Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Silvia Pfeiffer – HTML5 Audio and Video

Silvia Pfeiffer PortraitWith three different audio and video codec formats each supported by the diverse HTML5 capable Web browsers, plus the need to deal with fallback for older browsers, HTML5 media is not the simple solution we have all been hoping for.W3C invited expert Silvia Pfeiffer will talk through the big issues on this important topic.

Knud Möller – RDFa everywhere

Knud Möller PortraitIn 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 and the definition of RDFa Core.

Mark Nottingham – Browser Caching and You (A Love Story)

Mark Nottingham PortraitOver 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.

Ben Schwarz – Building a better web with HTML5

Max Wheeler PortraitDuring my session we’ll look at where the future of HTML lies, including new structural elements. You’ll also grasp an introduction to associated technologies that have come into popularity with the steam of HTML5: SVG, Web Sockets, Web Workers, Geo-location and making applications useful offline.

Fergus Pitt & David Peterson – The mashed up playlist

Fergus Pitt PortraitDavid Peterson PortraitThe ABC launched three new socially networked digital radio websites: ABC Dig Music, ABC Jazz and ABC Country in July 2009. They are the first of several ABC projects involving content aggregation. As well as having slick, highly usable designs the music platform integrates with various sources including MusicBrainz, YouTube, Last.fm and Wikipedia. This aggregation functionality graphically illustrates the possibilities of Semantic Web technology for an editorial organisation such as the ABC.

Silvia Pfeiffer – Taking HTML5 <video> a step further

Silvia Pfeiffer PortraitThis talk focuses on the efforts engaged by W3C to improve the new HTML 5 media elements with mechanisms to allow people to access multimedia content, including audio and video. Such developments are also useful beyond accessibility needs and will lead to a general improvement of the usability of media, making media discoverable and generally a prime citizen on the Web.

Doug Schepers – W3C and web standards big picture

Doug Schepers PortraitDoug will talk about the technologies currently under development at W3C which we are likely to see in browsers now or in the near future, and will have demos of as many of them as possible. Some of these demos will be HTML5 demos, but also technologies from the WebApps WG, Device API and Policies WG, CSS, SVG, geolocation, etc. He will clear the air about HTML vs. XHTML, and why they are not as far apart as people think.

Kerry Taylor – Semantics & sensors

Kerry Taylor PortraitThe Semantic Sensor Networks W3C Incubator is an international initiative to develop standards for sharing information collected by sensors and sensor networks over the Web, including an ontology for different types of sensing devices and their observations, and new approaches for the semantic markup of sensor descriptions and services that support sensor data exchange and sensor network management.

Renato Iannella – Opening up social networks

Renato Iannella PortraitSocial Networks have been a world-wide phenomenon and their proliferation poses a pressing interoperability and usability challenge to both web users and service providers. Web users have different social networks accounts and utilise them in different ways depending on the context. For example, more friendly chat on FaceBook, more professional on LinkedIn, and a bit daring interaction on Hi5. Maintaining these multiple online profiles is cumbersome and time consuming and locks in the web user to a service provider. Also, sharing information and user-generated content is particularly challenging due to the obscure nature of privacy and rights management on social networks and the lack of awareness and transparency of such policies.

WCAG2 – Gian Wild

Gian Wild PortraitSo WCAG2 – version 2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as set out by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative – has been released as a Candidate Recommendation. What does that mean for Australia? There are many issues that were addressed in WCAG1 which have been left up to policy makers and developers in WCAG2. This session will highlight these issues and talk about what kind of impact they will have on your development and on your audience.

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Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development

Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney