If it feels like a long time since you've received OC seminar
announcements, that's because it has been a long time indeed! Now with
the summer fortunately drawing to an end, we are ready to resume the
technical seminar activities.

Back in June, Ashraf Al Shafaki had given us an overview of Scrum, an
agile software methodology that is gaining momentum. This topic raised
many interesting discussions, and we'll be surely talking about it again
in the future. Next week, we turn to a technical topic: understanding
and using standards to design Web-based applications.

THE TOPIC

With the establishment of the Web as a communication and application
delivery medium, traditional desktop applications are giving way to
Web-based equivalents. Most business applications stand to benefit from
migration to the Web platform, for various reasons including the ability
to be accessed from normal Web browsers instead of specially-made client
applications. Thus, Web applications are inherently cross-platform and
distributed, leading to better manageability and maintainability.
However, the promise of the Web relies on one important factor: the
presence of a globally agreed-upon set of standards that govern how user
interface is to be handled by Web browsers. Without these standards,
each browser would expect different responses from the back-end
application server, making the task of writing robust applications
impossibly complex. Only by following standards can browsers effectively
participate in delivering the value of the Web. Unfortunately, in the
real world, each browser understands and implements existing standards a
little differently, thereby making Web developers responsible for
ensuring that their code is both standard-compliant and cross-browser
compatible. The focus of this seminar will be to present the theory,
tools and techniques needed to make this happen, and to hint at the
future of Web applications.

THE PRESENTER

Omar Abdel-Wahab is a compulsive learner and communicator. Since he
joined OC in March 2006, he's dabbled with countless Web technologies
and generated tens of cool implementations, including contributions to
the open source domain. Before joining us, Omar had created the web site
for Samir and Aly (http://www.samirandaly.com/) among others, and worked
on the customization of several open source PHP applications.

PRESENTATION AGENDA

1. Introduction: History of the Web and overview of modern Web design
2. HTML, XHTML and XML
3. CSS 1/2/3
4. JavaScript and DOM
5. W3C standards
6. Cross-browser and W3C compliance
7. Best practices
8. The (present) future: Web 2.0

SESSION TIME AND PLACE