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Michael™ Smith gives HTML5 a report card; Knud Möller finds RDFa everywhere; Mark Nottingham tells us a love story about browser caching; Michael™ Smith asks if HTML5 is ready for prime time; Jacqui Begbie & Neil King explain Australia’s Web Accessibility Transition Strategy; Gordon Grace gets government data online; Divya Manian is into active web development and Daniel Davis cares about widgets.

HTML5 Report Card

Passing with flying colors or just barely making the grade?

Presenter: Michael™ Smith

Remember how fun it was to do hands-on classroom projects together in kindergarten? Well, this interactive session is going to be like that, but just with bigger people.

In the first part of the session, I’ll hand out blank report cards, and each of us will — individually and based on whatever criteria we personally want to use — use those report cards to assign A, B, C, D, and E letter grades to particular new features that are part of HTML5 and related specifications that are supported to some degree in browsers.

Then I’ll collect those, and use the info to judge which HTML5 features to focus the discussion on during the second part of the session. During the second part of the session, we’ll make a handful of poster-side HTML5 Report Cards together, by taking a look at the HTML5 features we identified during the first part of the session, and then assigning A, B, C, D, and E letter grades to those together — based on the current quality of the features/implementations, and on criteria such as if/how well the features actually work as expected, as well as on some criteria such as “plays well with others”, “areas where improvement is needed”, etc.

Active Web Development

Presenter: Divya Manian

Web technologies are evolving at such a frenetic pace that it becomes almost mandatory to learn on your own. A lot of us still depend on other people to do this learning for us, and we tend to use their answers to solve our everyday problems. Inconsistent implementations, rapidly evolving specs, questionable performance impacts and maintenance implications mean we cannot always depend on others for answers but must involve ourselves actively in the process of developing specifications for new Web technologies. But how do we go about it? There are some simple rituals we can all do, which can have us be better-informed and also better inform the people and groups who are most directly involved in the development of new Web technologies.

Australia’s Web Accessibility Transition Strategy

Presenter: Jacqui Begbie & Neil King

The Australian Government formally endorsed the WCAG 2.0 specification in February 2010. In June they released the Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy (www.finance.gov.au) which sets the pathway for transition to WCAG 2.0 for all government agencies. Achieving this will be the biggest accessibility task ever embarked upon by the Australian government. Leading by example they hope to bring much of the private sector along too.

In this session, Jacqui will discuss the obligations and requirements to meet each of the three phases of the work plan. This in turn will ensure industry, developers, and agencies create WCAG 2.0 conformant government websites to level A by 2012, and federal websites that conform to level AA by end of 2014. Neil will provide some practical advice on the resources that are out there that will assist in addressing each of the phases, and insights on the core challenges that need to be met.

Widgets – Why Should I Care?

Presenter: Daniel Davis

When I was a young lad, I had the use of a computer for the Christmas holidays so I typed out my thank you letters and felt super cool. Unfortunately there was no printer. I wrote out by hand what was on the screen and got laughed at by my dad. Despite this, I felt I was ahead of the crowd and at the start of something new and exciting. Thirty years later, I feel we’re at the same stage with widgets – at the start of something new and exciting.

Browser Caching and You (A Love Story)

Presenter: Mark Nottingham

Over time, Web developers have feared, hated and loved Web caching, at times trying to kill it, at others professing undying love. Mark Nottingham (chair of the IETF HTTPbis Working Group and author of its revised Web Caching specification) will examine how browsers (mis)-treat your content today, as well as where your relationship with browser caching might go in the future.

HTML5 Ready for Prime time?

Presenter: HTML5 Panel

When the front page of daily newspapers carry stories mentioning HTML5, you know something’s afoot. But, despite all the hype, just how ready for prime time is it? Can you rely on it today? And if so, which parts? And how does it change the web for designers and developers? Is it just a better way to build web sites, or does it promise a whole new level of sophistication for the web?

In this round table discussion hear from standards developers, browser developers, and practicing web developers. You’ll come away with a better understanding of the direction HTML5 is taking the web, the challenges you’ll face today using HTML5, and the possibilities it’s opening up for developers.

RDFa everywhere

How you can give meaning to everything

Presenter: Knud Möller

RDFa is a W3C standard for embedding semantic metadata directly into HTML web pages. While early work on RDFa dates back to 2004, it recently gathered a lot of uptake and traction through the adoption by big players such as Google, Yahoo! and Facebook. This has put the Semantic Web into the attention of a much wider public, setting RDFa out the be the technology to finally bring the Semantic Web into the mainstream. The language gained the status of a W3C recommendation in late 2009 as RDFa 1.0. Since then, the RDFa working group has been established to improve and extend the standard. Eventually, this work will result in a new version of the language, which is set to be released as RDFa 1.1 in 2011. In this talk, an overview will be given of the RDFa technology in general, followed by an outline of its latest developments, such as the RDFa API, or the definition of RDFa Core, which prepares the standard to extend its scope beyond the context of web pages, by allowing it to be included into any other markup language than just HTML.

More than raw: government data online

Presenter: Gordon Grace

The USA and UK governments have made significant progress with linked, open data in recent months. Several fundamental datasets from the Australian Government are on the cusp of being exposed as meaningful, reusable, machine-readable assets, further driving the adoption of linked data within and around government.

Making better use of online data offerings using a combination of top-down policy and guidance, together with bottom-up development efforts from agency web teams, would seem to describe a sustainable, organic growth in linked government data.

Learn about the path to the first release of data.gov.au; a draft roadmap to future releases; the barriers to linked data and open public sector information (PSI); and the real-world questions this technology aims to solve.