2015 was an incredibly busy year for the W3C, and a huge variety of work was accomplished. There were, in fact, too many things going on to even list all of them. Here I review a few of the more interesting developments.
Upcoming Recommendations That May Be of Interest to Lab Folks
CSV on the Web Working Group
Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web
Metadata Vocabulary for Tabular Data
Generating JSON from Tabular Data on the Web
Generating RDF from Tabular Data on the Web
Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group
Data on the Web Best Practices
Spatial Data on the Web Working Group (with Open Geospatial Consortium)
Spatial Data on the Web Use Cases & Requirements
Web Annotations Working Group
Notable Activities and Events
The W3C earned an Emmy for “Standardization and Pioneering Development of Non-Live Broadband Captioning”.
The WebAssembly Community Group kicked off, working on making it possible to build c/c++ (and eventually other languages) applications for the browser.
The consortium began a new effort to reach out to developers, beginning with a developers’ web site and a @w3cdevs twitter feed.
The fourth version of the Document Object Model (DOM4) became an official recommendation.
W3C took a firm stand on upholding net neutrality.
HTML5 began to take hold over Flash. There were lots of conversions of prominent web applications to HTML5, especially for video players (Twitch, YouTube).
The Consortium began considering a proposal from the EFF for a nonaggression covenant for Encrypted Media Extensions, to help provide some legal protection against laws like the DMCA 1201 for people who implement the standards.
The Tracking Protection Working Group released the last-call working draft of its do-not-track recommendation.
MathML was approved as an ISO/IET international standard (in addition to being a W3C Recommendation).
The W3C launched an edX MOOC for HTML5.