Tech Note: The Current and Future Web

[The Higher Ed Assessment blog will be "off" during the winter holidays. Back on January 6, 2009.]

Accessibility standards are updated per the December 2008 announcement by the World Wide Web Consortium (known by the acronym W3C). The strategies for making and keeping web technologies accessible by all users are labeled Success Criteria and written as testable rules. The new standards, expected to be widely adopted, provide for future developments in what some describe as a technology-neutral manner.

Recommended quick read for the new standards: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 are detailed on the web page How to Meet WCAG 2.0. Non-technical readers can gain a sense of the scope of WCAG simply by scanning the Table of Contents. (Scroll down just a little from the top of the web page for this section.)

Another December release from W3C is much more limited but has import in light of a December report from Pew. The "minor update" from W3C is the CSS Mobile Profile 2.0, concerned with how cascading style sheets (CSS) are implemented on mobile devices such as cell phones. The W3C profile is of interest to technical readers; the related Pew report is more digestible to non-technical readers.

The Future of the Internet III is the product of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Internet experts were surveyed on what we might expect about web computing in the year 2020. Strong agreement was registered for two assertions made in the survey: that the Internet will be improved (not replaced) and that mobile devices such as cell phones will provide the primary connection to it.

[The Higher Ed Assessment blog will be "off" during the winter holidays. Back on January 6, 2009.]

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.