Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Keeping abreast with browser and standards developments, latest scripting and styling techniques, let alone next generation developments like HTML5 is a full time job. Since most of us have full time jobs, what we at Web Directions try to do is a lot of that job for you – by hunting down speakers who can distill days or event weeks of research and reading into a crowded hour of valuable content.

To this end, we’ve managed, with the help of the W3C’s Australian Office, based over at CSIRO, and run by Amit Perashar, to drag kicking and screaming (well, maybe not screaming) Michael (TM) Smith (the TM is part of his official name, though I’ve not managed to find out why as yet), co-chair (along with Chris Wilson, a keynote speaker from last year) of the W3C HTML Working Group.

Michael will be covering in detail the W3C’s current work on the next generation of web standards, particular in the context of HTML. Now, plenty of folks who aren’t knee deep in the minutiae of HTML might wonder whether this session is for them – so we asked Michael a bit about himself, and about the session – who it is for, and what it will cover.

I’ve had the privilege of speaking on the same bill as Michael, and he’s a feisty, entertaining speaker, who tells it like it is – so this definitely won’t be an anodyne presentation full of motherhood statements. In fact, we were hard pressed not to make this a keynote presentation, so do definitely consider attending this one.

Web Directions

Tell us how you came to be at the W3, and what you do there

Michael

I came to the W3C after several years of doing work on software deployed in mobile networks in Japan (including both software related to mobile browsing and to mobile e-mail), first at a company called Openwave, which made one of the first mobile browsers, and then at Opera Software, which makes one of the best mobile browsers.

I joined that W3C team initially as part of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative but have since transitioned over to work directly related to client-side browsing technologies, in the Web Applications Working Group, which Doug Schepers and I are the W3C team contacts for, and in the HTML Working Group, which Dan Connolly is the W3C team contact for and which I’m currently acting as the co-chair for, along with Chris Wilson.

Web Directions

HTML5 – it looks like a lot more than just the next generation of HTML – can you give us an idea of the goal of the HTML5 project

Michael

I guess the highest-level goal is to produce a specification for HTML that aligns with how HTML is actually being processed in browsers and how HTML is actually being used on the Web — for example, a specification that takes into account the fact that HTML is used for creating Web applications, not just static documents.

The HTML5 draft in its current form, which was written entirely by Ian Hickson, amounts to being very much like a formal functional specification for how browsers should process HTML — it defines handling of HTML precisely and thoroughly, free from any ambiguities. We need a spec like that to ensure interoperability among browsers; or to put it another way, we need it to ensure that Web developers will be able to write Web applications and documents that behave the same way regardless of what browser is used to access them (as long as the browser conforms to the spec).

Along with that key goal of ensuring interoperability, HTML5 adds some new elements — in particular, elements designed to make it easier for developers to create Web applications, and designed to give the open Web platform greater feature parity with competing proprietary single-vendor technologies like Flash.

Web Directions

Who is your session aimed at – just hardcore HTML geeks? And what will attendees get out of it?

Michael

The session is not aimed just at hardcore HTML geeks. It’s aimed at Web professionals of any kind who are interested in finding out about the potential that HTML5 has to make their work easier and about the new features that HTML5 brings that will allow them to create more compelling content while still using truly open technologies and not relying on single-vendor proprietary solutions.