Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Chris Wilson – Moving the web forward

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.

Chris Wilson PortraitIn this keynote, Chris Wilson examines the state of the web, some of the problems facing browsers (as platform Architect of the Internet Explorer browser) and standards (as co-chair of the HTML Working Group) and explores what we need to do together to move the web forward.

Bert Bos – A new life for old standards

Bert Bos PortraitCSS level 2 became a standard in 1998. The last revision of HTML4 dates from 1999. That’s long time ago in Web years, but they aren’t forgotten: after several years of work, CSS is close to a revision and browser support is better than ever. It’s necessary, because CSS needs to grow: vertical text, columns, print support, complex layouts and much more is increasingly demanded. Likewise, there is a big effort to revise HTML. Interest is so high, the W3C is trying a new process, to let more people participate in the editing work. There are also new forms, standards for combining SVG and HTML and new work on the security of forms. Bert’s here to tell us: we haven’t seen the end of the Web page yet.

Cheryl Lead and Ben Buchanan – Moving your organisation to web standards

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

Cheryl Lead PortraitBen Buchanan PortraitThis was one of our most loved sessions last year, so much so that we decided to do it again this year, with some new faces, some new experiences. With speakers from both government/education as well as the private sector, get advice from those who’ve already been there on dealing with recalcitrant management, teams members and agencies, building by stealth and making incremental change.

John Allsopp – Microformats

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2006.

John Allsop Portrait

The problem of bringing richer semantics to the world wide web has been challenging standards bodies and developers for several years. Approaches like “The Semantic Web” promise much, but require us to throw away the accumulated efforts, skills and tools of more than a decade. Over the last year or two, an evolutionary approach to richer semantics for today’s web, based on HTML, current developer practices, and tools, called Microformats, has been spreading like wildfire among tool developers, and web publishers large and small.

In this presentation John Allsopp looks at why microformats are necessary, what organisations like Yahoo! are doing with them, and how your organisation can benefit from them right now.

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Thoroughly enjoyed Web Directions — met some great people, heard some inspiring presenters and added a whole bunch of things to my to-do list.

Joel Roberts Web Developer