Standards veteran and darling of the mobile industry, Robin Berjon, gives us the details about the W3C’s upcoming Device APIs and Policy Working Group (draft charter), which is slated to start later this year. The new working group is promising to add a range of new APIs to the Web and Widgets, which could potentially see the [HTML5] Web platform being able to compete with native apps on functionality.
Introducing DAP! but will it suck? from Standards Suck on Vimeo.
During TPAC 08, Lachy got-a-chattin’ with Richard Ishida – the W3C’s Internationalization (i18n) activity lead. Richard gives an insight into all the complexities that the i18n activity is trying to deal with. Richard is a wonderful speaker with tremendously knowledgeable of all things 18n; he gives some great descriptions of i18n problems in this little interview. If you are new to i18n, I think you will find this video very insightful.
At TPAC 2008, Anne talked to the co-chair of the W3C’s CSS Working Group, Daniel Glazman. Daniel explains that at CSS-WG meeting, Dean Jackson, who recently left the W3C to work for Apple, put forward proposals for how to do CSS animations, CSS transitions, and CSS transformations – which, according to the WebKit blog, have been implemented in WebKit. Anyway, despite this video only coming out now, as it’s the CSS Working Group, which moves at near glacial speeds, all this is still highly relevant 
Daniel also talks about a project, called BlueGriffon, he has been working on to create an open-source, cross-platform, WYSIWYG editor based on XUL runner. Daniel claims his editor will be different to what is out there as it will be more focus on Web designers work flows and design strategies using templates. Sounds pretty neat.
At TPAC 2008, Anne talked to Karl Dubost (twitter), who at the time was working for the W3C (he is now the development director at vdl2 in Montreal, Canada). Karl was, and still is, involved with the HTML5 activity. Karl was also involved in the W3C’s Quality Assurance process as “the conformance manager”: something that, IMHO, is now sorely lacking at the W3C – part of why standards suck, I guess .
Anyway, let Karl tell you about the social tools of the W3C that enable specs to be created… and if you get bored, you can just look at his lesbian orgy t-shirt! 
I (Marcos) took a brief break while I was finishing my PhD and I moved to Norway to work for Opera Software, which has been pretty awesome I have to admit. Anyway, we have a few left over videos from TPAC 2008 that I never got around to publishing… So, sorry about that! Over the next three weeks we will be publishing what is left. The videos are still highly relevant and very informative.
We have also lined up some fantastic fresh interviews for the next few weeks. And we will all be back at TPAC this year, for more of our gorilla guerrilla interviews, documenting the shameless debauchery of the W3C stars, and hopefully to uncover the true identity of Mr Last Week
At TPAC08, Lachlan and Geoffrey Sneddon (gsnedders) had a chat at TPAC about some interesting work Geoffrey has been doing on a spec generator that makes use of HTML5 parsing and some other interesting things. They also pay a salute to everyone’s favorite chroniqueur of the WHAT WG youth: Mr Lastweekinhtml5!
During TPAC, Lachlan caught up with Ian Hickson (Hixie), editor of the HTML 5 specification. Hixie discusses the tools he uses to gather and respond to feedback, which is fundamental to the open development of the standard. Hixie clarifies the whole “when will HTML5 be ready?!” thing and gives us some details about what part of the spec he is working on now.
The YouTube video Ian mentions showing off HTML5 features in today’s cutting-edge browsers:
Ways you can track editorial changes to HTML5:
Whoa! Apologies for dropping off the radar! I was supposed to upload this video before Anne and I took off to Tanzania to climb Mt Kilimanjaro, but had a crazy week at work and didn’t get time. Anyway, here is the Anne’s, Lachlan’s, and Marcos’ take on TPAC. What we learned, some interesting (and hopefully still relevant) news about the W3C, and a summary of what some of the key working groups (HTML, Web Apps, CSS) reached consensus on during the week! Enjoy!
On top of the roof of Africa, Marcos and I took a nineteen second holiday break to bring you the following Standards Suck episode. It hopefully explains why we went on hiatus for a while. Publishing of the remaining episodes made during TPAC will hopefully resume shortly.
While relaxing by the beach in Mandelieu, Ben Millard and Lachlan Hunt had a chat about contributing to HTML working group. In particular, Ben discusses how he studied data tables used on the web and how that led to creating an improved algorithm for understanding the structure of a table, helping to improve accessibility.