w3c

Tim Berners-Lee audio at WWW2008

I recorded W3C President Tim Berners-Lee's press conference at this week's WWW2008 conference in Beijing.

I will write about the contents later. Click here for the audio and then click on the olive-colored play button.

Please forgive the mediocre sound quality; I record for my notes, and not primarily for broadcast. I came in a few seconds late as Berners-Lee was being introduced in alternating Chinese and English. The remainder of the press conference, including questions and answers, is in English.

Other posts from WWW2008 are here, and I'm Twittering here.

Update: I was having a glitch … Read more

Episode 620: Not safe for trademark

Future of the Web coming fast and furious

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Though the favorite metaphor to describe the Web has long been a highway, or for some, a "series of tubes," the man credited with inventing it all thinks of the Web more like the human mind.

"Lots of people are doing research around the Web...and there are interesting results, but a lack of a core curriculum in the universities," Tim Berners-Lee told a gathering of scientists at HP Labs and other Silicon Valley executives here. "I've been told the Web has 10 to the 10 to the 11 (number of) … Read more

Microsoft Word files to speak to the blind

Microsoft and open-source site SourceForge plan to offer a free plug-in early next year that will convert Office 2007 files to the Daisy format, which translates text to speech.

The free tool will add a "Save as Daisy" option within Word 2007 and 2003. Daisy, or Digital Accessible Information System, XML files can be "read" aloud by speech synthesizers, paired with audio narration, and used to create electronic Braille. Users can navigate open-standard Daisy documents quickly by jumping between page elements such as headers and indexes.

The Daisy Consortium of 70 nonprofits has aimed since 1996 … Read more

W3C's openness hypocrisy: Public barred from 'public' conference

The World Wide Web Consortium, which purports to be an "open forum" for standards discussion, doesn't exactly live up to its own claims.

Earlier on Monday, the W3C barred one of my colleagues, News.com reporter Anne Broache, from attending a "Toward More Transparent Government" conference held, ironically, in a government building in Washington, D.C.

The conference Web site clearly says: "Conversations and results are public."

But Danny Weitzner, one of the W3C's policy directors and event co-chair, repeatedly claimed in a followup telephone conversation that, by "public," the … Read more