XTech 2005: XML, the Web and beyond.
HTML is the world's most successful data format, being used in an extraordinary wide range of circumstances, across a wide range of devices.
Despite its success, there are still a number of significant problems associated with it. For instance
* Accessibility: HTML was not designed for accessible use, and so to use it properly, guidelines have to be followed to make the content properly accessible.
* Usability: Research has shown that usability is the second most important property of a website after good content. It is therefore important that the markup language support this aim.
* Device independence: Even though it is an obvious use case, it is extremely difficult to single-author pages so that they will work over a wide range of devices
* Semantics: with the emergence of the semantic web, there needs to be integral support for better semantics within web pages.
* Frames: While composing pages from other pages is an obviously needed functionality, the design of frames leaves much to be desired.
* Forms: HTML Forms have formed the basis of the e- commerce revolution, but after a decade of experience we now know how to improve them.
XHTML2 has been designed to address these, and other, problems with HTML. The result is recognisably still in the HTML family, but with a much cleaner foundation. This paper introduces XHTML2, and discusses the trade-offs and design decisions made, and talks about implementation issues, authoring issues, and content management issues.
The full paper was not available at the time the proceedings were created. Unless this talk was "Late Breaking", this means the author did not submit their paper to the organizers before the start of the conference.
Please help us by encouraging the author to submit their paper as soon as possible.
Steven Pemberton
W3C/CWI
Steven Pemberton is a senior researcher at the CWI, Amsterdam, the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science. Hehas been involved with the Web from the beginning, organising twoworkshops at the first WWW conference in 1994, and chairing the first Style Sheets Workshop in 1995. He is chair of the HTML and Forms Working Groups, and co-author of amongst others HTML, CSS, XHTML and XForms. He is editor-in-chief of ACM/interactions.
Mark Birbeck
x-port.net Ltd.
Mark Birbeck is the founder of x-port.net Ltd., a software house that produces XForms processors and tools. x-port's core engine, formsPlayer, was one of the two full implementations that allowed the XForms standard to meet its exit criteria.Mark has 20 years experience in software development, and has contributed to books on XML, XML and databases, SOAP, and RDF and metadata.He is an invited expert on both the W3C XForms and HTML Working Groups.