April 2014 – LBNL W3C Rep Blog

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.