Web Standards Group

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July Canberra WSG meeting

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Date: Friday 24 July, 2009

Event Details

When: Friday, 24 July 2009

Time: 1.30pm - 4.30pm

Where: NLA Theatre, lower ground floor, National Library of Australia, Parkes Place, Parkes, ACT 2600 http://www.nla.gov.au/library/locationmap.html

Cost: Free

First presentation: Simon Pascal Klein

Topic 1: Beautiful Web Typography

Pascal is a standardista graphic, web and front-end designer, but worst of all he’s a rampant ‘typophile’. Born in Mainz, Germany—the birthplace of Gutenberg—he now works in Canberra as a contract designer and studies at the Australian National University. He’s been actively engaged in the Open Source community and local web industry, notably as one of the unorganisers to first bring BarCamp to Canberra. He enjoys drinking in as much good type as he can get and has proudly bending beziers since 2004.

Beautiful Web Typography is aimed to be an inspirational look at type on the web and how to improve it using existing well-understood standards-compliant technologies. The talk will be roughly broken into three sections: letter, text, and page, similar to typographer Ellen Lupton’s book, ‘Thinking With Type’.

Letter will cover terminology, the setting of web-safe and other fonts on the web, CSS font-stacks, varying font styles, tracking (horizontal spacing), font-sizing, and selecting the right glyphs.
Text looks at combining letter and facing the new obstacles that arise when setting blocks of type, focusing on line lengths, vertical spacing, text as user interface, paragraph styles, and alignment.
Page examines the macro; grids systems in which type can be set and aligned to.

The talk is most suited to anyone who publishes on the web, in particular front-end designers.

Second presentation: Paul Hagon, National Library of Australia

Topic 2: Where am I? Building location aware websites

Paul Hagon is a web developer at the National Library of Australia. He has been working at the Library for 3 years and has been working in cultural institutions for the past 10 years.

Mobile devices with inbuilt GPS, such as the iPhone, are leading to the development of location aware applications. This trend isn't just limited to the mobile arena. Advances are being made to bring this technology to desktop and laptop browsers. Services exist to allow you to share your location to a variety of applications. How can we incorporate this technology into our websites and what are the technical and social implications of doing so?

Third presentation: Us Now film

We're planning on kicking off the Us Now film at 3.30pm. The film will last for approximately an hour.

The Us Now film is about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet and "takes a look at how this type of participation could transform the way that countries are governed. It tells the stories of the online networks whose radical self-organising structures threaten to change the fabric of government forever."

You can watch a short on YouTube or read more about it at the Us Now website. This film was recently launched at London and Harvard and screened at the Hague and the French National Assembly in the last two weeks. Now it's our turn in Canberra....

Post WSG drinks

Please join us for drinks afterwards at the Pork Barrel Cafe (a short walk from the NLA). We can continue discussions in an informal setting and we're likely to hit happy hour (cheap drinks).

Our sponsors

The July Canberra WIPA/WSG meeting is proudly sponsored by Web Directions South 2009.

Web Directions South 2009

October 6-9, Sydney

Two days of workshops plus a two day, three track conference - Design, Development and Business - with leading international and local experts in user experience, interface design, social media, coding and development, SEO, accessibility, interaction design and much more.

http://south09.webdirections.org/