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HTML Writers Guild Guild Operations News

Guild News and Announcements

Recent Announcements

  1. Merger of HTML Writers Guild and International Webmasters Association-IWA [30 August 2001]

Older News

  1. The Guild co-sponsors Accessibility Symposium [11 September 2000]
  2. The Guild Welcomes two new employees! [22 June 2000]
  3. April is Accessibility Month! [10 April 2000]
  4. AWARE Center Advisory Board Announced [10 April 2000]
  5. New Executive Committee Selected [10 April 2000]
  6. Annual HWG Member Meeting, 24 February. [5 February 2000]
  7. WAI Authoring Tool Guidelines Announced. [5 February 2000]
  8. W3C Releases XHTML Specification. [5 February 2000]
  9. Searchbutton Search-Enables HWG Site. [9 January 2000]
  10. Upcoming Events for 2000. [9 January 2000]
  11. HWG Partners with Project Gutenberg. [19 December 1999]
  12. Guild Newsletter Features Member "Tips." [19 December 1999]
  13. New Governing Board Members Appointed. [21 November 1999]
  14. Guild Adopts Web Accessibility Policy. [21 November 1999]
  15. HWG Membership Certificates Now Available. [9 November 1999]
The Guild co-sponsors Accessibility Symposium

The HTML Writers Guild is proud to co-sponsor the Universal Web Accessibility Symposium 2000, to be held on October 31, 2000 in conjunction with the WebNet 2000 World Conference on the WWW and Internet in San Antonio, Texas.  Speakers will include the director of the Guild's Accessible Web Authoring Resources and Education (AWARE) Center.

The Universal Web Accessibility Symposium will address the legal and technical requirements for universal accessibility to the Internet, and will explore the connections between access by aging adults (the fastest-growing demographic group using the Web) and physically challenged individuals.  Specific topics include:

         
  • Resources to make information originators' job         responsibilities clearer regarding accessibility      
  • Legal mandates for universal accessibility      
  • Verification standards for web accessibility      
  • Web accommodation techniques for seniors and         physically challenged individuals

Speakers will include Cynthia Waddell, ADA Coordinator for the City of San Jose (and AWARE Center advisory board member); Dinah Cowen, Director of the Department of Defense Computer/Electronic Accommodations Program;  LTC John Hill and LTC Curt Carver, Assistant Professors, West Point; Cyndi Rowland, Director of Web Accessibility In Mind (WebAIM), Utah State University; Kynn Bartlett, AWARE Center Director, HTML Writers Guild; and others!

This Symposium is sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), Southwest Texas State University College of Health Professionals, the HTML Writers Guild, and the Institute for Quality Improvement in Long Term Health Care at Southwest Texas State University.  Mette Baker is the Program Coordinator, and Dr. Deanie French is the Program Chair.

For more information on the Symposium, please see the following web sites:

      http://www.awarecenter.org/uwas2000.html
      http://www.swt.edu/~df12/accessiblity/symposium.htm

In addition to the Universal Web Accessibility Symposium, the Guild is also represented at the WebNet 2000 conference by Frank Boumphrey, who will be presenting a workshop on XML.  For details on WebNet 2000, please see:

      http://www.aace.org/conf/webnet/

[11 September 2000]
The Guild Welcomes two new employees!

The Guild would like to extend a warm welcome to two new full-time employees that have joined our staff this Spring.

Chris Weiss joined our staff in mid-April as an Accounting Clerk. She brings a large array of organizational skills which have already proven to be a great asset to our Florida office. If you have contact with us regarding membership and class payments, or any other matters handled by our Treasurer staff, you'll most likely be speaking with Chris!

Marshall Jansen who some of you may know as our volunteer VP of Marketing and Outreach, came on board full-time last week as our Senior Web Developer. Marshall will be responsible for the maintenance and production of the Guild's primary Web site, and will be assisting in the maintenance of our Web Crossings server used for the HWG Online Education program, and the Guild's online bookstore, The Bookmark. Marshall joins us remotely from his home off the coast of Mobile Bay in Fairhope, Alabama.

We're happy to have both Chris and Marshall on staff, helping us to provide you with faster service and the most up to date resources on the Web as possible!

[22 June 2000]

April is Accessibility Month!

April 2000 has been designated as the Guild's third annual Web Accessibility Month, a month-long focus on the very important issue of web accessibility!

By "accessible", we mean a web site that can be used by everyone, regardless of disability. Unfortunately, many web pages being created are not accessible, because they have unnecessary, artificial barriers to access -- cutting out parts of their own audience!

Accessibility problems are very common and present major obstacles to a number of web users. For example, images that are not labeled with the ALT attribute cannot be understood by the screenreaders often used by blind computer users. Deaf users cannot understand the sound tracks of multimedia files, unless transcripts are provided. Users with dexterity or mobility disabilities may not be able to use a mouse or keyboard to access a site.

In order to make an accessible web site, web authors need to have an understanding of "non-standard access methods" -- in other words, more than just the latest version of Netscape or Internet Explorer running on a desktop or laptop. The techniques that provide access for people with disabilities can also make a web site usable by people with mobile access devices such as cell phones or PDAs; by users connecting via web appliances such as WebTV; and by users who have older hardware and software.

Links: [10 April 2000]

AWARE Center Advisory Board Announced

To help us meet our goal of being the premier resource on accessible web design, the AWARE Center has recruited a panel of distinguished experts in the field. We are pleased to announce the following individuals as charter members of the AWARE Center Advisory Board:

  • Kathleen Anderson, State of Connecticut
  • Mike Burks, Internet Society
  • Deanie French, Southwest Texas University
  • Charles McCathieNevile, World Wide Web Consortium
  • Gregory Rosmaita, Visually Impaired Computer Users Group of New York
  • Cynthia Waddell, City of San Jose
  • Bebo White, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

Our thanks go out to these individuals for their commitment of time and expertise!

Links: [10 April 2000]

New Executive Committee Selected

Joe Cline (joe@hwg.org) has been selected President, this is his second time in the seat! Joe was also re-selected for his position as VP of Technology.

Frank Boumphrey has been selected Treasurer, and was re-selected for VP of Events.

Marshall Jansen (marshall@hwg.org) has been selected as VP of Marketing and Outreach.

Leanne Phillips (leanne@hwg.org) has been re-selected for both Secretary and VP of Member Education.

Fred Barnett (fred@hwg.org) has been re-selected for Assistant Secretary.

In addition, Ann Navarro (ann@hwg.org) also holds a seat on the EC, for her staff position as the HWG Chief Operation Officer (COO).

The Executive Committee (EC) runs the day to day operations of the Guild, from classes to events to advertising and the budget. They are selected from the Governing Board, and hold their positions for a year at a time.

Links: [10 April 2000]

Annual HWG Member Meeting, 24 February.

Each year, the HTML Writers Guild holds our official online meeting to which all members are invited. This year's meeting will be held in place of the February Town Hall meeting. The details for this meeting are:

Year 2000 Annual HWG Membership Meeting
Date Thursday, 24 February 2000
Time 6:30 p.m. PST, 9:30 p.m. EST
Server HWG Interactive, http://interact.hwg.org/
IRC irc.hwg.org, port 6667
Channel#meeting

To connect, either go to HWG Interactive and use the Java-based client available via the web, or use your favorite IRC client and join channel #meeting.

The agenda for the 2000 membership meeting consists of:

  • 1. Welcome and Introduction of GB Members
  • 2. State of the Guild Summary
  • 3. Membership Numbers and Growth
  • 4. Financial Overview and Treasurer's Report
  • 5. News on Specific Guild Activities:
    • A. Online Education Program
    • B. Accessible Web Authoring Resources and Education Center
    • C. The Mailing List Program
    • D. HWG Participation in the W3C
    • E. Project Gutenberg and XML Activities
    • F. Conference Attendance and Speaker's Bureau
  • 6. Future Goals of the HWG
  • 7. Appreciation and Thanks to the 1999-2000 Board
  • 8. Official Adjournment
  • 9. Question and Answer Session (informal)

We hope to see you all there -- remember, all members of the Guild are welcome!


Links: [5 February 2000]

WAI Authoring Tool Guidelines Announced.

The World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative develops a number of specifications designed to enhance the access of people with disabilities to web content and software. On 3 February 2000, they released the 1.0 version of the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, a road map for people who make HTML editors and other web creation utilities so that their programs can be used by people with disabilities, and the output of their programs can be used by anyone on the web.

The HTML Writers Guild was pleased to be one of the contributors to this specification.

For more information web accessibility, including advice on how to make sure your web pages can be used by people with disabilities, please see the Guild's Accessible Web Authoring Resources and Education Center.


Links: [5 February 2000]

W3C Releases XHTML Specification.

On 26 January 2000, the World Wide Web Consortium released the newest flavor of HTML -- XHTML. The HTML Writers Guild is proud to have played a role in the development of this specification, and we would like to thank Ann Navarro and Frank Boumphrey for their dedication and hard work in the W3C's HTML Working Group.

But what is XHTML, and what does it mean to members of the Guild?

WHAT IS XHTML?

To understand that, first we need to review what HTML is. Hypertext Markup Language was created as an "application" of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), which is a "meta-language" for describing other markup languages.

Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) is simply a version of HTML but defined as an application of XML (Extensible Markup Language). XML was developed as another "meta-language", not as complex as SGML but powerful enough for use in web environments.

WHY XHTML?

Why an XML-based HTML, if we already have "normal" HTML? By using XHTML, we have access to the strengths of XML -- extensibility and interoperability. Developers can extend XHTML through modules, DTDs, schemas, and incorporation of other XML-based languages. XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations), which allow XML documents to be easily changed from one representation to another, will make it easy to adapt XHTML pages for a wide variety of browsers and user agents.

WHAT IS XHTML LIKE?

If you're already familiar with HTML 4.01, you'll find that XHTML 1.0 offers the same features and abilities you've always had. (Future versions of XHTML will expand beyond simply "translating" the HTML specification into XML.)

There are some differences in syntax, however; the most notable ones include:

  • Documents must be "well formed" -- an XML term meaning that tags must match and be nested properly
  • Element and attribute names must be in lower case
  • For non-empty elements, end tags are required -- no more optional </P> or </LI> tags
  • Attribute values must always be enclosed in quotes
  • Empty elements must either have an end tag, or the start tag must end with />

If you're like at least half of the web designers out there, the second bullet point above might stand out and you may be asking:

WHY LOWER CASE?

In HTML, tags and attributes are not case sensitive. This means that <BODY>, <body>, <Body>, and even <bOdY> refer to the same thing; you can have your opening tag be <body> and your closing tag </BODY>, and it all works fine. XML, the language used to build XHTML, is case sensitive. <Body> is considered a different tag from <BODY>, <body>, or <bOdY>, in XML. Because of this, a standard for XHTML tags had to be set -- and the most likely choices were "all uppercase" (such as <BODY>), or "all lowercase" (such as <body>). In the end, lowercase won out, although it really could have gone either way; a semi-arbitrary choice had to be made.

DO CURRENT BROWSERS SUPPORT XHTML?

No and yes. Current browser releases do not speak XHTML, they speak HTML. However, it is possible to write XHTML in a way that is compatible with HTML, and will not break on existing HTML-based browsers. These are described in Appendix C of the XHTML specification.

As an example, the "hr" (horizontal rule) tag must be closed, and would normally be written in XHTML as either <hr/> or <hr></hr>. However, this will confuse many existing HTML-based browsers; instead, you can write the tag as <hr /> -- note the space. This is legitimate XHTML and is compatible with HTML browsers.


Links: [5 February 2000]

Searchbutton Search-Enables HWG Site.

Have you been by the Guild's homepage lately? It's got a new look to it, and features our new site search engine, provided by the good people at Searchbutton.com. We've also updated the Guild's stylesheet, to give a clean, crisp, green look to the site.

Searchbutton.com is a company that provides sites with search capabilities without requiring the installation of a site search engine program or CGI script. Instead, Searchbutton spiders your site remotely and creates a searchable database; you can then search-enable your site by adding a simple HTML form.

In addition to saving us the time we'd have spent setting up and configuring a search program, Searchbutton.com also provides the Guild with useful statistics on which IP addresses and hostnames are using our site, what the most popular search terms on hwg.org are, and which searches produce no matches. The last type of report could be the most useful, as it tells us areas that we can improve our content offerings!


Links: [9 January 2000]

Upcoming Events for 2000.

As part of our ongoing Speakers Bureau program, we are pleased to present this list of upcoming industry events at which the Guild will be participating.

VBits
San Francisco, CA
Feb 12 - Feb 17, 2000
Frank Boumphrey will be speaking on using VB and XML to create web applications.
Intranets 2000
San Jose, CA
Feb 27 - Mar 1, 2000
We will be presenting two workshops at this conference, on 'Basic XML' and 'Advanced HTML authoring'.
WinWriters Online Help Conference
San Diego, CA
Mar 5 - Mar 9, 2000
We will be having a booth at this conference and we will be presenting a workshop on "Using XHTML for Universal Display and Accessibility".
SHARE: Practical Information for IT Professionals
Anaheim, CA
Mar 5 - Mar 10, 2000
HWG President and AWARE Center director Kynn Bartlett will be presenting "Meeting the Accessibility Challenge: Can Everyone Use Your Web Site?" on March 6.
CSUN's International Conference on Technology and People with Disabilities
Northridge, CA
March 20-25, 2000
The Guild will be sponsoring a booth at this event, which focuses on the use of technology to overcome disability barriers!
WWW9 -- The Ninth World Wide Web Conference
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
May 15 - May 19, 2000
We will be presenting a workshop at this conference entitled "Crafting and Reforming HTML Pages as XHTML." If you are attending any of these events, please stop by and introduce yourself to our HWG representatives, we'd love to meet you!

Links: [ 9 January 2000]

HWG Partners with Project Gutenberg.

Project Gutenberg is an altruistic organization that is dedicated to transcribing the world's documents, treaties, and books into ASCII text, so that they will be available to future generations forever.

Project Gutenberg has been remarkably successful, and thousands of documents have been marked up. In fact Gutenburg accounts for over 98% of all documents marked up as e-text!

The HWG Involvement

HWG oversees a project that marks up Gutenberg documents as XML. Why XML? Plain ASCII text has several downfalls, the most obvious being that it only covers the western alphabets, omits potentially crucial illustrations, and vital formatting is difficult, if not impossible. Marking up documents in XML will solve all these problems.

The HWG will support Project Gutenberg by creating the necessary DTD's for the XML markup, as well as overseeing the markup itself.

How do you get involved

Anyone is cordially invited to join this project! We are looking for volunteers to markup e-texts and to help with the development of the HWG family of DTD's. If you have a DTD that you feel is suitable for markup, we would love to see it, and we will either host services for you, or we will link to your page. We are trying to emulate the Gutenberg philosophy that a good idea is self-replicating and does not need elaborate organization.

We are also looking for server space to store marked up documents that can be made available to the public.

Even if you are too busy at the present time, stay in touch by joining our mailing list, and help spread the word!


Links: [19 December 1999]

Guild Newsletter Features Member "Tips."

The Guild's foundation is members helping members, sharing our expertise and knowledge to improve our skills in the craft of web design. Everyone has something to teach, and something to learn! In keeping with that spirit, the HWG-News Newsletter HWG-News features member-submitted "tips" in each issue, in the space between articles and announcements.

Submitted tips MUST meet the following criteria:

  1. They should be no more than 8 lines (500 characters, about 80 words) in length.
  2. Tips must be quick, direct, and to-the-point. They should be able to stand alone without further explanation. (URLs to more information are acceptable.)
  3. They must address the broad topic announced in the previous newsletter.
  4. Commercial advertisements or endorsements ("Use product ABC! It's the best!") will most likely be rejected. In general, tips should follow standard W3C specifications on HTML, CSS, and accessibility whenever appropriate.
  5. Tips must be received by the posted deadline, a week from the release of each newsletter.
  6. The HWG-News editorial staff are the final judges of which tips are selected for publication.

What happens if your tip is selected? Each issue, the first-place winner will receive a free HWG t-shirt. Runner-up tips will be also listed in the HWG-News newsletter as space permits, and submissions will be posted on the HWG web site.


Links: [19 December 1999]

New Governing Board Members Appointed.

The HTML Writers Guild is pleased to announce the appointment of two new members to the Governing Board, Marshall Jansen and Chris Higgs. They have been appointed to terms ending February 2002.

Marshall Jansen works for National Computer Print, Inc. as their webmaster, after working his way through the ranks of Operations to Programming, to finally becoming the entire Web Department. Marshall became self-taught in HTML when he realized that COBOL might pay the bills, but it would never be fun. After a few succesful forays into the freelance web design arena, he convinced his company that he was the perfect fit for the currently open Webmaster position.

Marshall created the Guild's online course in Javascript programming and has taught it since November 1998.

Chris Higgs is a lecturer at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and is the first non-North American member of the Guild's Governing Board. He is also the webmaster for the university's Institute of Land and Food resources.

Since July 1998, Chris has served as the Guild's List Guide Manager, leading the team of volunteers who help members use the HWG's discussion mailing lists, and has been a frequent participant in the Guild's monthly Town Hall meetings.

The Guild welcomes Chris and Marshall to the Board and thanks them for making commitments to serve!


Links: [21 November 1999]

Guild Adopts Web Accessibility Policy.
The Governing Board has recently voted to approve a policy regarding the accessibility of HWG-operated or co-operated websites. This policy requires that all official Guild sites be at least minimally accessible to our members with disabilities.

Our definition of minimal accessibility is based upon the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG defines three levels of checkpoint priority, and Guild policy requires at least single-A WCAG compliance, which means all priority one checkpoints.

In addition, the Guild may establish other accessibility requirements beyond single-A compliance on a case-by-case basis; while we require valid HTML on all Guild-operated sites, we haven't yet codified any additional accessibility requirements, although this discussion is underway.

The Guild's policy on web accessibility also covers any sites provided by external partners that bear the Guild's name and symbols, and are designated as official Guild services. (Exceptions may be made on a case-by-case basis for specific sites, at the option of the Board.)

Our goal is to both increase the accessibility of our own services and serve as an example to other websites of a clear and consistent standard for web accessibility using the W3C's work.


Links:

[21 November 1999]

HWG Membership Certificates Now Available.

The Guild is pleased to announce the availability of Membership Certificates for Full members of the Guild!

These optional paper certificates display your membership status in the Guild and are suitable for wall display. (At the present time, certificates are only available in English.)

Any Full member of the Guild is eligible for a certificate, which is dated with the term of membership (one year) covered by your Full membership.

Rather than increase the cost of Full membership for everyone, the Guild has chosen to make these membership certificates available for an additional cost of $5 to cover printing, shipping and handling when renewing or joining as a Full member. Members who do not wish a certificate are not required to pay.

If you need an additional certificate, or if you are not renewing or paying your membership dues, a membership certificate is available to you for a $10 processing and shipping charge.


Links: [11 November 1999]

This page is maintained by webmaster@iwanet.org. Last updated on 19 April 2002.
Copyright © 1999-2002 by the HTML Writers Guild