Standardistas and accessibilitistas: This call to action via 456 Berea St concerns a disturbing direction the next HTML specification is heading in. Roger Johansson writes:

What is currently going on in the W3C HTML Working Group is very disappointing and something I never expected to see when I joined it. I was naive enough to think that everybody joining the HTML WG would be doing so out of a desire to improve the Web. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case […]

In Roger’s opinion, if nothing is done, “the next version of HTML will do nothing to improve the Web,” and conscientious designers will be “better off sticking to HTML 4.01 Strict.”

So, if you have an interest in improving the accessibility of HTML, want more semantic and less presentational markup, and are good at arguing your case, apply for HTML Working Group membership by following the instructions for joining the HTML Working Group. Do it now.

The New York Web Standards Meetup Group and the New York Semantic Web Meetup Group will be meeting at theMechanism on 17 May 2007 at 6:30 pm to discuss Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA). UIMA is a framework used to create computer applications that can acquire unstructured information in its raw form and/or its analysis and use in software tools such as databases, search engines, and knowledge management systems. William Surowiec to present. RSVP now!

19 April 2007 . 6:30 pm
theMechanism|eEmerge
440 9th Avenue 8th Floor
New York, NY 10001 [map]

Please contact us if you’d like to present at the June or July Meetup.

In this useful article, “Query String Removal Helpful?”, Joe questions the standard wisdom that query string removal aids search engine optimization (SEO). His conclusion—semantic links are best (content is king), but the presence or absence of querystring parameters is cosmetic.

The New York Web Standards Meetup Group and the New York Semantic Web Meetup Group will be meeting at theMechanism on 19 April 2007 at 6:30 pm to discuss webcam motion tracking using Flash and query languages for RDF. Jqln to present.

19 April 2007 . 6:30 pm
theMechanism|eEmerge
440 9th Avenue 8th Floor
New York, NY 10001 [map]

Please contact us if you’d like to present at the May or June Meetup.

These are the notes to my recent presentation on AJAX and forms to the New York Web Standards Meetup Group. These notes were purposefully left open and vague to facilitate discussion based on attendees’ interests—during the presentation a lot of good questions were asked. That dialogue is not represented here.

Hello, my name is Jeffrey Barke. I’m the Senior Developer and Information Architect for the US office of theMechanism and I plan on talking briefly about how to easily use AJAX to improve the usability of forms and admin/control panel interfaces.

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Updated mini AJAX yesterday after I discovered a function name conflict in Internet Explorer 7. This conflict only occurs if one is using mini AJAX in tandem with Prototype [which we do all the time]. For some unknown reason, this hadn’t been a problem for any of the other browsers [Safari, Firefox on Mac and Firefox, Opera on PC], but it caused the script to fail ignominiously in Internet Explorer 7.

So, if you downloaded mini AJAX from this site prior to 16 March 2007 and plan on using it with Prototype or script.aculo.us, please download the latest version here.

The New York Web Standards Meetup Group will be meeting at theMechanism on 22 March 2007 at 6:30 pm to discuss AJAX and form handling. We plan on giving a form submission demo utilizing mini AJAX and JSON.

22 March 2007 . 6:30 pm
theMechanism|eEmerge
440 9th Avenue 8th Floor
New York, NY 10001 [map]