Mark Birbeck is the managing director of webBackplane. He has been creating software for many years, and his particular interests are the semantic web, and components that help to create dynamic, flexible, user interfaces. He has consulted, given training, spoken at conferences, and contributed to books and articles on these and other topics. He is also heavily involved in the creation of new standards on these themes.
In October 2003, Mark Birbeck wrote XHTML and Metadata, which looked at whether it was possible to use RDF/XML attributes in XHTML. It also expressed some of the ideas relating to enriching the user interface, made possible by embedded semantic information.
Mark Birbeck gave this talk at Google on May 24th, 2008. The talk covers RDFa in detail, looking at its implications for the future of search, and in particular how it can be used to enhance the user experience.
Ian Forrester interviewed Mark Birbeck whilst they were both at XTech 2008. Subjects mentioned range from XForms, Ajax, Sidewinder, ODF, unobtrusive JavaScript, XUL, standards adoption, New Labour, Hegel's idealism, the Ajax Community, and the Ubiquity XForms processor.
The CURIE Syntax 1.0 document is a W3C Working Draft, authored by Shane McCarron of Applied Testing and Technology, Inc., and Mark Birbeck. It provides a way to express URIs in a compact way that is independent of the language in which the compact URI (CURIE) is being used.
The XHTML Modularization 1.1 document is a W3C Working Draft, which provides a set of modules that represent the entire XHTML language, but which can be combined and reused to create new languages. It's also possible to build languages that use only a subset of the modules, such as when creating a profile of XHTML for mobile devices.
The RDFa Primer is a W3C Working Draft, authored by Ben Adida of Creative Commons, and Mark Birbeck. It provides an introduction to RDFa, with lots of examples.
I've had an interesting time lately, looking at SugarCRM for a potential customer. The project involves having an internal system for the sales team, and then a public system that needs to cope with tens or even hundreds of thousands of members.
The Rich Web Application Backplane document is a W3C note, published in July 2006, which looks at the need to provide a common architecture for use across voice, web browsers, widget frameworks, and so on.
There is still plenty of scope for the browser to evolve, but the truth is that progressive browser enhancement makes browser evolution far less significant than it has been until now. That's probably not a bad thing, given the chaos that is currently surrounding the development of HTML at the W3C.
