Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog

Just read on Gez Lemon’s site Juicy Studio that with WebKit’s recent announcement of support for WAI-ARIA, all the major browsers are now doing something to support it.   This ROCKS!

For those of you not familiar with WAI-ARIA, it’s a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for making all those ajaxy fancy user-interface components (like tree menus or alerts) accessible to people with disabilities.

Last year at a W3C conference, I got to see WAI-ARIA demoed by a blind gentelmen.  It was WAY cool.  I hope all browsers move quickly to suppor this as much as possible.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that one topic I’m passionate about is making the Web accessible to people with disabilities.  We all depend on the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) guidance via the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to help us through the process.

Well… WCAG 2.0 has just advanced to the next stage of the standards development process, Candidate Recommendation. What they need you to do is to go use it.

This weekend, get together with your friends and convert all of your sites and your blogs to being WCAG 2.0 conformant.  It won’t take that much work.  When you’re done, write about how it went.

Have you converted yet?  What do you think?  Let’s make our sites accessible so everyone can use them and access them.

This is really cool.  The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) has just release as Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers. It tests against compatibility with twelve different Web technologies.

Point your phone’s browser to: http://dev.w3.org/2008/mobile-test/test.html.

If you see twelve green boxes, your mobile browser has passed the test.

Here’s hoping that this compatibility test will cause the same level of competition among mobile browser vendors as the release of Acid 3 did for desktop browser vendors.

The Acid3 browser standards compliance test hasn’t been out that long and WebKit, the open source framework behind the Apple Safari browser, already scores a 95/100.  Congrats guys!  Way to lead.

I’m excited about the recent release of the Web browser standards test Acid3.  Now lets encourage the browsers to do it.  Sounds like the WebKit crew is already working on it, which is awesome.  What about Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and Opera?

There was a lot of big news today in the world of Web standards.  Today the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first public working draft of HTML 5.  It’s the next generation of thinking around the future of HTML, which is the lingua franca or building blocks of every Web site.

Some of HTML 5 is great… some of its meh… but it’s a start, which is AWESOME.

Yes, just to be clear… HTML 5 is far from done.  If you follow the timeline set forth by the chairs of the working group who have taken up this endeavor, this may be wrapping up in 2010.

But… what this first public working draft is is hopefully a starting point of even more community discussion and participating in what will be the future of the Web.

Now, just to warn you.  The HTML 5 specification draft is pretty heavy… as in the language is tough and if you were to print it off and drop it on your toe, you’d probably break your toe.  The main audience of the spec is browser makers (Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, Opera, etc.)

If you wanna work your way up to reading the spec, I’d recommend checking out the document “HTML 5 differences from HTML 4” which was also released today for first public working draft by the W3C.  You could also check out the A List Apart article written by Lachlan Hunt, “A Preview of HTML 5.“

Even though plenty of people have already written about this, I wanted to pass on my congratulations to the Microsoft Internet Explorer team for passing the Acid2 test on their recent internal build of Internet Explorer 8.  I realize that is a big achievement and they should be congratulated.

I have been on the W3C HTML Working group for about a month now.  The big initiative we’re working on is the development of HTML 5.

Since I joined the working group, I’ve been out there talking with people, listening to folks, reading comments, and reading blogs.  Noted JavaScript expert Jeremy Keith summed up a common collective feeling that i’ve heard so much from people…

The present isn’t that bad. HTML is good enough.

I really think that complacency is one of the biggest enemies of HTML 5.

People generally don’t know what’s wrong with HTML 4 or why HTML 5 is better so they don’t pay attention or get involved.

The thing is we need HTML 5.  The Web and how the world uses the Web has changed a lot since HTML 4.  More on this later…

CNET TV has recently shown a great deal of leadership in the online video space by starting to provide captions for their video. This is great news! I know it’s not easy to caption video… this is a big move for them. I hope more video shops (like Revision 3) will follow their move and start providing captions.

There is a chunk of the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 that deals with captioning. Success Criteria 1.2.1 says…

1.2.1 Captions (Prerecorded): Captions are provided for prerecorded synchronized media, except if the synchronized media is an alternative to text and is clearly labeled as such . (Level A)

Shawn Henry of the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative recently wrote a blog post entitled “Is WCAG 2.0 almost done?!” Well after reading the document, I say let’s advance the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 to it’s next stage.

Like Shawn, I’ve been following the development of WCAG 2.0 for a while and I think that this is one of the working group strongest drafts yet.

I’m going to start using WCAG 2.0 when making Web sites.  Will you join me?