working Draft is also updated.

URL:

User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/CR-UAAG10-20010912/
To submit comments: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ua/
Techniques Working Draft: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-UAAG10-TECHS-20010912/
Press release: http://www.w3.org/2001/09/uaag-cr-pressrelease
Implementation report: http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/implementation/report-cr2
Web Accessibility Initiative: http://www.w3.org/WAI/

4. W3C HTML Validation Service Upgraded

W3C is pleased to announce an upgrade to the W3C HTML Validation Service created and maintained by Gerald Oskoboiny of the W3C Systems Team. New features include XHTML 1.1 and XHTML Basic 1.0 support, experimental MathML 2.0 support, new functions on the results page, and an option to override character encoding. Feedback on the service is welcome. Refer to What's New for the change history.

URLs:

HTML Validation Service: http://validator.w3.org/
Gerald Oskoboiny: http://www.w3.org/People/Gerald/
Feedback: http://validator.w3.org/feedback
What’s New: http://validator.w3.org/whatsnew

5. W3C Morocco Office Launches Arabic Home Page

The home page of the W3C Morocco Office is now available as Unicode encoded Arabic. The Office is hosted by the Ecole Mohammadia d'Ingénieurs, in Rabat, Morocco. W3C Offices assist with promotion efforts in local languages, broaden W3C's geographical base, and encourage international participation in W3C Activities.

URL:

W3C Morocco Office: http://www.emi.ac.ma/W3C/
Ecole Mohammadia d'Ingénieurs: http://www.emi.ac.ma/
W3C Offices: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/

6. DOM Level 3 Core Working Draft Published

he DOM Working Group has released an updated Working Draft of the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification. The DOM is a platform- and language-neutral interface that allows programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure, and style of documents. Comments are invited.

URLs:

DOM Level 3 Core Specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-DOM-Level-3-Core-20010913/
To submit comments: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-dom/
DOM Activity: http://www.w3.org/DOM/Activity

7. RDF Test Cases Working Draft Published

World Wide Web Consortium today released the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) 2.0 as a W3C Recommendation. The specification has been reviewed by the W3C Membership, who favour its adoption by industry. SMIL (pronounced "smile") defines an XML-based language that authors can use to write interactive multimedia presentations. Version 2.0 includes approximately one hundred predefined transition effects, and support for hierarchical layout and animation.

URLs:

RDF Core Working Group: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore/
RDF Test Cases: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-rdf-testcases-20010912/
To submit comments: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/
Semantic Web Activity: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

8. XPointer Becomes a W3C Candidate Recommendation

W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of the XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0 to Candidate Recommendation. XPointer can be used in URI references to address parts of an XML document such as elements, attributes, character content, and relative position. Comments are welcome through 4 March 2002. Read about the W3C XML Activity.

URLs:

XPointer Language Version 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/CR-xptr-20010911/
To submit comments: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/
XML Activity: http://www.w3.org/XML/

9. Refactoring RDF/XML Syntax Working Draft Published

The RDF Core Working Group has released the first public Working Draft of Refactoring RDF/XML Syntax. The document records the process of updating the grammar in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification, showing the changes step-by-step. Read about the Semantic Web Activity.

URLs:

RDF Core Working Group: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore/
Working Draft: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-rdf-syntax-grammar-20010906/
RDF Model and Syntax Specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222/
Semantic Web Activity: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

10. New W3C Members

Bartimeus - Accessibility, Zeist, The Netherlands
Integrated Forum on Electronic Commerce (ECIF), Seoul, Korea
Plugged In Communications Pty Ltd., Milton, Queensland, Australia

URLs:

W3C List of all members: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List
How to Join: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Prospectus/Joining

11. About this newsletter

Many thanks to Charles McCathieNevile (WAI, W3C) for his contribution.

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