The World Wide Web Consortium - Australian Office

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Australian Newsletter - May 2002

Hello and welcome to the newsletter from the Australian W3C Office. In this edition we include information on regional activities, Internationalisation, RDF Primer and IsaViz.

Regional Events
Web Internationalisation
RDF Primer Working Draft Published
W3C work with IMS
IsaViz - A Visual Authoring Tool for RDF Announced
New Members
Current Software Releases
About this newsletter

1. Regional Events

# AusWeb02, Maroochydore July 6-10th

AusWeb 2002 will be held at Twin Waters Resort, Sunshine Coast Queensland from Saturday 6 July to Wednesday 10 July 2002. Since its inception in 1995, AusWeb has been the primary forum for both industry and academics within Australia to discuss the rapidly evolving technologies and usage of the Web. It provides an informal and supportive environment, with the programme being designed to facilitate open discussion and debate. And, of course, the location is wonderful!

URLs:

Full details: http://ausweb.scu.edu.au

# Free W3C Seminars

The Australian W3C Office, in conjunction with a number of W3C Members, presents a free seminar - W3C and Web Services. Web services is a hot topic today, because it promises to be the foundation of the Web tomorrow. We have all seen the impact and benefits of the Web. Web services will enable the Web to be even more powerful and useful. The W3C is developing the specifications for Web Services. It is a vendor neutral organisation and it is committed to keeping the Web open and interoperable - vital ingredients for the success of the Web. Building on the success of HTML, XML and other W3C technologies, Web Services will help us realise the full potential of the Web.

Locations:
Melbourne, in conjunction with ManageSoft Corporation, Melbourne IT and Monash University
Venue: Monash Conference Centre
Level 7, 30 Collins Street
Melbourne.
Date: 7th June, 10:0am to 12:00pm

Christchurch, NZ, in conjunction with the University of Otago
Venue: Ilam Function Centre
University of Canterbury
90 Ilam Road
Date: 7th June, 1:30pm

Perth, in conjunction with Software Engineering Australia, Western Australian and the WA Department of Industry and Technology.
Venue: SEA WA
Enterprise Centre E5,
De Laeter Way Technology Park,
Bentley, WA
Date: 18th June, 9am - 11am.

Adelaide in conjunction with education.au.
Venue: TBA
Date: August

Canberra in conjunction with National Library of Australia and NOIE.
Venue: National Library Theatre (on Level LG1)
Date: 29 May, 3:30pm

Sydney in conjunction with ManageSoft Corporation and UTS.
Venue: UTS
Building 6 (Design and Architecture), Rm 322
Enter via Harris St.
Date: 11 June, 2:00pm

Brisbane in conjunction with DSTC Pty Ltd.
Venue: TBA
Date: August

The following free seminar is different to the one above, it is an overview of W3C and XML.

GOLD COAST, in conjuction with Dialog Institute and DSTC.
Venue: Dialog Institute
7 High Street
Robina Town Shopping Centre
Robina Town Centre Drive.
Date: 27th June, 10am

To register for any of the above seminars please complete the following and email to: w3c-australia@w3.org
~~~~~~~~~~~~~snip~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I would like to register for the follow free W3C Seminar
Name:
Organisation:
Contact Email:
Location of free W3C:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~snip~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

URLs:

Further information will be available at the following website and via this Newsletter: http://w3c.dstc.edu.au/eventsOz.html

# Web Accessibility Workshop

Vision Australia Foundation and VICNET are running a series of half-day Web Accessibility Workshops in Perth and Sydney (21/5 & 31/5). Details: call Andrew Arch on 03 9864 9282 for cost and registration information.

# W3C Day 2002

The Australian W3C Office invites you to attend the 2002 W3C Day. This year’s programme covers: TAG, XML Protocol, XML Encryption, Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), Accessibility and the Semantic Web. Ms Janet Daly, W3C Head of Communications, will chair the day. Presenters include: Mr Joseph Reagle W3C Public Policy analyst and Working Group Chair and Mr Hugo Haas, Web Services Activity Lead W3C. (Some presentations will be complemented by appropriate tutorials).

URLs:

W3C Day: http://www.dstc.edu.au/Tech_Transfer/Events/Evolve01/w3c.html

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2. Web Internationalisation

Results of recent surveys of web pages and web usage by Global Reach and FUNDREDES show that the English language content of the Web is now down to 40% of the total web content. The major 60% is presented in other languages. Similarly, web users are now mostly non-native English speakers whose browsers default to the character set of another language. These figures are extrapolatable to show the rise of non-English languages on the web will continue - particularly in the Far Eastern languages.

A consequence of this is that search engines and other web agents are now becoming smarter about the language in which pages are written and how to present them to users.

The document character set for XML and HTML 4.0 is Unicode (aka ISO 10646). This means that HTML browsers and XML processors should behave as if they used Unicode internally. But it doesn't mean that documents have to be transmitted in Unicode. As long as client and server agree on the encoding, they can use any encoding that can be converted to Unicode.

It is VERY IMPORTANT that the character encoding of any XML or (X)HTML document is CLEARLY LABELED. This can be done in the following ways:

Use the 'charset' parameter in the Content-Type header of HTTP. Example:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=EUC-JP
For XML, use the encoding pseudo-attribute in the xml declaration at the start of a document or the text declaration at the start of an entity. Example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
For HTML, use the tag. Example:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

With this information, clients can easily map these encodings to Unicode. In practice, a few encodings will be preferred, most likely: ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1), US-ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, also the other encodings in the ISO-8859 series, iso-2022-jp, euc-kr, and so on.

If you are producing web pages in English, you must still make the character set declarations. If you do not, then readers whose web browsers default to non-English character encodings will see your web pages as a jumble of incomprehensible strokes. These are becoming the majority of web users that you are not presenting your material to if you do not make a character set declaration. If you do, then their browsers will make the mapping and present the English text as you intended.

Several UK W3C members produce web sites using non-English material (e.g. Arabic, Chinese, Japanese). A brief survey shows that most of these are either not using character set declarations, or are using proprietary charsets such as those provided by Microsoft. If you do not use a character set declaration then the chances are that your intended audience will not be able to read the web page. If you use a proprietary character set declaration then your web pages will not be readable by the audience who do not have that character set. They will not have the character set if they do not have the proprietary operating system or browser that provides the character set. If you use these proprietary character sets you are vastly limiting you audience and market. There will be no way for their tools to map from a proprietary character set that they do not know about to Unicode.

If you are a tool producer you should ensure that your tools are capable of handling character set declarations correctly.

The UK office of W3C is currently producing a primer on Web Site Internationalisation which will be announced in this newsletter when it is available. In the meantime, there is considerable guidance available from W3C on internationalisation on the W3C internationalisation web pages

URLs:

W3C Internationalisation: http://www.w3.org/International/
Global Reach: http://global-reach.biz/globstats/index.php3
FUNDREDES: http://funredes.org/LC/english/L5/top
Unicode: http://www.w3.org/International/O-unicode.html
Content-Type header of HTTP: http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset.html
encoding pseudo-attribute: http://www.w3.org/TR/charencoding
xml declaration: http://www.w3.org/TR/sec-prolog-dtd
text declaration: http://www.w3.org/TR/sec-TextDecl
<meta>: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/h-5.2.2
UTF-8: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2279.txt

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3. RDF Primer Working Draft Published

The RDF Core Working Group has released the first public Working Draft of the RDF Primer. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a general-purpose language for representing information in the Web. This primer provides the fundamentals required to use RDF in applications.

URL:

RDF Core Working Group: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore/
RDF Primer: http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-rdf-primer-20020319/
Resource Description Framework: http://www.w3.org/RDF/
Semantic Web Activity: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

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4. W3C work with IMS

Within Australia the W3C WAI Group is working with IMS, a metadata scheme for learning objects based on Dublin Core, to integrate accessibility metadata into the IMS scheme. The group has published a White paper on Accessibility that interprets the W3C guidelines for those coming from an educational perspective. They have also identified some services that educational providers want to use and been able to work with the W3C Authoring Tools Working Group to have the W3C Guidelines extended to cover these services. Dublin Core Accessibility Special Interest Group’s has also started working with W3C and IMS holding their first meeting last November and are planning to meet again in the UK in June.

About IMS: IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. is developing and promoting open specifications for facilitating online distributed learning activities such as locating and using educational content, tracking learner progress, reporting learner performance, and exchanging student records between administrative systems.

About Dublin Core: The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. DCMI's activities include consensus-driven working groups, global workshops, conferences, standards liaison, and educational efforts to promote widespread acceptance of metadata standards and practices.

URLs:

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative: http://www.w3.org/WAI
W3C Authoring Tools Working Group: http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/
IMS Global Project: http://www.imsproject.org
IMS White Paper: http://www.imsproject.org/accessibility/index.html
Dublin Core: http://www.dublincore.org/
Dublin Core Accessibility Special Interest Group: http://www.dublincore.org/groups/access/

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5. IsaViz - A Visual Authoring Tool for RDF Announced

W3C's Semantic Web Advanced Development initiative announces the release of IsaViz, a visual environment for browsing and authoring RDF models represented as graphs. IsaViz has a 2.5D user interface allowing smooth zooming and navigation. IsaViz supports RDF/XML and N-Triple import and export, and SVG and PNG export. Developed by Emmanuel Pietriga of W3C and Xerox Research Centre Europe, IsaViz is based on the Xerox Visual Transformation Machine, Hewlett-Packard's Jena, Graphviz from AT&T Research, and Apache's Xerces.