A Workshop on Device Independent Authoring was initially proposed as a joint W3C workshop with the WAP Forum, to be held in June 2000. Because of the great interest, especially in mobile devices, the original proposal grew into two separate workshops.
The first workshop, a joint W3C/WAP Workshop on the Multimodal Web was held in Hong Kong 5-6 September 2000.
This page presents the results of the second workshop, which was held in Bristol UK 3-4 October 2000, and focused on the authoring issues that are common across all devices.
Daniel Dardailler, W3C workshop chair, opened the proceedings and asked the participants to introduce themselves.
The groups each took a topic as follows:
The Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of Device Independence, as well as in some cases, Action, Wishlist, Focus and Contingencies were considered in three separate groups.
At the closing plenary session, a show of hands indicated an overwhelming majority in favour of W3C taking steps towards addressing the issues of device independence aired at the workshop. This should include clarifying the relationship between any device independent activity and the multimodal activities aired at the Hong Kong workshop. [notes]
If the web is to allow 'everyone and everything to be connected', then, in the same way that the WAI is addressing 'everyone', so further attention deserves to be paid to the 'everything'.
Many thanks to the presenters who illustrated the diverse range of topics covered by device independence, to Gregory Rosmaita for contributing the many notes referenced above, to Tom Pereira for capturing the results of the group discussions, and to all participants for making it a lively and engaging workshop.