The biggest news this month from the W3C is that Media Queries and RDFa 1.1 have both made it to recommendation status. (Don’t be confused; a W3C specification is called a recommendation when it is complete. These specs may get updated in the future, but they are now as official as they get.)
Media queries allow web authors to designate styles for specific media, such as a screen of a certain size or a printer. Browsers already have pretty good support for media queries, but the new W3C recommendation will help make sure future browsers support them in a predictable way. Media queries are the cornerstone of responsive web design, the approach of targeting CSS styles to make the same HTML render nicely in smartphones (in any orientation) as well as in desktop browsers. Along with media queries, the ‘view-mode’ media feature has also been made an official recommendation. This specification extends media queries to include web application states, such as full-screen or minimized.
The RDFa recommendations include RDFa Core 1.1, RDFa Lite 1.1, and XHTML+RDFa 1.1. These specifications make it possible to mark up web pages (HTML5 as well as XHTML) to be machine readable, an important step in the direction of a semantic web. RDFa Core 1.1 specifies the core syntax and processing rules for RDFa 1.1 and how the language is intended to be used in XML documents. RDFa Lite 1.1 provides a simple subset of RDFa for novice web authors. XHTML+RDFa 1.1 specifies the usage of RDFa in the XHTML markup language. The RDFWeb Applications Working Group also published the RDFa 1.1 Primer.
Also of note, the W3C has published a new edition of Standards for Web Applications on Mobile, an overview of the various technologies developed in W3C that increase the power of Web applications, particularly in the mobile context.
The Provenance Working Group has published a Working Draft of “PROV-AQ: Provenance Access and Query.” This document specifies how to use standard Web protocols, including HTTP, to obtain information about the provenance of resources on the Web. It describes both simple access mechanisms for locating provenance information associated with web pages or resources, and provenance query services for more complex deployments. This is part of the larger W3C Prov provenance framework, another part of the semantic web activity.