Probably the most visible activity of the W3C this summer was the live-on-stage Tweet by W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee during the opening ceremonies of the London Olympics, ‘This is for everyone.’ Whether this bit of stagecraft eclipses the news of Microsoft’s defection from the Do Not Track default settings with IE10 is arguable. In the meantime, actual work was indeed accomplished in developing standards.
Some strides were made in the progress of CSS (cascading style sheets).”CSS Values and Units Module Level 3” is a W3C Candidate Recommendation. The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of “Selectors API Level 2,” which should simplify the selection of DOM elements via CSS. The Web Applications Working Group and the CSS Working Group also published the First Public Working Draft of “Fullscreen,” which defines the fullscreen API for the web platform.
The Device APIs Working Group has published a Group Note of “Web Application Privacy Best Practices.” This document describes privacy best practices for web applications, including those that might use device APIs.
Three Candidate Recommendations were published by the Web Performance Working Group: Page Visibility, Performance Timeline, and User Timing. In addition, the Navigation Timing Specification has moved to Proposed Recommendation.
Other new proposed recommendations include R2RML: RDB to RDF Mapping Language and A Direct Mapping of Relational Data to RDF, and Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces.
W3C will participate in the first edition of the “Open Data Conference” that will take place on September 27, 2012 in Paris, France. This event with an international dimension will gather public and private decision makers and address some of the pressing challenges facing the Open Data paradigm, such as accountability, privacy, or data licensing.
W3C is now offering online training classes for developers, beginning with a set of courses on developing for mobile devices. The latest round begins September 3. See W3DevCampus.com for details and to sign up.