Introducing myself

Good afternoon,

My name is Everett and I have recently joined the HTML WG and the Accessibility Task Force.  I thought I'd write a quick note to introduce myself.

I have been loosely involved in web development for over a decade.  I am currently working as an independent web developer and accessibility consultant in Toronto, Canada.  I'm coming to the HTML5 party a little late, but I'm quite excited about contributing my skills and experience to the group.

I am currently the Drupal 7 Core Accessibility Co-maintainer, and have been working to improve the accessibility of Drupal 7 Core for a little over a year (yes we are nearly ready to release a beta).  I have also been contributing to the Fluid Project ( http://fluidproject.org ) as a QA Tester and Accessibility Consultant since the fall of 2008.

From my experiences in the Drupal and Fluid communities I can understand frustrations of not having adequate markup in xhtml 1.0 to semantically represent common UI components (tablists, dialogs, drag and drop UI patterns, etc.).  We have had to get creative in our decision making about how to best represent the semantics and behaviour of these concepts without native markup.

I plan to examine a few areas of the spec in detail, and will be taking a look at the drag and drop portion of the spec to help in coming up with a model for a device independent interaction.

Thanks and I look forward to meeting and working with you all,
Everett Zufelt
http://zufelt.ca

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