Friday, March 29, 2013

W3C Workshop: Referencing and Applying WCAG 2.0 in Different Contexts


28 March 2013
The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) today announced the Workshop on Referencing and Applying WCAG 2.0 in Different Contexts on 23 May 2013 in Brussels, Belgium. Participants will explore approaches for using Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and its supporting resources in different policy settings and contexts. The Workshop is open to policy-makers, users, developers, accessibility experts, researchers, and others interested in adopting, referencing, and applying WCAG 2.0. If you are interested in participating, please submit a statement of interest by 23 April 2013. Learn more about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Role Attribute Published as W3C Recommendation


28 March 2013
The Protocols and Formats Working Group (PFWG) published Role Attribute as a W3C Recommendation. Role Attribute is an XML attribute that allows authors to add semantic information to documents. Role Attribute supports WAI-ARIA, the Accessible Rich Internet Applications technical specification for making dynamic, interactive web content accessible to people with disabilities. Learn about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

W3C Invites Implementations of XSLT and XQuery Serialization 3.0


28 March 2013
The XSLT Working Group and the XML Query Working Group have published a Candidate Recommendation of XSLT and XQuery Serialization 3.0. This document defines serialization of an instance of the data model as defined in XQuery and XPath Data Model (XDM) 3.0 into a sequence of octets. Serialization is designed to be a component that can be used by other specifications such as XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 3.0 or XQuery 3.0: An XML Query Language. Learn more about the XML Activity.

Friday, March 15, 2013

CSS Paged Media Module Level 3 Draft Published, CSS Print Profile Note Published


14 March 2013
The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published two documents :
  • A Working Draft of CSS Paged Media Module Level 3. This module describes the page model that partitions a flow into pages. It builds on the Box model module and introduces and defines the page model and paged media. It adds functionality for pagination, page margins, page size and orientation, headers and footers, widows and orphans, and image orientation. Finally it extends generated content to enable page numbering and running headers / footers.
  • A Group Note of CSS Print Profile. This specification defines a subset of Cascading Style Sheets Level 2, revision 1 and CSS Paged Media Level 3 for printing across multiple devices and media types. It is designed for printing in situations where it is not feasible or desirable to install a printer-specific driver, and for situations were some variability in the output is acceptable. This profile is designed to work in conjunction with XHTML-Print and defines a minimum level of conformance as well as an extension set that provides stronger layout control for the printing of mixed text and images, tables and image collections.
Learn more about the Style Activity.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Tips to great content architecture across your organization

Here are some tips to great content architecture across your organization.

1. Make sure that your website has the most useful and functional information architecture possible
Make sure that multiple pages don’t have similar or thin content. Will your website’s visitors be confused at all? Is the page they access relevant to the information they’re looking for? Don’t ever confuse your visitors, and don’t ever show them something they aren’t looking for. Keep it simple!

2. Make sure that the copy on your website speaks to your customer
Keyword research is a huge part of this. You must make absolutely certain that anyone writing web copy has access to (and understands) your keyword research. Make sure they use this research in the writing and development of web copy – if your core demographic is high school children, don’t write using the vocabulary of someone with a PHD.

3. Although your meta keywords tag is not helpful in search engine optimization, it can be helpful in collaboration.
Often, a company will spend countless dollars and time on research about how to speak to their customer, how to create the best marketing calls, marketing segments, and then a copywriter will change the message without realizing all of the energy that was put into the message. To help avoid this, make sure the copywriter has coordinated site wide, and make sure they incorporate the correct keywords into the content. Don’t focus too much on keyword density, but rather on providing valuable content.

4. Remember that every page of your site is a possible entry point.
Every page of your website is a possible entry point for your customer and should be developed using this mentality. Make sure that each page clearly states the primary subject, provides contextual navigation and momentum about the rest of the website, helps the visitor complete a task/find what they were looking for, and to motivate the visitor into your sales funnel. Pages often don’t have a strong call to action and conversions may suffer greatly.

Your corporation should create a checklist for each page to ensure all of these actions get met.

5. Make sure that your website has a great internal linking structure.
This is absolutely crucial to make sure that you have an easily crawlable website. At least one internal link should be in place to each page of your website. A page that does not have an internal link to it is called an “orphan page” and will never be seen by the search engines.

6. Think about what you’re going to link to from the home page.
Your website’s home page is the page that most visitors will see – so it’s important that you link to your most important pages. Search engines also recognize this, and they use your home page link architecture as a sign of what your most important pages are.

About the Author: Andrew Hallinan is the owner of Tampa Search Engine Optimization company, and is Tampa Bay's leading Search Marketing Specialist. Andrew Hallinan has more free tips and advice at his blog. 

Sunday, March 10, 2013

WAI-ARIA 1.0 Authoring Practices Draft with Updated Guidance

07 March 2013

The Protocols and Formats Working Group (PFWG) has published an updated Working Draft of WAI-ARIA 1.0 Authoring Practices: An author's guide to understanding and implementing Accessible Rich Internet Applications. It provides detailed advice and examples to make widgets, navigation, and behaviors accessible using WAI-ARIA roles, states, and properties. It is primarily for web application developers, and is also useful for user agent and assistive technology developers. Please send comments by 5 April 2013. Learn more from the call for review e-mail and read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Metadata for the Multilingual Web - Usage Scenarios and Implementations Draft Published

07 March 2013

The MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Metadata for the Multilingual Web - Usage Scenarios and Implementations. This document introduces a variety of usage scenarios and applications for the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0, ranging from simple machine translation or human translation quality check to training for machine translation systems or automatic text analysis. Many of the underlying implementations will be showcased in the upcoming W3C MultilingualWeb Workshop 12-13 March in Rome. Learn more about the Internationalization Activity.

Linked Data Platform 1.0 Draft Published

07 March 2013

The Linked Data Platform (LDP) Working Group has published a Working Draft of Linked Data Platform 1.0. This document specifies a set of best practices and simple approach for a read-write Linked Data architecture, based on HTTP access to web resources that describe their state using the RDF data model. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.