“This document explains how and why using web standards will let you build websites in a way that saves time and money for the developer and provides a better experience for the visitor. Also discussed are other methods, guidelines and best practices that will help produce high-quality websites that are accessible to as many as possible.” (Roger Johansson – 456 Berea Street)

“Ultimately, the push for standards-compliant code should come from the coding ranks. We need to enlighten all levels of management to the savings they can achieve by embracing Web standards. If the people on the front lines don’t take on the job of promoting standards to management and management learns of these savings first, you’ll be faced with a tougher challenge-why didn’t you know to use and push for standards-compliant code?” (Alan K’necht – Digital Web Magazine)

“On the web, CSS is the style sheet language of choice. However, the usefulness of CSS is not limited to screens. If you want to transfer web content — be it XML or HTML — onto paper, there are good reasons to use CSS. The language is radically simpler than that of XSL, and it is suitable both on-screen and on paper. This means that you probably don’t have to write a stylesheet at all but can reuse an existing one.” (Håkon Wium Lie and Michael Day – xml.com)

“SMIL 2.0 has the following two design goals: (1) Define an XML-based language that allows authors to write interactive multimedia presentations. Using SMIL 2.0, an author can describe the temporal behavior of a multimedia presentation, associate hyperlinks with media objects and describe the layout of the presentation on a screen. (2) Allow reusing of SMIL 2.0 syntax and semantics in other XML-based languages, in particular those who need to represent timing and synchronization. For example, SMIL 2.0 components are used for integrating timing into XHTML and into SVG.” (W3C)

“As an experiment in the use of SMIL, a captioned version of Jeffrey Zeldman’s Web Essentials 04 video keynote, using Quicktime SMIL 1.0.” (splintered)

“The World Wide Web uses relatively simple technologies with sufficient scalability, efficiency and utility that they have resulted in a remarkable information space of interrelated resources, growing across languages, cultures, and media. In an effort to preserve these properties of the information space as the technologies evolve, this architecture document discusses the core design components of the Web. They are identification of resources, representation of resource state, and the protocols that support the interaction between agents and resources in the space. We relate core design components, constraints, and good practices to the principles and properties they support.” (W3C)

“So what does media-neutral content look like? It focuses on tasks and concepts, not on chapters and appendixes. It follows the same basic information design principles that have informed good manual design and good online design for decades: task orientation, minimalism, and scenario-based development. If you author tasks and concepts, rather than sections and paragraphs, you have the makings of a topic collection that can be reordered for different needs, supporting different task flows for different users, and supporting different reading paths for different media. ” (Don Day, Erik Hennum, John Hunt, Michael Priestley, David Schell, Nancy Harrison – WritersUA)

“The World Wide Web’s markup language has always been HTML. HTML was primarily designed as a language for semantically describing scientific documents, although its general design and adaptations over the years has enabled it to be used to describe a number of other types of documents. The main area that has not been adequately addressed by HTML is a vague subject referred to as Web Applications. This specification attempts to rectify this.” (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group)

Unfinished version of an essay on ‘Web applications’. – “The light-weight, Web-based applications (‘webapps’) of this essay are small, platform-independent programs that are downloaded on demand and execute inside a client program, such as a browser. They are thus like Java applets, but more ‘script-like’ than ‘program-like’ and therefore easier to write in many cases (though harder in others). They have a clearly separated user interface, that allows webapps to be easily adapted to different devices.” (Bert Bos – The W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents Position Papers)

“This essay is an excerpt from the book ‘Peer-to-Peer Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies’. It presents the goals that drive the developers of the best-known peer-to-peer systems, the problems they’ve faced, and the technical solutions they’ve found.” (Rael Dornfest and Dan Brickley – O’Reilly openP2P)

“(…) the project seeks to define and develop a system is focused on the simulation and communication of complex ideas. We call this ‘communication enhancement’ – the direct extension of the abilities of humans to develop, understand, and describe even the most complex simulations.” (About Croquet)

Doug Bowman Presentation at Web Essentials 04 – “Building designs with CSS is no longer a fringe activity practiced by standards geeks and early-adopters. Creative pioneers and highly skilled designers are bringing CSS to the mainstream. The explosion in popularity is ushering in a new wave of possibilities for web design. CSS provides greater design control, allows more flexibility, and enables sites to become attractive, accessible, and faster-loading, all at the same time.” (Stopdesign) – courtesy of elearningpost

“The World Wide Web is an information space of interrelated resources. This information space is the basis of, and is shared by, a number of information systems. Within each of these systems, people and software retrieve, create, display, analyze, relate, and reason about resources. Web architecture defines the information space in terms of identification of resources, representation of resource state, and the protocols that support the interaction between agents and resources in the space.” (W3C)

“The purpose of the SPARK project is to create a flexible, interoperable SVG-based user interface framework. Using well established and standardized languages including SVG, XML, Java and IDL, we went about creating a framework that could easily be used by others to rapidly develop SVG based applications or prototypes.” (SVG Open 2003)

“Generally speaking, standards are a means to apply pressure on corporations to behave in a manner that is beneficial to everyone, not just the shareholders of the corporation.” (Andrei Michael Herasimchuk – Design by Fire)

“With all the discussion about separating presentation from content (and structure), it’s easy to lose track of the goal. So let’s step back, define our terms, and take a look at why it matters.” (Michael Cohen – A List Apart)

“The specifications in the Matrix are at least at Last Call stage, except if they are working on a Test Suite at Working Draft stage. An empty cell means that the data is either not available or not known by the maintainers of the Matrix. The Matrix contains 70 Recommendations, 18 Candidate Recommendations, 0 Proposed Recommendations and 15 Last Call Working Drafts.” (W3C)

“Mixing the worlds of documents, programming, and visual design is a familiar experience for XML developers, especially when dealing with presentation technologies like SVG. Such mixtures can produce exciting new representations of information.” (Fabio Arciniegas A. – XML.com)

“Even though Web standards are being embraced by many Web authors, some businesses are reluctant to invest in standards-based Web sites without concrete reasons to do so. To help Web authors interested in advocating Web standards, this article assembles arguments and information about Web standards into one document and explains Web standards in terms of how they affect business.” (MACCAWS) – courtesy of elearningpost

“The number of wireless visitors using tiny browsers with ever increasing capacities is unlikely to diminish.” (Heidi Pollock – Webmonkey) – courtesy of nick finck