May Matters

Here’s a roundup of W3C news since my last post.

This one’s a little different from most: the Multimodal Interaction Working Group has published a  Candidate Recommendation of “Emotion Markup Language  (EmotionML) 1.0.” The group also published “Vocabularies for EmotionML.”  As the web is becoming ubiquitous,  interactive, and multimodal, technology needs to deal  increasingly with human factors, including emotions. The  specification of Emotion Markup Language 1.0 aims to strike a  balance between practical applicability and scientific  well-foundedness. The language is conceived as a “plug-in”  language suitable for use in three different areas: (1) manual  annotation of data; (2) automatic recognition of  emotion-related states from user behavior; and (3) generation  of emotion-related system behavior.

On the more immediately practical side, the Geolocation Working Group has published a Proposed  Recommendation of “Geolocation API Specification.”

There were a handful of developments in the semantic web activity. W3C launched the new Linked Data Platform (LDP)  Working Group to promote the use of linked data on the Web, and the RDF Web Applications Working Group published three  Proposed Recommendations for “RDFa Core 1.1,” “RDFa Lite 1.1”  and “XHTML+RDFa 1.1.” The group also published a draft of the  “RDFa 1.1 Primer“. The SPARQL Working Group published three Last Call Working  Drafts: SPARQL 1.1 Overview, SPARQL 1.1 Graph Store HTTP Protocol, and SPARQL 1.1 Query Results CSV and TSV Formats.

The Provenance Working Group published 5 Working Drafts. PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model, Constraints of the Provenance Data Model, PROV-N: The Provenance Notation, PROV-O: The PROV Ontology, and PROV Model Primer.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group published Working Drafts of “CSS Exclusions and Shapes Module Level 3,”  “CSS Regions Module Level 3,”  and “CSS Writing Modes Module Level 3.” It published the First Public Working Draft of “CSS Variables Module Level  1.” The group has also published a  Proposed Recommendation of “Media Queries,” which allow for media-dependent style sheets tailored for different  media types.

The Web Applications Working Group invites implementation of  the Candidate Recommendation of “Web IDL.” This document  defines an interface definition language, Web IDL, that can be  used to describe programming interfaces that are intended to be implemented  in web browsers. Web IDL is an IDL variant with a number of  features that allow the behavior of common script objects in  the web platform to be specified more readily.

The Web Applications Working Group has also published two Working  Drafts for file handling by web applications: File API: Writer and File API: Directories and System.

The Efficient XML Interchange Working Group has published a  second Public Working Draft of “Efficient XML Interchange (EXI)  Profile.” This document describes a profile of the EXI 1.0  specification for devices with limited memory capacities.