April Showers

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

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.