Bert Bos (W3C)

A colleague showed me an interesting way of presenting slides, called a Slipshow https://slipshow.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ so I stole some ideas from it for b6+: You can now make long slides that scroll (only down, unless you go backwards, and without zooming in) and you can draw on a slide (with one color and one line thickness only). https://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/b6plus/

Also new with b6+ is documentation for style sheet writers. No more reverse-engineering if you want to write your own slide style. https://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/b6plus/writing-style-sheets.html

B6+ is a JavaScript program to present slides in HTML. Since I last talked about it here, it has had a number of improvements:

• With a suitable style sheet, b6+ can switch between light and dark modes.
• It has become easier to use two-window mode (slides in one window and the preview and speaker notes in another).
• The C key shows a clickable table of contents. (A request from a user of our old Slidy tool…)

Two events by the Unicode Consortium that may be interesting for developers of applications or web sites with international audiences. The first is a webinar on August 13, part 2 of a series on bidirectional text: https://blog.unicode.org/2024/07/registration-now-open-bidirectional.html #unicode #bidi #webinar

(1/2) B6+, the slide framework in JavaScript, got some enhancements after feedback at #w3cTPAC. It's now quicker to start a slide show, there is even a button for it. If the style sheet supports it, another button toggles light & dark styles. Exiting the slide show back to the slide index is also quicker (one press of Esc instead of two).

#b6plus https://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/b6plus/

Some news about recent updates to IRC tools for W3C meetings (1/3):

scribe.perl, the program called by RRSAgent to format minutes, now accepts more than one person in an action item (‘action alice, bob, cory: do something’). And in addition to Ralph links (‘->’), it now also accepts markdown-style links (‘[anchor](url)’). See https://www.w3.org/2023/01/SoftwareNews#x20230722b

Some news about recent updates to IRC tools for W3C meetings (2/3):

gb, the experimental GitHub-URL Bot that tries to replace Trackbot, can now add comments to existing issues. It now answers with a /me message if it was itself addressed with a /me message. It already accepted multiple assignees for an action item, but that fact is now also documented in the built-in help. And it understands ‘list my actions’ as a shorter form of ‘list actions for me’. See https://www.w3.org/2023/01/SoftwareNews#x20230722c

Some news about recent updates to IRC tools for W3C meetings (3/3):

AgendaBot, the experimental bot that can find meeting agendas in mail archives or on the W3C calendar, has been updated to understand the new layout of the W3C calendar. See https://www.w3.org/2023/01/SoftwareNews#x20230722a

The new versions have been running on the IRC server at irc.w3.org since a few days. You may already have used them.

I published an update to gf-markdown-awk, the Awk library for converting GitHub-flavored markdown to HTML or to plain text. The version is now 0.2. This version understands character entities, both numeric entities and named entities (all 2125 of them).

So, e.g., the function call markdown::to_html("## Hé and olé") returns "Hé and olé" and markdown::to_text("## Hé and olé") yields "Hé and olé".
https://github.com/bert-github/gf-markdown-awk

I wrote some code. Probably only for a niche market. 🙂 It's a library in Awk for converting (GitHub-flavored) markdown to HTML or to plain text. Version 0.1, and it has known bugs. But if you avoid those, it works… https://github.com/bert-github/gf-markdown-awk