Don’t touch a keyboard or see a screen: new open standards to make web open to all

Written on 12th February 2009                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom

As part of ensuring the Web is available to all people on any device, W3C published a new standard on February 10th to enable interactions beyond the familiar keyboard and mouse. EMMA, the Extensible MultiModal Annotation Markup Language, promotes the development of rich Web applications that can be adapted to accept more input modes (such as handwriting, natural language, and gestures) and output modes (such as synthesised speech) at lower cost. 

EMMA was developed by the Multimodal Interaction Working Group which included these W3C Members: Aspect Communications, AT&T, Cisco Systems, Department of Information and Communication Technology – University of Trento, Deutsche Telekom AG, France Telecom, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) Gmbh, Hewlett Packard Company, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, International Webmasters Association / HTML Writers Guild (IWA-HWG), Korea Association of Information & Telecommunication, Korea Institute of Science & Technology (KIST), Kyoto Institute of Technology, Loquendo, S.p.A., Microsoft Corp., Nuance Communications, Inc., Openstream, Inc., Siemens AG, Université catholique de Louvain, V-Enable, Inc., Voxeo, and Waterloo Maple.

“As a common language for representing multimodal input, EMMA lays a cornerstone upon which more advanced architectures and technologies can be developed to enable natural multimodal interactions. We are glad that EMMA has become a W3C Recommendation and pleased with the capabilities that EMMA brings to the multimodal interactions over the Web.”

— Wu Chou, Director, Avaya Labs Research, Avaya

Learn more about Multimodal Interaction Activity at W3C.

Accessibility, annotation, EMMA, Extensible MultiModal Annotation Markup Language, Information technology, open standards, W3C

No Comments »

Forget Web2.0, here comes HTML5!

Written on 23rd January 2008                                                                                                              6 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Part of the W3C HTML5 Team at lunch

W3C, the have published a proposal for the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web: HTML. The new version comes with new elements and improved interoperability. We are especially interested in the new ‘irrelevant‘ attribute which we are sure will be widely accepted and implemented. It might even save Facebook and MySpace.

Also interesting are the ‘canvas‘ element which will represent a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, which can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly and a whole bunch of new Link Types. Besides the now widely used “nofollow” there are a whole bunch of new Link Types such as: “alternate”, “contact”, “external”, “pingback”, “prefetch”, “sidebar” and “tag”.

It will take some time before you will be able to take advantage of these new tags though so no need to update your websites just yet. Microsoft, still the biggest player in browsers, hasn’t complied with previous W3C standards yet and most browsers don’t even support CSS3 at this point so it will take a few years before you can start using the “canvas” and “prefetch” tags. Unless you only use Safari and Firefox! The ‘”Canvas” tag was first implemented in Safari by Richard Williamson and has now been adopted in the official HTML5 specs and works in Firefox too.

The current draft is now open for suggestions for improvement. And the W3C is not shy about using Web2.0 technology and services to keep you involved in the process. You can follow (non-editorial changes only) the whole editing process via http://twitter.com/WHATWG or follow live updates to the document here: http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker.

Oh, and can someone explain this obvious sneer at the end of the document (yes, we read all the way down) which we don’t quite understand:

“Special thanks and $10,000 to David Hyatt who came up with a broken implementation of the adoption agency algorithm that the editor had to reverse engineer and fix before using it in the parsing section.”

We will read the whole 318 pages (once we have printed them) tonight and give you more details soon, maybe, whenever. Can’t wait? Knock yourself out:
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/

browsers, HTML5, W3C

6 Comments »