X-tech conference 2005 - day 2
This is a summary of the second day of the X-tech conference 2005 with
another set of interesting presentations.
Presentations
Using W3C XForms in office applications, Lars Opperman
Lars Opperman from Sun showed the capabilities of starOffice/openOffice in making Xforms
documents. These can be very simple to very complex they’re still working on supplying
full xforms support. Currently it isn’t possible to have repeating elements. This is a
feature we will see in future releases.
It’s good to see Xforms getting adopted into more and more software tools.
Structured authoring in wikis: the convergence of structure and chaos, Paul Prescod
Paul Prescod from blastradius had a presentation about using wikis in a development environment and how you would use them from the start of a project through to the end. Unfortunately for me this wasn’t very relevant and I really should have gone to the mozilla E4x presentation which my colleagues did go see.
The Application of Weblike Design to Data - Designing Data for Reuse, Matt Biddulph
Matt Biddulph from BBC Radio and Music Interactive had a presentation on a project they did for BBC Radio 3. They redesigned their URL scheme to make it human readable and make sense. This in itself isn’t a new idea but still a good thing to do. But what tehy also did is that every piece of information on the website get’s a unique URL which remains the same forever. Every radio schedule which get’s played from now on can be found under the same url 5, 10 or even 20 years from now.
Rich Web: SVG And Canvas In Mozilla, Robert O’callahan
Robert O’callahan had a very interesting presentation showing the new canvas element and the new SVG capabilities of Firefox. The canavas element which is being introduced in the upcoming 1.1 release is a way of programmaticaly rendering images. This can be done using SVG (also in the new release) but the problem with this is that SVG is part of the DOM tree which makes it unsuitable to contain large numbers of elements. Robert showed a demo of an image being randomly placed, scaled and rotated in a canvas. If something similar was done in SVG the ever increasing DOM would cause a computer to slowly run through all it’s resources and probably give up after a while.
SVG on the other hand is very usefull at doing other things. SVG is a vector format and this
makes it ideal for scaling images and because it’s part of the DOM you can use script to
do all kinds of interesting things. Animation for instance but also to display dynamic graphs
(stock ticker, etc).
Using the foreignObject element in SVG it’s also possible to put Xhtml in SVG. Robert
showed a particular nice example of this with a special build of Firefox which uses
Cairo. This makes it possible to do all
kinds of things like rotating elements (this includes html). See the example below. The
google page shown is fully functional and using the buttons could be fully rotated in 360
degrees. Really cool
XHTML2: Accessible, Usable, Device Independent, and Semantic, Steven Pemberton
In this late breaking news session Steven Pemberton of W3C showed some of the new features of the upcoming xhtml 2.0 specification. This promisses to be a great step forward but it also is going to become a lot more complex in comparison to say html 4.01 or even xhtml 1.0. I don’t think many normal users will adopt xhtml 2.0 very soon.
WHATWG - Proposing extensions to HTML4 and the DOM, Ian Hickson
Right after the W3C presentation Ian Hickson from Opera held probably one of the most controversial talks of the conference (certainly in the eyes of the W3C folks). Currently Ian is working on a couple of new standards web applications 1.0 and Web forms 2.0. He calls these HTML 5.0. Some of the things he proposes are currently being worked on or are actually used in browsers (like the canvas element) others are just proposals.
One of the main reasons for expanding html is for developers to make it easier to build web applications and have it work in a consistent way on different browsers/platforms. Examples are drag-and-drop support or an input type date for web forms. One other main reason I feel is to keep html simple so Joe Average can keep on doing what he’s already doing (on a massive scale) but add some more functionality (xhtml is hard for none developers).