Month: April 2012

This entry will cover a smattering of activities that may be of interest at the Lab, some for front-end oriented folks, some for data-oriented folks, and some for back-end oriented folks. For the former, we have some new bits of CSS that should make layout and animation easier plus an early draft of the next document object model. For the datavores, there are some new XML specs that have made it all the way to recommendation status and some early work on government linked data. For the back-enders, we have a new working group on cryptography and last call for input on the draft of cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published

five Working Drafts:

• CSS Flexible Box Layout Module describes a CSS box model optimized for user interface design. In the flexbox layout model, the children of a flexbox can be laid out in any direction, and can “flex” their sizes, either growing to fill unused space or shrinking to avoid overflowing the parent. Both horizontal and vertical alignment of the children can be easily manipulated. Nesting of these boxes (horizontal inside vertical, or vertical inside horizontal) can be used to build layouts in two dimensions.
• CSS Grid Layout which allows designers to define invisible grids of horizontal and vertical lines. Elements from a document can then be anchored to points in the grid, which aligns them visually to each other, even if they are not next to each other in the source.
• CSS Transforms.CSS transforms allows elements styled with CSS to be transformed in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space. This specification is the convergence of the CSS 2D transforms, CSS 3D transforms and SVG transforms specifications.
• CSS Animations. This CSS module describes a way for authors to animate the values of CSS properties over time, using keyframes. The behavior of these keyframe animations can be controlled by specifying their duration, number of repeats, and repeating behavior.
• CSS Transitions.CSS Transitions allows property changes in CSS values to occur smoothly over a specified duration.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of DOM4.

Two XML-related specs are now official recommendations

• W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 Part 1: Structures
• W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 Part 2: Datatypes

The Government Linked Data Working Group has published four First Public Working Drafts:

• Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT). DCAT is an RDF vocabulary designed to facilitate interoperability between data catalogs published on the Web.
• The RDF Data Cube Vocabulary. There are many situations where it would be useful to be able to publish multi-dimensional data, such as statistics, on the web in such a way that it can be linked to related data sets and concepts. The Data Cube vocabulary provides a means to do this using the W3C RDF (Resource Description Framework) standard. The model underpinning the Data Cube vocabulary is compatible with the cube model that underlies SDMX (Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange), an ISO standard for exchanging and sharing statistical data and metadata among organizations. The Data Cube vocabulary is a core foundation which supports extension vocabularies to enable publication of other aspects of statistical data flows.
• Terms for describing people. It defines how to describe people’s characteristics such as names or addresses and how to relate people to other things, for example to organizations or projects. For each term, guidance on the usage within a running example is provided. This document also defines mappings to widely used vocabularies to enable interoperability.
• An organization ontology. This document describes a core ontology for organizational structures, aimed at supporting linked-data publishing of organizational information across a number of domains. It is designed to allow domain-specific extensions to add classification of organzations and roles, as well as extensions to support neighbouring information such as organizational activities.

W3C launched a new Web Cryptography Working Group, whose mission is to define an API that lets developers implement secure application protocols on the level of Web applications.

The Web Application Security Working Group has published a Working Draft of Cross-Origin Resource Sharing.

This is the inaugural post for the Lab’s W3C Rep Blog, in which I attempt to convey a sense of the breadth of activity occurring at the W3C by showing the sheer volume of it. A crazy lot of things happened in March, so I’m going to reserve the detail for things that seem most relevant. In fact, a crazy lot of things happen every month at the W3C, so I won’t be trying to list everything in this blog. For that level of detail, you might want to subscribe to the W3C Newsletter. If you’re wondering what this W3C stuff is all about, see the About page.

The CSS working group came out with an important new spec redesign on April 1.

Community Groups and Business Groups are two relatively new types of W3C groups introduced last year. The lab joined the High-Performance Computing Community Group, and there are other groups cropping up each month.

The Math Working Group‘s charter has been extended until 31 March 2013.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of “Widget Updates.”

The Device APIs Working Group has published a Group Note of “The Media Capture API.”

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of “CSS Speech Module.”

The SVG Working Group, part of the Graphics Activity, has put out a call for participation.

The Media Fragments Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of “Media Fragments URI 1.0 (basic).”

The Audio Working Group has published a Working Draft of “Web Audio API.”

The Tracking Protection Working Group has published two documents:

• A First Public Working Draft of Tracking Compliance and Scope which defines the meaning of a Do Not Track (DNT) preference and sets out practices for websites to comply with this preference.
• A First Public Working Draft of Tracking Preference Expression (DNT) which defines the technical mechanisms for expressing a tracking preference via the DNT request header field in HTTP, via an HTML DOM property readable by embedded scripts, and via properties accessible to various user agent plug-in or extension APIs. It also defines mechanisms for sites to signal whether and how they honor this preference, both in the form of a machine-readable tracking status resource at a well-known location and via a “Tk” response header field, and a mechanism for allowing the user to approve site-specific exceptions to DNT as desired.

Three Web Applications Working Group specifications were published

• A Last Call Working Draft of HTML5 Web Messaging which defines two mechanisms for communicating between browsing contexts in HTML documents.
• A Last Call Working Draft of Web Workers that defines an API that allows Web application authors to spawn background workers running scripts in parallel to their main page. This allows for thread-like operation with message-passing as the coordination mechanism.
• A Group Note of Widget URI scheme that defines the widget URI scheme and rules for dereferencing a widget URI, which can be used to address resources inside a package. The dereferencing model relies on HTTP semantics to return resources in a manner akin to a HTTP GET request. Doing so allows this URI scheme to be used with other technologies that rely on HTTP responses to function as intended, such as XMLHTTPRequest.

The Web Performance Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of “Navigation Timing.” This specification defines an interface for web applications to access timing information related to navigation and elements.

The Web Performance Working Group has published a First Public and Last Call Working Draft of “High Resolution Time.” This document defines a Javascript interface that provides the current time in sub-millisecond resolution and such that it is not subject to system clock skew or adjustments. Comments are welcome through 10 April. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published three Candidate Recommendation documents for “RDFa Core 1.1,” “RDFa Lite 1.1” and “XHTML+RDFa 1.1.”

The XML Security Working Group has published the “XML Encryption 1.1” Candidate Recommendation.

The W3C has chartered a MultilingualWeb–LT (Language Technology) Working Group, which will develop standard ways to support the (automatic and manual) translation and adaptation of Web content to local needs

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of “CSS Values and Units Module Level 3.” This CSS3 module describes the common values and units that CSS properties accept and the syntax used for describing them in CSS property definitions.

The HTML Data Task Force, Semantic Web Interest Group has published two Notes

• The HTML Data Guide aims to help publishers and consumers of HTML data. With several syntaxes (microformats, microdata, RDFa) and vocabularies (schema.org, Dublin Core, microformat vocabularies, etc.) to choose from, it provides guidance on deciding what to choose in a way that meets the publisher’s or consumer’s needs.
• The Microdata to RDF describes processing rules that may be used to extract RDF from an HTML document containing micro data.

The Device APIs Working Group and Web Real-Time Communications Working Group have published a First Public Working Draft of “MediaStream Capture Scenarios.”

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published two First Public Working Drafts

• CSS Transforms. CSS transforms allows elements styled with CSS to be transformed in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space. This specification is the convergence of the CSS 2D transforms, CSS 3D transforms and SVG transforms specifications.
• CSS Fragmentation Module Level 3. This module describes the fragmentation model that partitions a flow into pages. It builds on the Page model module and introduces and defines the fragmentation model. It adds functionality for pagination, breaking variable fragment size and orientation, widows and orphans

Whew!