A couple fun things coming up soon:

First, my colleague Sara and I will be providing accessibility training to MnSCU webmasters across the state. This is part of a strong effort being undertaken to highlight the need for accessible web resources, especially important since MnSCU (my employer) is both a higher ed institution and a government agency. It’s also an opportunity for me to completely rewrite our accessibility guidelines, which are based on the just plain sad and often incorrect Minnesota State guidelines. Part of me would just like to point to the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, but that won’t cut it.

Second, my colleague Matt and I will be presenting a session on XML at the upcoming MnSCU IT conference. Matt is the guy who proved to me that client-side XSLT is workable; until then I’d been myopically convinced that server-side XSLT was the only way to go. Our goal is to demonstrate that XML isn’t just an up-and-coming technology, but that it’s here and can be worked into web sites right now. Matt will show some of the cool ways that he’s been using XML in his site’s back end (as a data store, mostly) and maybe some of his client-side magic. For my part, I’ll show a bit of XML and SOAP at work. Oughta be a party.