Designing websites in amongst the “suits” and their business models, targets, projections and synergies (ha!) can be death by dot point. Or fun. What are manager types actually thinking when they brief (or don’t) you. How do you translate their KPI’s into interface designs that
The 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.
Social 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.
This talk focuses on the efforts engaged by W3C and its members to promote and improve web standards and in particular HTML 5 with mechanisms to allow people with disabilities to access multimedia content, including audio and video.
What is driving this accelerating diffusion of networked technologies? How do you really measure or control how “pervasive” something is? Why would you even want to? We’ll introduce you to a practical framework for analysing and measuring your “spatial perception of an activity” and explore what it literally means for an application to be “pervasive”, in both an experiential and business sense. At the end of this session you’ll be able to clearly diagram the key change that’s driving this evolution and how it will impact your strategies for technology and business in the future.
RDFa is at the cornerstone of the Browser Web and the Semantic Web. With RDFa, publishing data becomes as easy as publishing HTML, and can help web pages authors to join the linked data cloud and leverage all the URI-based data integration features brought by Semantic Web and Linking Open Data technologies.
In this introductory session primarily directed at those who author web content, Mark will touch a range of RDFa topics from its goals and how it came about, to its relationship to linked data and how it’s being used in some recent projects for UK Government web-sites.
With the proliferation and widespread adoption of JavaScript frameworks, smart developers have wondered if a similar approach to smoothing over the rough spots of CSS might work. Thus, CSS frameworks like Blueprint, YUI Library CSS Tools, Boilerplate, and many others were born. In this session, we will survey the landscape of CSS frameworks and consider how each of them deals with the unique challenge of creating generalised, reusable CSS styles.
So 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.
In this session, co-founder of Ajaxian.com, and The Ajax Experience conferences, and now head of Mozilla Foundation’s new Tools team Ben Galbraith will take us on an expedition through the developer tools landscape. Learn what’s out there, and what they can do to make you more productive, your sites and applications better and faster, and your life as a developer more enjoyable.
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 25 9.10am
Lynne will set the tone of the conference this year with insights into the future of media drawn from her wealth of experience in business, media and online communities as Senior Editor at Fast Company.
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 4.05pm.
This is what it feels like to be hyperconnected: a new kind of community – pervasive, continuous, yet strangely tense and tenuous, like a balloon inflated to the point of bursting. The limits of the neocortex meeting the amplifier of the Human Network. That creates unique opportunities: we can come together at a word, self-organize around or against a blog post, a live-streamed video, an automated reply from a faceless, rent-seeking organization. Nothing can stop us. We can’t even stop ourselves. But what do we want? And the other thing? You’ll need to be at Web Directions South, for the closing keynote, if you want to find out.
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 2.40pm.
Hear how Drupal, Semantic MediaWiki and other bleeding edge tech were enlisted along with pixie dust, FOAF, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Linked Data (basically all the Semantic Web stuff) to build a distributed social network. The focus will be not on evangelism (I don’t really care about that) but how disparate open source platforms can talk and work together. This stuff actually works and makes development more fluid. These technologies make local development easier, but when it is time to broaden your scope, classic search is still king. How can you leverage this? Newcomers such as Yahoo Searchmonkey can play an important role in the creation of a truly distributed information system.
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 2.40pm.
When developing websites or web applications, we often follow the principles of web standards, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and other accessibility guidelines. But is this enough? In this session, Ruth will look at how we can develop accessible web products by taking a holistic approach to web accessibility. She will look at different ways of incorporating accessibility into the design process to produce accessible and useful user experiences. This presentation will focus on the user experience design process by drawing on examples and learnings from Ruth’s work in Government.
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 2.40pm.
Security design is an important, but often neglected, component of system design. In this session, Douglas Crockford, creator of Javascript Object Notation, will outline the security issues that must be considered in the architecture of Ajax applications.
The design of the browser did not anticipate the needs of multiparty applications. The browser’s security model frustrates useful activities and allows some very dangerous activities. This talk will look at the small set of options before us that will determine the future of the Web.
During this session, attendees will:
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 1.40pm.
So, you’ve decided to tap into a whole new world of business oppportunities by stepping outside the anglocentric world. That’s great! But the process of internationalisaton can be a genuine minefield for the unitiated, so take a few tips from someone who’s been there before. In this talk Myles will cover what internationalization is, when to do it, and how to implement it. Topics include: localization, organising your content for translation, finding and managing translators, and dealing with the unexpected technical issues that inevitably arise.
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
