It is easy to forget that using web resources requires many highly refined visual and motor skills. Building web resources with accessibility in mind means creating web pages that can be used by people with different skills or that can be modified to ease access.

The Semantic Web has been a long time coming impeded by both cultural and technological problems. RDFa (Resource Description Format/Attributes) represents the latest initiative to embed semantics into web pages.

Week eight projects: Accessibility   RDFa

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Bonus reading

March 13, 2008
[Don't you love it when graduate school and the "real world" are in sync?]
The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem
A few weeks ago, we began talking about the new Yahoo! Search open platform. Today, we're releasing more details about two important components of the initiative -- the developer platform as well as our support of a number of semantic web standards.

The Data Web in Action While there has been remarkable progress made toward understanding the semantics of web content, the benefits of a data web have not reached the mainstream consumer. Without a killer semantic web app for consumers, site owners have been reluctant to support standards like RDF, or even microformats. We believe that app can be web search.

By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers. For example, by marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo! Search and others to understand the semantic content and the relationships of the many components of its site. With a richer understanding of LinkedIn's structured data included in our index, we will be able to present users with more compelling and useful search results for their site. The benefit to LinkedIn is, of course, increased traffic quality and quantity from sites like Yahoo! Search that utilize its structured data.

In the coming weeks, we'll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.

Yahoo Search Blog by Amit Kumar, March 13, 2008

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A student writes ...

Week eight student questions here

Terry talks...

Week eight answers here