Hi all, This is a message to introduce myself I'm male, 47 and live in the northern part of The Netherlands. My wife and I have two sons, the older one being a succesfull game-programmer After working several years in the management of a couple of municipalities, I now work as a senior-lawyer for a municipality.
What has that to do with webstandards? Well in fact ...nothing. But I can tell you my greatest passion during the last 2.5 decades was programming (just anything) on a computer. I remember buying my first computer back in 1983. It was a ZX Spectrum. In those days I first tried to program some machine code, but without any significant success. I just shouted it from the roof when after after entering '1 + 1' the screen showed '2' (or something near 2). The last couple of years I became more and more interested in accessibility of (government)information on the web. I consider that a condition for any modern democracy to function. In 2004 with some friends I founded an association who maintains a Dutch forum for starting php-programmers, called PHPFreakz. You can find the forum at <http://www.phpfreakz.nl/> http://www.phpfreakz.nl After beeing chairman of that association for a couple of years I withdraw. I'm now just a 'member of honour'. At present I'm member of the advisory committee for the Dutch 'Webguidelines for Governmentsites' ( <http://webrichtlijnen.overheid.nl/english/> http://webrichtlijnen.overheid.nl/english/ ). Some English spoken posts about these guidelines can be found here: * <http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2007/01/new_dutch_acces.html> http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2007/01/new_dutch_acces.html * <http://www.webstandards.org/2007/01/15/the-dutch-embrace-web-standards/ > http://www.webstandards.org/2007/01/15/the-dutch-embrace-web-standards/ * <http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200702/the_dutch_accessibility_la w_is_awesome/> http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200702/the_dutch_accessibility_law _is_awesome/ Background information on these guidelines was given in a presentation Raph de Rooij recently gave at <http://gilbanedc.com/> http://gilbanedc.com/. You can find his presentation here: <http://www.raph.nl/presentation.pdf> http://www.raph.nl/presentation.pdf Furthermore I'm member of the Normative Committee of a Dutch foundation called 'Drempelvrij' (In English: 'Barrierfree'). This foundation is responsable for the certifying of websites thats meets WCAG 1.0 . So, I'm not a professional webdesigner, since I don't make websites for a living. There's one website i made recently: <http://www.regels-stadskanaal.nl> http://www.regels-stadskanaal.nl On the site one can find all the legislation of the municipalty I work for. The site became a prototype of the ' Guidelines for governmentsites'. Suggestions to improve this site a very welcome Cheers, Koen Willems ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
