Standards Suck » Anne van Kesteren

Tim Berners-Lee on government data

marcosc — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:46:51 +0000

During TPAC, we sat down for a chat with the Director of the W3C, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. During the interview, Tim filled us in about his goals for this year with regards to getting the world’s governments to open up the people’s data (yes “raw data now!”). We grilled him about what that means: does it really mean “raw” or is it really an RDF conspiracy? Tim has some great anecdotes about the uses of raw data and what we, as citizens, can achieve if we work together and get governments to give us raw data now! (don’t be shy! shout it out! I sure as hell did).

Tim Berners Lee on Govenment Data from Standards Suck on Vimeo.

Standards Suck at TPAC 2009

admin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:47:52 +0000

We’ve never been really fast at Standards Suck. There is no rush since the end result of most standards is already known. This time around we taped the introduction to TPAC 2009 after the event, in a somewhat tired state on the day we would leave the Bay Area. Fun fact: arriving fifty minutes before take off does not go down well with the people behind the supposedly closed down check-in counters.

TPAC Intro from Standards Suck on Vimeo.

I suppose I can also make a minor announcement here. The moment implementations of video in Web browsers are somewhat more stable we will start serving Ogg Theora instead. And with a bit of luck we’ll be able to include captions and all as well at that point.

Coming soon to CSS…

marcosc — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:00:37 +0000

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.

Conforming to Karl

marcosc — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:00:01 +0000

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!

TPAC Wrap-up

marcosc — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 02:30:12 +0000

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!

Uhuru Peak

admin — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:40:57 +0000

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.

Alex Mogilevsky on CSS and Internet Explorer 8

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 06:13:45 +0000

Anne interviewed Alex Mogilevsky here in Mandelieu during TPAC on CSS and the new Internet Explorer. Alex is a developer on the IE Team working on the new IE8 layout engine. He also participates in the W3C CSS Working Group.

Standards Suck at TPAC 2008!

marcosc — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 10:06:21 +0000

Anne, Lachlan, and Marcos will be bringing you coverage from W3C’s most important event of the year: Technical Plenary / Advisory Committee Meetings Week (TPAC). It’s basically W3C’s social event where all the working groups have a chance to intermingle, exchange ideas, eat too much and get really drunk! yes, we will have the cameras ready to catch all the action!:)

In this episode, Marcos and Anne talk about which groups are meeting throughout the week and other happenings.

If you want us to interview anyone in particular, please let us know!

W3C digging the XML grave

Lachlan Hunt — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:07:00 +0000

Anne van Kesteren sat down with Simon Pieters to talk about the impact of XML on the mobile web, who gave a surprising insight into its failure. They discuss the level of support for XML vocabularies in mobile browsers, and what mobile browsers have been forced to do for compatibility with legacy content.

Everything HTML5 but the kitchen sink

admin — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 05:08:44 +0000

Pattern theorists have suggested Steve Faulkner will be hosting this show, but this is not the case. In fact, it’s Lachlan and I, Anne, again. With Marcos adding our awesome music.

HTML5 has recently been published again by the W3C and this podcast introduces the new features and some of the old. data-* attributes, ruby annotations (not programming), global tabindex attribute, et cetera.

Documents that published by the W3C are HTML5, HTML 5 differences from HTML 4, and HTML 5 Publication Notes.