Dec 12, 2008 Posted by Herko on Dec 12, 2008 in All things Web, Professional notes | 0 comments

W3C news

This week, the W3C announced two inter­est­ing bits of news, news I’d like to share with you.

The World Wide Web Con­sor­tium announced yes­ter­day that it has for­mally adopted the next ver­sion of the Web Con­tent Acces­si­bil­ity Guide­lines (WCAG 2.0)  as an offi­cial rec­om­men­da­tio. This is a big step towards eWCAG 2 becom­ing a web stan­dard. The cre­ation of the WCAG 2.0 spec­i­fi­ca­tion has been a long and ardu­ous process, but the W3C promised to show a result by the end of this year. And so they have.

11 Decem­ber 2008 — Today W3C announces a new stan­dard that will help Web design­ers and devel­op­ers cre­ate sites that bet­ter meet the needs of users with dis­abil­i­ties and older users. Draw­ing on exten­sive expe­ri­ence and com­mu­nity feed­back, the Web Con­tent Acces­si­bil­ity Guide­lines (WCAG) 2.0 improve upon W3C’s ground­break­ing ini­tial stan­dard for acces­si­ble Web con­tent. [source:W3C  press release]

The W3C hails WCAG 2.0 as the “Stan­dard that Defines Acces­si­bil­ity for Next Gen­er­a­tion Web”. the impact of WCAG 2.0 is big, on web­sites that need to con­form to acces­si­bil­ity stan­dards like gov­erne­ment and edu­caion web­sites, and for qual­ity frame­works such as the Dutch Web Guide­lines –where I work. W3C has listed a num­ber of doc­u­ments in their press release explain­ing the impact on var­i­ous aspects such as design and changes from WCAG 1.0.

W3C val­ida­tors need your money!

In other W3C news, Molly Holzschlag –the well known and respected web stan­dards guru– posted a call for com­mu­nity sup­port for the much used W3C val­ida­tor ser­vices. Appar­ently, the W3C’s val­ida­tor ser­vices cost so much in infra­struc­ture and band­width, tha this is too much of a strain on the W3C bud­get. So they launched the Val­ida­tor Dona­tion and Spon­sor­ship Cam­paign. Molly explains:

It works like this:

• Donor: A donor is any­one inter­ested in donat­ing money to the cause. A micro­pay­ment of 1.00 USD if the val­ida­tor “saves your day” can be very helpful!
• Spon­sor: A spon­sor is a com­pany or orga­ni­za­tion that donates to the W3C
• Com­mu­nity Fundrais­ing: There are two badges avail­able at the W3C that link to the fundrais­ing page. If you sup­port the val­ida­tor, encour­age oth­ers by plac­ing a badge on your site and blog­ging about the topic
• Time Not Money: If you can­not or do not wish to donate money, your time is as or even more valu­able. There are oppor­tu­ni­ties to help the W3C main­tain and grow val­i­da­tion services.

So if you’re a reg­u­lar user of the val­ida­tor ser­vices, please help out and show your support!

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