Balisage 2018

The XForms 2.0 Test Suite

Programming - we're doing it wrong

tbd

Keynote Steven Pemberton: On the description of data

4 a.m. is the new midnight

Researcher, W3C and CWI

Keynote: HTML5 is the new FlashTrack: Keynote Date: May 5, 2016 Time: 9:15 am - 10:00 am View session

Expert panelTrack: Expert panel Date: May 4, 2016 Time: 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm View session

• Internet pioneer, and usability expert involved with the Web from its very beginnings
• Researches how underlying technologies can be designed to improve the user experience
• Co-designed many of the web technologies in use today, such as HTML, XHTML, CSS, RDFa and XForms

Steven Pemberton is a researcher at CWI, The Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, Amsterdam, the first non-military internet site in Europe. His research is in interaction, and how the underlying software architecture can support users. He co-designed the ABC programming language that formed the basis for Python.

Involved with the Web since the beginning, he organised two workshops at the first Web Conference in 1994, and chaired the first W3C Style Sheets and Internationalisation workshops. For the best part of a decade he chaired the W3C HTML working group, and has co-authored many web standards, including HTML, XHTML, CSS, XForms and RDFa. He now chairs the W3C Forms working group, and was until recently a member of the ODF (Open Document Format) technical committee.

He speaks and writes regularly on the effects of technology design.

Related resources

• We wanted cat videos — so we got HTML5
• J. Boye Philadelphia 16 conference news: 5 things about the web that we need to future-prove
• J. Boye Aarhus 14 conference presentation: What do we want from the web?
• J. Boye Aarhus 08 conference keynote: Never is a long time (Disruptive Technologies and the Web)
• Steven was awarded the ACM CHI Lifetime Service Award in 2009
• XML Amsterdam 2015 Conference: HTML5 is the New Flash

Sign up and secure your ticket{.ubermenu-target .ubermenu-target-with-icon .ubermenu-item-layout-default .ubermenu-content-align-left .ubermenu-item-layout-icon_left}

Tijd: Januari 9 2015 vanaf 19.00 tot 22.00 Locatie: Pakhuis de Zwijger Website of map: http://www.dezwijger.nl/ Soort gebeurtenis: netwerkborrel, lezing Georganiseerd door: Freelance Friday

Één van de beste tradities van Freelance Friday is dat de eerste bijeenkomst in het nieuwe jaar wordt opgeluisterd met een lezing van Steven Pemberton.

Lees de preview van The Second Enlightenment

Steven is onderzoeker bij het Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam. Als lid van W3C, de organisatie die de ontwikkeling van ‘internet voor iedereen’ bewaakt, is hij co-auteur van onder meer HTML4 en CSS.

De presentatie van Steven Pemberton vrijdag 9 januari heeft een titel gekregen en Steven stuurde ons de onderstaande aanleiding en samenvatting van zijn verhaal.

The Second Enlightenment

Helping my son with his history homework, I found this paragraph in his history book: "At that time it was common practice for the church and the state to monitor everything that was said, written and printed. This practice is known as censorship. Anyone who dared to criticise the Church, the King and his officials was prohibited from speaking and could even go to prison. In most countries there were many officials who constantly screened everything that was said or written.

[...] The enlightenment thinkers were totally opposed to censorship. They wanted the freedom to express their thoughts and ideas."

Before the invention of printing, the church and state owned all access to information. The printing press released information supply from their restrictions, and enabled people to spread ideas which, many believe, led to the enlightenment.

But books still needed an expensive infrastructure of printing presses, publishers and bookshops, so that although spreading ideas became easier, it was still not straightforward. And the church state and commercial interests still did their best to control what was published.

The internet has created a new way of spreading ideas, because now everyone has the power and ability to publish, without needing an expensive infrastructure: your living-room computer can in principle reach everyone who is connected to the internet.

But as we have now become aware, this has not stopped criminal, commercial and state interests from monitoring us and using our information, or trying to stop ideas.

How bad is the problem, how can we preserve our privacy, and what needs to be done to make us less susceptible to monitoring?

Steven Pemberton

Tijd: Januari 10 2014 vanaf 19.00 tot 23.00

Locatie: Pakhuis de Zwijger Website of map: http://www.dezwijger.nl/Soort gebeurtenis: borrel, nieuwjaarsreceptie, 2014 Georganiseerd door: Freelance Friday

Traditiegetrouw verzorgt Steven Pemberton de eerste Freelance Friday van het jaar. Dat is ook ieder jaar weer een groot succes.

De presentatie is in het Engels / The presentation will be in English!

The True Cost of Content (Piracy and the Internet).

In the early days of broadcasting, newspapers prevented radio stations from broadcasting news reports for fear of competition; in the 1960's the record industry restricted the number of hours radio stations could play records; in the 1970's Hollywood tried to stop the introduction of video recorders to prevent people recording films from TV; in the 80's the record industry ran a campaign "Home taping is killing music". Existing industries are just scared of innovation.

So is file-sharing really so bad? Why do studies show that the people who file-share the most also spend the most on films and music? Why don't existing industries take advantage of file-sharing rather than try to stop it?

Before the internet, phone calls to far-away places would be more expensive than local calls. The internet has now demonstrated that this model was wrong: the cost of communication is not distance-based.

Now we see CDs of music often costing more than the DVD of a film, even though a film is much more expensive to produce. Why is this? Will the internet eventually show us the true cost of content in the same way it has shown us the true cost of communication?

Over de spreker:

Pemberton is onderzoeker bij het Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam. Als lid van het World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), de organisatie die de ontwikkeling van ‘internet voor iedereen’ bewaakt, is hij co-auteur van onder meer HTML4 en CSS.

http://www.cwi.nl/~steven

http://www.w3.org/

The Hidden Pearls of ODF (XForms and RDFa)

by Steven Pemberton

ODF Plugfest 10 London, United Kingdom

CWI Scientific Meeting

Speakers: Steven Pemberton (Distributed and Interactive Systems) and Kees Oosterlee (Scientific Computing)

Time: Friday, January 31, 13.00-14.00h

Location: CWI in Amsterdam - Euler room (Z009) Titles and abstracts are given below.

Sandwiches will be provided before the talks.  We hope to see you there!

13.00-13.30: Steven Pemberton Title: Declarative Web Applications

Abstract: XForms is a web language which, as the name suggests, was originally designed for describing forms on the web. It has a number of unusual properties, such as separation of data and presentation, abstract input-output controls that allow for easy adaptation using style-sheets, and a declarative, invariant-based computation engine. After the release of the initial 1.0 version of XForms, it was quickly realised that with a small amount of generalisation, XForms could also be used to describe more general applications than only forms. And so was born version 1.1. This has since been widely adopted in industry (for instance the KNMI is entirely XForms-based, and XForms is an integral part of the Open Document Format ODF), and allowed us to gain experience in its use. One of the interesting pieces of experience is that you can write applications in XForms at about a tenth of the cost of using a language such as Javascript. This talk will present the essential elements of XForms, and then as an example, develop a mapping application that would otherwise require thousands of lines of Javascript.

13.30-14.00: Kees Oosterlee Title: Forward – Backward, the Swinging Aspects of our Work

Abstract: In this presentation we explain how efficient numerical mathematics techniques, that proceed forward and backward in time, can be used in the context of pricing financial option products and of modern risk management at financial institutions. In particular, we discuss some changes that have taken place due to the financial crisis.

Lezing Steven Pemberton (CWI/W3C Benelux): HTTP Must Die! op ISOC.nl Nieuwjaarsreceptie, Amsterdam, 10 januari.

At the OHM conference in Geestmerambacht Steven Pemberton (CWI) and Marc Stevens (CWI) will give three lectures.

• 31 July 2013, 17.00h, room T1, Steven Pemberton: What do we Want from the Web?
• 1 August 2013, 13.00h, room T2, Marc Stevens: Counter-cryptanalysis: fire retardant for the next Flame-like attack on MD5 & SHA-1
• 1 August 2013, 17.00h, room T1, Steven Pemberton: Evolution, memory, sex, computers

Web related:

What do we Want from the Web? By Steven Pemberton

The web is now over 20 years old, but still in its infancy. Books printed 100 years ago are still readable, and available in many cases. Will we still be able to read and access websites made today in 100 years time? Or will all our content be lost to future ages? What is needed to make the web age-tolerant? What do we want from the web in both the short and long term?

Content

Despite the use of style-sheets, the current web is almost completely visually-oriented. This locks the content into one particular representation, and makes it hard to repurpose. What we need is a web that is primarily content-oriented, with a final phase of presentation; only in that way can content be repurposed in the same way that data can be.

Design for the web should be like design for a house style. It has a general style that the content can flow into.

Multi-device

We don't want to have to produce copies of our websites for each new type of platform or device. There needs to be a generic method of repurposing content to the formfactor of the device accessing it.

Accessibility

Even when we are 80, we will still want and need to use the web. How can we make our 30-year-old selves sensitive to the problem of our less-abled

Authorability

With the coming of HTML5, the web has stopped being about documents, and started being about programs. Now only programmers can produce modern web pages. What can be done to alleviate the problem?

Availability

HTTP, the protocol used for serving Web pages, has served us well for the last 20 years, but is beginning to show its age: it has become a single-point-of-failure for content. It enables DDoS attacks, makes it easy for governments and other agencies to censor sites and content, and just when a website becomes super-popular it can fail causing the website to crash and be unreachable.

This talk will cover these points, and general approaches that could be used to make a coherent future web.

Source: https://program.ohm2013.org/event/123.html

"Everything is XML, XML is Everywhere (we just couldn't knowit)"Steven Pemberton-CWI

17:00 - 18:00

When you store a photo, you can store it as a JPEG, or a PNG or in a number of other formats; when you store music you might store it as MP3, FLAC, WAV, or any number of others; when you store a film, you might store it as MPEG, XVID, or again any number of alternatives. But in the end what we really are interested in is the photo, the music and film. There are reasons to choose one format over another, but those reasons are in the service of our needs with regards to the content. Looked at in this way, XML is only there in the service of our data. There are reasons to choose XML as format, such as the interoperability, the toolchain, and the generality; but there are also reasons that people choose other formats, such as JSON, or (non-XML) HTML. From this point of view XML is just a particular serialisation of our data. This talk is about a general method that allows you to regard all formats, and all data just as different serialisations of data, and how you can get the XML serialisation out of every format, so that we can use it in our XML toolchains.