April wrap up…

Anne Van Kesteren and Marcos CaceresApril was a pretty crazy month. I held a WAF Working Group meeting at QUT, left the HTML Working Group, and then took a week off to walk the Overland Track in Tasmania (flickr photos!).

The working group meeting went well despite the fairly average attendance: we only had six members attend. I had hoped that at least 10 people would show up. On the upside, I finally got to meet Cameron McCormack and Lachlan Hunt (two new Australian recruits to the WAF Working Group) and we got lots of stuff done. The other people who attended included Art Barstow (Nokia, the Working Group chair), Guido Grassel (Nokia), and the always entertaining Anne van Kesteren (see picture, on the left). The minutes of the meeting are publically available at the w3c.

Wombat

The meeting centered around our current work:

And Anne van Kesteren gave a presentation to QUT staff and students about the future of HTML… HTML5.

The meeting took place from Tuesday the 17th to Thursday 19th of April. At the meeting we discussed Bert Bos’ review of the Widget Requirements document. We also attempted to set the scope of the the widgets 1.0 spec, and talked about how we are going to approach the development of the XBL2.0 test suite. Ian Hickson (Hixie) also phoned in to give us an update on the XBL 2.0 spec; we are hoping that Mozilla, Microsoft, and Apple will commit to implementing XBL2 but none of them have made any public commitment to date. Lachlan and I put forward a proposal on how to progress the XBL Primer. We basically reiterated what I had sent to the WAF public list a few weeks ago; that is four scenarios that cover different aspects of XBL that will be relevant to web developers: basically content reordering, simple form validation, complex form validation + XHR. The last thing we discussed was the DFAUI, and thankfully we managed convince Spanish Telefonica to move it to an incubator group… now we need to convince Coach Wie of Nexaweb. If it happens, that will be great news for WAF as it gives us more time and resources to focus on widgets, XBL and the Primer, and access-control.

The other good thing about the meeting was that we ate like pigs and drank plenty during the evenings 🙂 For the meeting, I had ordered catering for eight people and since there was only 6 of us so there was way too much food to go around. We also went out to various restaurants around the city for lunch that I had not been to before. QUT also paid for a dinner at Watt Modern Dinning (a fancy restaurant) located at Brisbane’s old powerhouse, and Nokia was kind enough to pay for our dinner on the first night. Overall, I think everyone found the meeting successful and had quite a bit of fun while they were here in Brisbane.

During the Working Group meeting the HTML Working group had progressed with its non ending bombardment of emails (over 1700!). Althought there is a handful (about 30 people) that I really respect on that list, most of the stuff posted to the list is just total crap. For example, redundant discussions about acronyms, abbr, and initialisms… and other really dumb suggestions like adding a term element. Then there were all the stupid emails that just contained “+1”. It all got too much and I decided to bail out. I think I will return to the working group once they stop generating so much email. Besides, the only useful thing I see that anyone can do is just to review the HTML 5 spec. I am happy to say that I did play a part in helping Maciej Stachowiak and others put together the first draft of the Design Principles for the HTML Working Group. I will privatly review the HTML5 spec and send feedback to the WHATWG list.

On Friday, I took Anne and Guido to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary to see some of the Australian wildlife. They have koalas, kangaroos and wallabies, (sleeping) wombats, and many birds including some impressive birds of prey (raptors). Guido left for Sydney on Friday afternoon.

On Saturday, I took Anne for a walk around the south east queensland hinterland. We did part of the Gold Coast Hinterland Great! Walk. It was not our intention to do the walk as I had the intention to do a short circuit around kondalilla falls and then take Anne down to Noosa to check out the beach. However, we failed to find the return path out of Kondalilla falls and ended up walking in a 25km circle to get back to the car! luckily, we got to see a large python and a monitor (a large lizard).

On Sunday, I took off to Tasmania to meet a friend of mine called Jesus Nuevo. Jesus has been working at the CSIRO for the last six months and was keen to walk the Overland Track before he was due to return to Spain. I have put pictures of the walk up on flickr. We did the 5 day walk in three days.