Toluu : QA Weblog

QA Weblog

On Monday of this week I attended a hearing in New York City organized by the Technology and Government Committee of the New York City Council. On the agenda was a proposal (Int. No. 991) regarding the use of open standards for publishing New York city government data. I picked up a printed copy of the proposal and a summary when I walked into the hearing. To my surprise the handout referred to W3C by name (the online proposal does not) and included a reference to the recent publication of the eGovernment Interest Group Improving Access to Government through Better Use of the Web.

So I filled out a form requesting to speak. To my surprise, the Chair invited me to testify early in the hearing.

Before I spoke, however, a representative from the Mayor's Office voiced opposition to some specifics of the proposal. Earlier that day, at the Personal Democracy Forum elsewhere in the city, the Mayor himself

Reflections on SemTech 2009June 30

SemTech 2009, along with W3C's significant participation in it, is now behind us. Besides catching upon on emails, I have spent the past week reflecting on the enthusiasm, presentations, and flurry of activities that constituted this year's event in San Jose, 14 to 18 June.

One strong feeling I had while in San Jose, was a sense of /deja vu/ in the Web world. Stepping back, I realize that 2009 feels a lot like 1999 when I was consulting with Allaire (remember CFML and ColdFusion?) and attended their user group meetings teaming with enthusiastic Web developers with war stories about their successes and failures bringing Web development servers into organizations of all types and sizes.

Ten years ago, many enterprises were just getting onto the "e-commerce bus," having been either eclipsed or inspired by the likes of innovative Web-centric companies such as Amazon.com and eBay who launched in 1995, or early-adopter retailers like JCPenney whose understanding of the catalogue business put them online faster than many other retailers, or businesses for that matter. Many mainline companies were in various phases of their Web evolution in 1999 -- from brochureware to intranets to pilot customer-facing interactive sites. And keep in mind that ten years ago, Google was barely two.

In 1999 there was also a wide cross-section of skill sets and diversity of understanding about what the Web was, how it worked, and what people and tools to trust to bring one's v

WCAG 2.0 in your mother tongueJune 26

I come from Egypt, live in Austria, work in France, and when I start speaking, some people think I'm American. I speak fluent German and English, but no matter what I do, some expressions and thoughts will always be easier for me in Arabic than in any other language. The expression "mother tongue" hits it rather well - it is the language where I feel most home and safe, despite it getting a little rusty over the years.

Come to think of it, the majority of the human population is probably more comfortable in a language other than English. It happens to be that English is the working language of W3C (and most international organizations) but that does not mean that other languages are not equally welcome at W3C. In fact, W3C encourages volunteers to contribute their valuable time and effort to translation of W3C standards and other resources.

I'm particularly proud of the Policy for Authorized W3C Translations which allows the production of translations that are recognized by W3C. This is especially useful for W3C standards such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, which are read and used by a large number of people. Besides Web developers, WCAG 2.0 is also used by decision makers, researchers, accessibility advocates, and people with disabilities from around the world.

W3C team at SemTechJune 25

Some of us on the team had a pretty busy last week: indeed, Karen Myers, Sandro Hawke, Dave Raggett, Eric Prud'hommeaux, Ralph Swick, and I were at the Semantic Technologies 2009 conference in San Jose. Dave (together with Dianne Mueller from JustSystems) gave a presentation on XBRL and the Semantic Web, Eric gave a tutorial (together with Lee Feigenbaum, from Cambridge Semantics) on SPARQL, and I also gave an introductory SW tutorial and a presentation. And, of course, we all had hallway discussions, meetings, interviews… more than I even remember right now. A number of W3C members were also represented either as presenters or at their booth at the exhibition (or both). More than 1200 people in San Jose in spite of the economic malaise... This is pretty good!

I published a blog entry on right before my journey back to Europe (and an addendum because I forgot something in the original blog entry…) with much more details. If you are inter

Orthogonality of SpecificationsJune 24

HTTP,HTML,URI

The general principle of platform design is that platforms consist of a set of standard interfaces. Standard interfaces allow substitution of components across the interface boundary, while independence of interfaces allow evolution of the interfaces themselves. In a PC, for example, the disk bus interface allows many different disk vendors to offer disk products independent of the model of display or keyboard, but the orthogonality of interfaces allow evolution of the interfaces themselves. If the display interface were linked to the disk interface too tightly, it wouldn't be possible to evolve ISA to SATA without updating VGA.

In the web platform, the three important interfaces are transport, format and reference, and the current definitions of those interfaces are HTTP, HTML and URI. The interfaces are standard, allowing many different implementations: HTTP standard lets you use HTTP servers from many vendors, the HTML standard lets you use many different HTML authoring tools or template systems, and the URI specification allows identification of many different components.

While HTTP is the current "common denominator" protocol that all web agents are expected to speak, the web should continue to work if web content is delivered by other protocols -- FTP, shared file systems, email, i