LBNL W3C Rep Blog

Last week saw the W3C’s Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee meeting in hybrid mode, hosted in Vancouver but also online. Much of the discussion of the Advisory Committee centered around the new legal entity, W3C Inc, which is in the process of replacing the old arrangement with host institutions MIT , ERCIM , Keio University, and Beihang University. The hosts will become partner institutions, and W3C will become its own legal entity with its own board of directors and bylaws. As I write this, the voting for the new board is about to close. We have fantastic slate of candidates, so my feeling is that we will have an active group that has a great amount of experience with the organization.

One of the highlights of the meeting for me was a discussion of sustainability for the web. The Sustainability Community Group is tackling the question of whether we can improve energy usage on the server side, the client side, and in our actions as W3C members. Given the fact that some very energy intensive technologies can be linked to the web, this is crucial work to address climate change.

Another highlight was the Developer Meetup. Seeing the latest incoming proposals for HTML forms from the OpenUI community group was very exciting. The new controls have built-in accessibility and fantastic styling options. Look for more coolness from this group in the future! There was also a talk about focused interoperability efforts across all browsers. The Interop effort will make cross-browser design much easier, and it includes new options like color mixing, subgrids, and container queries. Speaking of container queries, another talk covered that topic, showing how one could create content that adapts to the container in which it sits. Another talk focused on privacy. A new Private Ad Technology Community Group will look into better ways of enabling advertisers to reach buyers without compromising privacy. The slides for all these talks are posted for the public on the meetup site linked above.

For the past year, my time spent on W3C work has been quite completely subsumed by my having joined the Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group. It’s been an amazing experience, and I wanted to blog a little about what it’s been like.

The 2014 Technical Plenary/Advisory Committee (TPAC) meeting was held in Santa Clara, and I attended with the intention of identifying a working group to join. There were several on my list of candidate groups, so I began popping into the sessions for them, to see which would strike a chord with me. The second working group meeting I attended was the Data on the Web Best Practices one, and I found myself so intrigued by the discussion there that I forgot to go to the next one on my list. The meetings are generally set up so that the working group members are seated at tables in the center and observers sit in chairs against the wall. The working group is expected to conduct its business and the observers are expected to simply observe. The DWBP group was interested in who the observers were, and they asked observers to introduce themselves. When I told them that I was from LBNL, they immediately encouraged me to take part in the proceedings. They were hoping to get more input from the scientific world about their specs. I was asked to take a seat at the table right then. I ended up joining the group that day and have been involved heavily in development of their (now our) primary deliverable, the Best Practices document.

The Best Practices document will be a W3C Recommendation (which means it’s an official W3C-endorsed specification) when complete. We are collecting best practices for publishing data on the web, attempting to address issues that prevent data sharing. The working group has members from around the world, but a large number are from Brazil. Another large subset is from Europe. Only two of us are from the U.S., so we end up doing early-morning conference calls, every week, year-round to move the project forward. We wake up just before 6:00 am, call in to the MIT WebEx service, open an IRC client, and begin conversing with friends from across the world. It’s still somewhat thrilling to me to have that opportunity, despite the inconvenience of the hour. The working group also organizes face-to-face meetings twice a year. I was able to attend one in Austin, but had to skip the ones in Sao Paolo and Zagreb. Still, the face-to-face meetings always incorporate WebEx and IRC, so I’ve been able to participate in all of them. (IRC is used in an interesting way, to scribe notes about what is said and to manage a queue for speaking.)

The DWBP group is also working on two vocabulary documents, one that is the Dataset Usage Vocabulary, and one that is the Data Quality Vocabulary. The former is meant to create a means to describe instances of using a dataset, to help in tracking provenance and enabling dialog between dataset publishers and consumers. The latter vocabulary is for describing the quality of a dataset in the many dimensions involved. Neither the DUV folks nor the DQV folks are charged with creating new technology, but their work lays the foundation for future browser capabilities.

Over all, I’ve been most impressed by the openness of the process. Comments are always taken seriously, and working group members strive to address every comment made, as resolving each one is part of the W3C Process (yes, it has a capital P). At times the work can seem too mired in the process itself, but there is a history of good reasons for the method of working, and it ensures that all of us are heard. Much of the work is done via email between calls, and those emails are public, as are their archives. It’s an impressively inclusive organization peopled by techies who care. Thus far, I’ve felt fortunate to be among them. I’m happy to talk more about my experience to anyone at the Lab who is interested in participating. It’s a lot of work, but I’ve found it to be highly rewarding, and we’re not even done yet.

And if you’re so inclined, take a look at the Best Practices doc, http://w3c.github.io/dwbp/bp.html. Comments welcome!

2015 was an incredibly busy year for the W3C, and a huge variety of work was accomplished. There were, in fact, too many things going on to even list all of them. Here I review a few of the more interesting developments.

Upcoming Recommendations That May Be of Interest to Lab Folks

CSV on the Web Working Group

Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web

Metadata Vocabulary for Tabular Data

Generating JSON from Tabular Data on the Web

Generating RDF from Tabular Data on the Web

Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group

Data on the Web Best Practices

Data Quality Vocabulary

Spatial Data on the Web Working Group (with Open Geospatial Consortium)

Spatial Data on the Web Use Cases & Requirements

Web Annotations Working Group

Web Annotation Data Model

Web Annotation Protocol Spec

Notable Activities and Events

The W3C earned an Emmy  for “Standardization and Pioneering Development of Non-Live Broadband Captioning”.

The WebAssembly Community Group kicked off, working on making it possible to build c/c++ (and eventually other languages) applications for the browser.

The consortium began a new effort to reach out to developers, beginning with a developers’ web site and a @w3cdevs twitter feed.

The fourth version of the Document Object Model (DOM4) became an official recommendation.

W3C took a firm stand on upholding net neutrality.

HTML5 began to take hold over Flash. There were lots of conversions of prominent web applications to HTML5, especially for video players (Twitch, YouTube).

The Consortium began considering a proposal from the EFF for a nonaggression covenant for Encrypted Media Extensions, to help provide some legal protection against laws like the DMCA 1201 for people who implement the standards.

The Tracking Protection Working Group released the last-call working draft of its do-not-track recommendation.

MathML was approved as an ISO/IET international standard (in addition to being a W3C Recommendation).

The W3C launched an edX MOOC for HTML5.

The W3C is working to increase developer engagement with W3C. As part of that initiative, it is considering a new type of membership in the consortium, provisionally called the “webizen” program. Individuals who are employees of member organizations (as are we) *would* be eligible to participate, and in fact anyone could be a webizen. We need your help to figure out how to make the program useful and also fair. Please take a moment to fill out a brief survey regarding this proposal, and forward the info to anyone you think might be interested. The survey: https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/webizen-survey/ Blog post about the survey: http://www.w3.org/blog/2014/09/a-greater-voice-for-individuals-in-w3c/.

W3C20 Symposium Seeks Participation from Everyone

2014 marks the 20th year of the W3C and also the 25th year of the Web itself. To mark the occasion and to gear the consortium toward a future web that addresses the needs of everyone, W3C is holding a Symposium on the Future of the Web on October 29 at the Santa Clara Marriott. This is an opportunity for anyone who is interested to attend and join in the discussion. You need not have any prior affiliation with the W3C to participate. The symposium will be held from 3:00 to 6:00, followed by a gala dinner from 7:30 to 10:00.

HTML5 Becomes Proposed Recommendation

It’s almost there! HTML5 is now in the Proposed Recommendation stage, which means that once it garners approval by the W3C Advisory Committee, it will become an official W3C Recommendation. Much of the goodness in HTML5 has already been implemented in browsers, but the completion of its development to recommendation status means that the changes are standardized by the W3C, making them much more stable and thus more reasonable to take advantage of in your code.

New Recommendations

Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Profile for limiting usage of dynamic memory

Proposed Recommendations

HTML5

Last Call Working Drafts

XQuery and XPath Full Text 3.0

Linked Data Platform 1.0

Battery Status API

CSS Counter Styles Level 3

First Public Working Drafts

Linked Data Patch Format

Referrer Policy

Notes

HTML5 Differences from HTML4

Linked Data Platform Best Practices and Guidelines

Final report of the W3C Workshop on the Web of Things

report of the MultilingualWeb workshop

report from the first Share-PSI 2.0 workshop (Share-PSI 2.0 is the European network for the exchange of experience and ideas around implementing open data policies in the public sector.)

Developers’ Guide to Features of Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools

Symposia, Workshops, Courses

Accessible Way-Finding Using Web Technologies: Online Symposium

December 3, 2014, Call for Papers due October 20.

Workshop on Privacy and User–Centric Controls

November 20, 2014, Berlin, Germany

All participants are required to submit a position paper or statement of interest by 10 October 2014

Javascript course at W3DevCampus

October 20 – November 16, 2014 (early bird registration closes September 25)

Responsive Web Design course at W3DevCampus

October 3 – November 7, 2014

Web Accessibility Tutorials

Free online tutorials from the Web Accessibility Initiative

Updates to MathML and Entity Definitions

The W3C has approved two new recommendations related to Mathematical Markup Language (MathML), MathML Version 3.0 2nd Edition, and Entity Definitions for Characters.

MathML is a markup language for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and content. The goal of MathML is to enable mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the World Wide Web, just as HTML has enabled this functionality for text.  MathML can be used to encode both mathematical notation and mathematical content. While it is human-readable, authors typically will use equation editors, conversion programs, and other specialized software tools to generate MathML.

ARIA 1.0 is a Recommendation

The Web Accessibility Initiaitive’s ARIA specification is now a W3C Recommendation. This technology makes advanced Web applications accessible and usable to people with disabilities. The specification provides a framework to describe features for user interaction. In addition, ARIA provides ways to better enable use of web pages as a whole. “Landmark roles” allow authors to annotate regions of the page so users can find them quickly; this is important when users don’t have the overall knowledge of the page layout often represented in graphical browsers. Navigation and search regions, ancillary content, and of course the main content can be marked so users can find the region they need at the moment. The technology also allows authors to indicate content that should be treated more like a software application than as document content, so assistive technologies can provide application-specific behavior. Finally, it provides ways to handle regions of the page that automatically update their content, such as stock tickers or chat applications, which can be disruptive or unpercievable to some assistive technology users without the mediation provided by ARIA.

Web Turns 25

In case you missed it, March 11 was marked as the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web. What more appropriate place to look for more details than a web site about it? Visit webat25.org.

Recent Workshops

Footnotes, comments, bookmarks, and marginalia on the Web, A W3C Workshop on Annotations, was held in San Francisco April 2. Position papers are viewable on the workshop web site, and W3C has begun developing a charter for a possible working group on annotations.

W3C/IAB workshop on Strengthening the Internet Against Pervasive Monitoring (STRINT) was held in London England February 28 to March 1. The overall goal of the workshop was to steer IETF and W3C work so as to be able to improve or “strengthen” the Internet in the face of pervasive monitoring. A workshop report in the form of an IAB RFC will be produced as a result of this event.

New Working Drafts

Your chance to comment on early work

CSV on the Web: Use Cases and Requirements

Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web

Subresource Integrity

Annotation Use Cases

Requirements for Latin Text Layout and Pagination

CSS Font Loading Module Level 3

CSS Display Module Level 3

Navigation Error Logging

Web Near Field Communication API

Last Call Working Drafts

Your last chance to suggest substantive changes

CSS Flexible Box Layout Module Level 1

Web Cryptography API

User Interface Security Directives for Content Security Policy

Linked Data Platform 1.0

Vibration API

Polyglot Markup

W3C DOM4

CSS Backgrounds and Borders Module Level 3

Compositing and Blending Level 1

New Recommendations

Official W3C specifications newly minted

XQuery 3.0: An XML Query Language

XML Path Language (XPath) 3.0

XQueryX 3.0

XQuery and XPath Data Model 3.0

XSLT and XQuery Serialization 3.0

XPath and XQuery Functions and Operators 3.0

Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0 2nd Edition

XML Entity Definitions for Characters (2nd Edition)

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0

Metadata API for Media Resources 1.0

RDF 1.1 (a set of 8 recommendations, plus 4 notes)

Progress Events

Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format 1.0 (Second Edition)

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)

Three Linked Data Vocabularies, the Data Catalog, the Data Cube Vocabulary, and the Organization Ontology

JSON-LD 1.0

JSON-LD 1.0 Processing Algorithms and API

Performance Timeline

User Timing

Group Notes and Reports

XQuery 3.0 Use Cases

XQuery 3.0 Requirements

Linked Data Platform Use Cases and Requirements

Techniques for WCAG 2.0

Understanding WCAG 2.0

XML processor profiles

Model-Based User Interfaces and MBUI Glossary

On December 11 W3C launched a new Data Activity to lead the Web to a new level of data interoperability. The Activity includes two new groups:

• CSV on the Web Working Group, whose mission is to provide technologies whereby data dependent applications on the Web can provide higher interoperability when working with datasets using the CSV (Comma-Separated Values) or similar formats.
• Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group, whose mission is (1) to develop the open data ecosystem, facilitating better communication between developers and publishers; (2) to provide guidance to publishers that will improve consistency in the way data is managed, thus promoting the re-use of data; (3) to foster trust in the data among developers, whatever technology they choose to use, increasing the potential for genuine innovation.

The Data Activity subsumes and expands upon the work done in the Semantic Web and eGovernment Activities. W3C will continue to complete and enhance the Semantic Web in the light of growing real-world experience and demands.

Learn more about the Data Activity.

http://www.w3.org/2013/data/

Headlights 2014

Each year, the W3C designates a short list of trending topics for the future of the web and re-allocates resources to better address them. The consortium is now soliciting suggestions for focus topics to be part of the 2014 Headlights initiative. Have an idea of something the W3C should be prioritizing? Let me know, and we can propose it. See the Headlights 2013 web site for examples from last year.

W3DevCampus Offers Free Course in Responsive Web Design, HTML5 Class

W3C is offering a free online course in Responsive Web Design. New sessions will begin in the new year. See http://www.w3devcampus.com/ or follow the twitter feed for announcements.

There is still time to register for the W3C HTML5 online course that began 2 December. See http://www.w3devcampus.com/html5-w3c-training/ for details.

New Working Drafts

Your chance to comment on early work

Model-Based User Interfaces–Task Models

Beacon

Resource Priorities

W3C HTML Ruby Markup Extensions

Accessible Rich Internet Applications, WAI-ARIA 1.1

Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Canonicalization

TriG (a natural text syntax for RDF based on Turtle)

DOMMatrix interface

Last Call Working Drafts

Your last chance to suggest substantive changes

CSS Shapes Module Level 1

High-Resolution Time Level 2

CSS Writing Modes Level 3

CSS Syntax Module Level 3

User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 2.0

WAI-ARIA 1.0 User Agent Implementation Guide

Pointer Lock

CSS Masking Module Level 1

Custom Elements

Compositing and Blending Level 1

CSS Text Module Level 3

N-Triples

N-Quads

Media Source Extensions

Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT)

State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction

Linked Data Platform 1.0

CSS Cascading and Inheritance Level 3

Proposed Recommendations

Your last chance to comment before the spec becomes a recommendation

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing

JSON-LD 1.0

JSON-LD 1.0 Processing Algorithms and API

User Timing

Performance Timeline

XQuery 3.0

XML Path Language (XPath) 3.0

XQuery and XPath Data Model 3.0

XPath and XQuery Functions and Operators 3.0

XSLT and XQuery Serialization 3.0

API for Media Resources 1.0

CSS Style Attributes

New Recommendations

Official W3C specifications newly minted

CSS Style Attributes

Widget Interface

Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 2.0

Page Visibility (Second Edition)

Geolocation API Specification

Touch Events

Timed Text Markup Language 1 (TTML1) (Second Edition)

HTML+RDFa 1.1

Web Storage

Group Notes and Reports

RDF 1.1 JSON Alternate Serialization (RDF/JSON)

Touch Events Extensions

Selectors API Level 2

Use Cases & Exploratory Approaches for Ruby Markup

Final report of the Workshop on RDF Validation: Practical Assurances for Quality RDF Data

Workshop Report: Publishing and the Open Web Platform

Final report of the Social Standards: The Future of Business Workshop

Guidance on Applying WCAG 2.0 to Non-Web Information and Communications Technologies (WCAG2ICT)

Report of the Workshop on Rich Multimodal Application Development

Use Cases and Lessons for the Data Cube Vocabulary

Registered Organization Vocabulary

Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS)

Workshops

Strengthening the Internet Against Pervasive Monitoring, 28 February – 01 March 2014, in London (UK).

Linking Geospatial Data, 5-6  March 2014, in London (UK)

Fourth W3C Web and TV Workshop: Web and TV Convergence, 12-13 MAR 2014, in Munich, Germany

Workshop on Web Payments: How do you want to pay?, 24-25 March 2014, in Paris (France)

New Digital Publishing Activity

On June 25, W3C launched a new Digital Publishing Activity to make the Web a platform for the digital publishing industry, and to build the necessary bridges between the developers of the Open Web Platform and the publishing industry. More information can be found at  http://www.w3.org/dpub/.

Do Not Track

W3C activities around developing a standard for the meaning of Do Not Track (DNT) have been much in the news. Some examples: Do Not Track standards group shoots down advertiser proposal (CNET) and ‘Do Not Track’ Rules for Advertising to Web Users Come a Step Closer to an Agreement (NYT).

Digital Rights management

Another hot-button issue involving W3C is the development of a standard for digital rights management (DRM). Netflix recently drew fire by stating its intention to use HTML5 to control access to web content. Netflix presses ahead with HTML5, as free software activists call for boycott (Gigaom).

Official Recommendations

The Provenance Working Group published the PROV Family of Documents as W3C Recommendations. The PROV Family of Documents defines a model, corresponding serializations and other supporting definitions to enable the interoperable interchange of provenance information.

The Web Performance Working Group published a W3C Recommendation of Page Visibility. This specification defines a means for site developers to programmatically determine the current visibility state of the page in order to develop power and CPU efficient web applications.

Candidate Recommendations

The Pointer Events Working Group published the Pointer Events specification as a Candidate Recommendation.

The Device APIs Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of HTML Media Capture.

The Government Linked Data (GLD) Working Group published two Candidate Recommendations: The Organization Ontology and The RDF Data Cube Vocabulary.

The Web Applications Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Indexed Database API.

The Device APIs Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Vibration API.

Proposed Recommendations

The Web Events Working Group advanced the earlier Touch Events

  version 1 specification to Proposed Recommendation.

The RDFa Working Group published a Proposed Recommendation for HTML+RDFa 1.1.

Working Drafts Published

The Cascading Style Sheets Working Group published a working draft of Selectors Level 4

The Semantic Web Interest Group published a working draft of vCard Ontology

The Tracking Protection Working Group published two working drafts: Tracking Preference Expression (DNT) and Tracking Compliance and Scope.

The HTML Working Group published a Working Draft of Encrypted Media Extensions.

The RDF Working Group published a Last Call Working Draft of JSON-LD 1.0 Processing Algorithms and API.

The System Applications Working Group published two Working Drafts: The app: URI scheme and Messaging API.

The Web Real-Time Communication Working Group and the Device APIs Working Group published a Working Draft of Media Capture and Streams.

The System Applications Working Group published a Working Draft of Raw Socket API.

The Web Applications Working Group published four Working Drafts: Shadow DOM, Custom Elements, HTML Imports, and Java language binding for Web IDL.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group published a Working Draft of CSS Box Alignment Module Level 3.

The Internationalization Working Group published a Working Draft of Requirements for Hangul Text Layout and Typography.

The Web Application Security Working Group published a Working Draft of User Interface Security Directives for Content Security Policy.

The Device APIs Working Group published a Last Call Working Draft of Vibration API.

The MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group published a Last Call Working Draft of “Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 2.0.

The Web Applications Working Group published A Working Draft of Introduction to Web Components.

The Technical Architecture Group published the First Public Working Draft of URLs in Data Primer.

The Web Application Security Working Group published a Working Draft of Content Security Policy 1.1.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group and the SVG Working Group published a Working Draft of Filter Effects 1.0.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group published two Working Drafts: CSS Exclusions Module Level 1 and CSS Regions Module Level 1.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group published a Last Call Working Draft of CSS Custom Properties for Cascading Variables Module Level 1 and a First Public Working Draft of CSS Shapes Module Level 1.

The System Applications Working Group published a Working Draft of Web Telephony API.

The SVG Working Group has published a Working Draft of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 2.

The Multimodal Interaction Working Group published a Working Draft of EMMA: Extensible MultiModal Annotation markup language Version 1.1.

The CSS Working Group and SVG Working Group jointly published a First Public Working Draft of Web Animations 1.0.

The Web Cryptography Working Group published a Working Draft of Web Cryptography API.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group published a Last Call Working Draft of CSS Fonts Module Level 3.

The Web Real-Time Communication Working Group and Device APIs Working Group published the First Public Working Draft of Mediastream Image Capture.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group published a Last Call Working Draft of CSS Counter Styles Level 3.

The HTML Working Group published a Last Call Working Draft of the HTML5 Image Description Extension.

The Web Applications Working Group published a Working Draft of UI Events.

The Internationalization Working Group has published a Working Draft of Predefined Counter Styles.

The RDF Working Group published two Last Call Working Drafts: RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax and RDF 1.1 Semantics.

The XML Query Working Group published a Last Call Working Draft of XQuery 3.0: An XML Query Language.

Group Notes

The Technical Architecture Group has published a Group Note of Publishing and Linking on the Web.

The Device APIs Working Group and the Web Applications (WebApps) Working Group published a Working Group Note of Web Intents. This informative specification defines a service discovery and light-weight RPC mechanism for web apps.

The Web Applications Working Group published a Group Note of Widget Updates.

The HTML Working Group published three Group Notes: HTML5: Edition for Web Authors, main element – an HTML5 extension specification, and HTML: The Markup Language (an HTML language reference).

The Government Linked Data Working Group published two Group Notes: Registered Organization Vocabulary and Asset Description Metadata Schema.

The XML Security Working Group published a Group Note of Test cases for Canonical XML 2.0.

The Government Linked Data Working Group published a Group Note of Linked Data Glossary.

Reports

A report summarizing the MultilingualWeb workshop in Rome is now available. A new workshop in the MultilingualWeb series is planned for 2014.

W3C published a report summarizing the Open Data on the Web workshop that took place in April.

W3C published a new edition of Standards for Web Applications on Mobile.

W3C published a report summarizing the Workshop on Richer Internationalization for eBooks, which took place 4 June in Tokyo.

Workshops

2013-09-10 (10 SEP) – 2013-09-11 (11 SEP)

RDF Validation Workshop – Practical Assurances for Quality

RDF Data

https://www.w3.org/2012/12/rdf-val/

Cambridge, MA

2013-09-16 (16 SEP) – 2013-09-17 (17 SEP)

Publishing and the Open Web Platform

http://www.w3.org/2012/12/global-publisher/

Paris, France