Category: news

Social Web Activity Starts Up

On July 21, the W3C launched a new Social Activity aimed at helping developers build social networking apps that leverage the Open Web Platform. The goal is to better enable social technologies such as social business applications, cross-organization federation, and personal data privacy. The activity involves two new W3C groups, the Social Web Working Group and the Social Interest Group. The interest group will provide use cases and strategies, and the working group will develop specifications such as a JSON-based syntax for social data, a client-side web API, and a protocol for updating social information.

Web Annotation in the Works

W3C work on annotations is now gearing up. As a result of the April 2014 Web Annotations Workshop, the consortium is in the process of chartering a new Annotation Working Group. That group will develop standards to enable an open approach to annotations, facilitating an ecosystem of archived, shareable annotations available to the user in multiple environments. The Web Annotations Workshop report has been published as well.

New Working Drafts

Your chance to comment on early work

Metadata Vocabulary for Tabular Data

IndieUI: User Context 1.0: Contextual Information for User Interface Independence

Core Accessibility API Mappings 1.1

DOM Level 3 KeyboardEvent key Values

DOM Level 3 KeyboardEvent code Values

Media Queries Level 4

Data on the Web Best Practices Use Cases and Requirements

Non-element Selectors Module Level 1

W3C HTML Form HTTP Extensions

W3C HTML JSON form submission

WOFF File Format 2.0 

Service Workers

TTML Text and Image Profiles for Internet Media Subtitles and Captions 1.0

CSS Will Change Module Level 1

Tracking Preference Expression (DNT)

7 drafts from XQuery and XPath Working Groups

Last Call Working Drafts

Your last chance to suggest substantive changes

W3C DOM4

Content Security Policy Level 2

Geometry Interfaces Module Level 1

Beacon

Vibration API

Ambient Light Events

HTML Media Capture

HTML 5

Encoding

State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction

The app: URL Scheme

CSS Font Loading Module Level 3

CSS Masking Module Level 1

CSS Custom Properties for Cascading Variables Module Level 1

DOM Parsing and Serialization

New Recommendations

Official W3C specifications newly minted

Emotion Markup Language (EmotionML) 1.0

Group Notes and Reports

Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) 1.0

RDF 1.1 Primer

Final report of the Linking Geospatial Data workshop

Authoring HTML: Handling Right-to-Left Scripts

Authoring HTML: Language declarations

Interest Group Note for the vCard Ontology

Fourth Web and TV Workshop Report

Workshop on Web and Payments

Upcoming Workshops/Symposia

Workshop on Web Cryptography Next Steps

September 10-11, 2014, Mountain View, CA.

W3C20 Anniversary Symposium: The Future of the Web

October 29, Santa Clara, California

 

 

Yes, I’ve resolved to use more temporally informative titles for my posts. Following is a roundup of W3C activities at the close of the year and the start of the new one, beginning with a big milestone for HTML5 and ending with an upcoming local conference.

HTML5 Definition complete

In December, W3C published the complete definition of the “HTML5” and “Canvas 2D” specifications. Though not yet W3C standards, these specifications are now feature complete, meaning businesses and developers have a stable target for implementation and planning.

W3C now embarks on the stage of W3C standardization devoted to interoperability and testing. W3C is on schedule to finalize the HTML5 standard in 2014. The HTML Working Group also published first drafts of “HTML 5.1,” “HTML Canvas 2D Context, Level 2,” and “main element,” providing an early view of the next round of standardization.

Other New Recommendations

WOFF File Format 1.0. This document specifies the WOFF font packaging format. This format was designed to provide lightweight, easy-to-implement compression of font data, suitable for use with CSS @font-face rules. Any properly licensed TrueType/OpenType/Open Font Format file can be packaged in WOFF format for Web use.

Navigation Timing. This specification defines an interface for web applications to access timing information related to navigation and elements.

High Resolution Time. This specification defines a JavaScript interface that provides the current time in sub-millisecond resolution and such that it is not subject to system clock skew or adjustments.

Packaged Web Apps (Widgets) – Packaging and XML Configuration (Second Edition). This specification standardizes a packaging format and metadata for a class of software known commonly as packaged apps or widgets.

the Second Edition of the OWL 2 ontology language (a W3C Edited Recommendation). OWL 2, part of W3C’s Semantic Web toolkit, allows people to capture knowledge about a particular application domain (e.g, energy or medicine) and then use tools to manage information, search through it, and learn more from it.

Proposed Recommendations

Selectors API Level 1. Selectors, which are widely used in CSS, are patterns that match against elements in a tree structure. The Selectors API specification defines methods for retrieving Element nodes from the DOM by matching against a group of selectors. It is often desirable to perform DOM operations on a specific set of elements in a document. These methods simplify the process of acquiring specific elements, especially compared with the more verbose techniques defined and used in the past. Comments are welcome through 25 January.

Candidate Recommendations

The Provenance Working Group has published four Candidate Recommendation Documents along with corresponding supporting notes. These document provide a framework for interchanging provenance on the Web. PROV enables one to represent and interchange provenance information using widely available formats such as RDF and XML.

Working Drafts

Content Security Policy 1.1 (First public working draft). This document defines a policy language used to declare a set of content restrictions for a web resource, and a mechanism for transmitting the policy from a server to a client where the policy is enforced.

HTML Media Capture (working draft). The HTML Media Capture specification defines an HTML form extension that facilitates user access to a device’s media capture mechanism, such as a camera, or microphone, from within a file upload control.

Ambient Light Events (Last call working draft).This specification defines a means to receive events that correspond to a light sensor detecting the presence of a light. Comments are welcome through 26 January.

CSS Text Decoration Module Level 3 (Last call working draft). This module contains the features of CSS relating to text decoration, such as underlines, text shadows, and emphasis marks. Comments are welcome through 31 January.

CSS Cascading and Inheritance Level 3. One of the fundamental design principles of CSS is cascading, which allows several style sheets to influence the presentation of a document. The rules for finding the specified value for all properties on all elements in the document are described in this specification.

Workshops and Training

Electronic Books and the Open Web Platform, Feb 11-12, 2013, New York (USA), Hosted by O’Reilly Media. Today’s eBook market is dynamic, fast-changing and strong. Nevertheless, publishers face major business and technical challenges in this market, some of which could be reduced or removed by standardization.

W3C online course “Mobile Web 2: Programming Web Applications“. In this course, taught by Marcos Caceres, you will learn how to program mobile Web applications that can ship both online and in application stores. Moving beyond best practices, the course covers all techniques you need to know for creating successful mobile Web apps. The 6-week course begins 21 January 2013.

W3Conf: Practical Standards for Web Professionals, W3C’s second annual developer conference, in San Francisco on 21-22 February 2013. Presentations will focus on practical, cutting-edge standards that developers and designers can use across browsers today, and give a glimpse into what’s coming. The conference will feature leading experts in the Web industry on HTML5, CSS, graphics, mobiles, accessibility, multimedia, APIs, and more. Space is limited, so register now.

Community-Driven WebPlatform Docs to Aid Developers

The W3C has published a new resource for web developers, the WebPlatform Docs. Released as an alpha version, this is a new community-driven site that aims to become a comprehensive and authoritative source for web developer documentation. It provides a single site for current, cross-browser and cross-device coding best practices.

New Recommendations

“Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces” is now a W3C Recommendation.

The SPARQL working group has published several candidate recommendations:

SPARQL 1.1 Protocol

SPARQL 1.1 Graph Store HTTP Protocol

SPARQL 1.1 Entailment Regimes

New Working Drafts

The XML Security Working Group [1] has published two Last Call Working Drafts: XML Signature Syntax and Processing Version 1.1, and XML Encryption Syntax and Processing Version 1.1.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published the First Public Working Drafts of “Filter Effects 1.0” and “CSS Counter Styles Level 3.”

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of “File API.” This specification defines the basic representations for files, lists of files, errors raised by access to files, and programmatic ways to read files in web applications. Additionally, this specification also defines an interface that represents “raw data” which can be asynchronously processed on the main thread of conforming user agents.

The Technical Architecture Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of “Publishing and Linking on the Web.”This document is intended to inform future social and legal  discussions of the Web by clarifying the ways in which the Web’s technical facilities operate to store, publish and retrieve information, and by providing definitions for terminology as used within the Web’s technical community. This document also describes the technical and operational impact that does or could result from legal constraints on publishing, linking and transformation on the Web.

The Linked Data Platform (LDP) Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of “Linked Data Platform 1.0.” A set of best practices and simple approach for a read-write Linked Data architecture, based on HTTP access to web resources that describe their state using RDF.

The Web Applications Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of “Push API.” This specification defines a “Push API” that provides webapps with scripted access to server-sent application data.

WCAG 2 Becomes ISO Standard

The W3C and the Joint Technical Committee JTC 1, Information Technology of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), announced approval of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 as an ISO/IEC International Standard (ISO/IEC 40500:2012). WCAG 2.0 has been adopted or referenced by many governments and organizations.

Calls for Participation

The W3C has issued calls for participation for

• the MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group, part of the  Internationalization Activity.
• the Internationalization Working Group, another part of the Internationalization Activity.
• the System Applications Working Group, part of the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity
• the Near Field Communications Working Group, part of the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity
• the WebFonts Working Group, part of the Fonts Activity
•  the Pointer Events Working Group, part of the Rich Web Clients Activity

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.

This entry will cover a smattering of activities that may be of interest at the Lab, some for front-end oriented folks, some for data-oriented folks, and some for back-end oriented folks. For the former, we have some new bits of CSS that should make layout and animation easier plus an early draft of the next document object model. For the datavores, there are some new XML specs that have made it all the way to recommendation status and some early work on government linked data. For the back-enders, we have a new working group on cryptography and last call for input on the draft of cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published

five Working Drafts:

• CSS Flexible Box Layout Module describes a CSS box model optimized for user interface design. In the flexbox layout model, the children of a flexbox can be laid out in any direction, and can “flex” their sizes, either growing to fill unused space or shrinking to avoid overflowing the parent. Both horizontal and vertical alignment of the children can be easily manipulated. Nesting of these boxes (horizontal inside vertical, or vertical inside horizontal) can be used to build layouts in two dimensions.
• CSS Grid Layout which allows designers to define invisible grids of horizontal and vertical lines. Elements from a document can then be anchored to points in the grid, which aligns them visually to each other, even if they are not next to each other in the source.
• CSS Transforms.CSS transforms allows elements styled with CSS to be transformed in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space. This specification is the convergence of the CSS 2D transforms, CSS 3D transforms and SVG transforms specifications.
• CSS Animations. This CSS module describes a way for authors to animate the values of CSS properties over time, using keyframes. The behavior of these keyframe animations can be controlled by specifying their duration, number of repeats, and repeating behavior.
• CSS Transitions.CSS Transitions allows property changes in CSS values to occur smoothly over a specified duration.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of DOM4.

Two XML-related specs are now official recommendations

• W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 Part 1: Structures
• W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 Part 2: Datatypes

The Government Linked Data Working Group has published four First Public Working Drafts:

• Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT). DCAT is an RDF vocabulary designed to facilitate interoperability between data catalogs published on the Web.
• The RDF Data Cube Vocabulary. There are many situations where it would be useful to be able to publish multi-dimensional data, such as statistics, on the web in such a way that it can be linked to related data sets and concepts. The Data Cube vocabulary provides a means to do this using the W3C RDF (Resource Description Framework) standard. The model underpinning the Data Cube vocabulary is compatible with the cube model that underlies SDMX (Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange), an ISO standard for exchanging and sharing statistical data and metadata among organizations. The Data Cube vocabulary is a core foundation which supports extension vocabularies to enable publication of other aspects of statistical data flows.
• Terms for describing people. It defines how to describe people’s characteristics such as names or addresses and how to relate people to other things, for example to organizations or projects. For each term, guidance on the usage within a running example is provided. This document also defines mappings to widely used vocabularies to enable interoperability.
• An organization ontology. This document describes a core ontology for organizational structures, aimed at supporting linked-data publishing of organizational information across a number of domains. It is designed to allow domain-specific extensions to add classification of organzations and roles, as well as extensions to support neighbouring information such as organizational activities.

W3C launched a new Web Cryptography Working Group, whose mission is to define an API that lets developers implement secure application protocols on the level of Web applications.

The Web Application Security Working Group has published a Working Draft of Cross-Origin Resource Sharing.

This is the inaugural post for the Lab’s W3C Rep Blog, in which I attempt to convey a sense of the breadth of activity occurring at the W3C by showing the sheer volume of it. A crazy lot of things happened in March, so I’m going to reserve the detail for things that seem most relevant. In fact, a crazy lot of things happen every month at the W3C, so I won’t be trying to list everything in this blog. For that level of detail, you might want to subscribe to the W3C Newsletter. If you’re wondering what this W3C stuff is all about, see the About page.

The CSS working group came out with an important new spec redesign on April 1.

Community Groups and Business Groups are two relatively new types of W3C groups introduced last year. The lab joined the High-Performance Computing Community Group, and there are other groups cropping up each month.

The Math Working Group‘s charter has been extended until 31 March 2013.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of “Widget Updates.”

The Device APIs Working Group has published a Group Note of “The Media Capture API.”

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of “CSS Speech Module.”

The SVG Working Group, part of the Graphics Activity, has put out a call for participation.

The Media Fragments Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of “Media Fragments URI 1.0 (basic).”

The Audio Working Group has published a Working Draft of “Web Audio API.”

The Tracking Protection Working Group has published two documents:

• A First Public Working Draft of Tracking Compliance and Scope which defines the meaning of a Do Not Track (DNT) preference and sets out practices for websites to comply with this preference.
• A First Public Working Draft of Tracking Preference Expression (DNT) which defines the technical mechanisms for expressing a tracking preference via the DNT request header field in HTTP, via an HTML DOM property readable by embedded scripts, and via properties accessible to various user agent plug-in or extension APIs. It also defines mechanisms for sites to signal whether and how they honor this preference, both in the form of a machine-readable tracking status resource at a well-known location and via a “Tk” response header field, and a mechanism for allowing the user to approve site-specific exceptions to DNT as desired.

Three Web Applications Working Group specifications were published

• A Last Call Working Draft of HTML5 Web Messaging which defines two mechanisms for communicating between browsing contexts in HTML documents.
• A Last Call Working Draft of Web Workers that defines an API that allows Web application authors to spawn background workers running scripts in parallel to their main page. This allows for thread-like operation with message-passing as the coordination mechanism.
• A Group Note of Widget URI scheme that defines the widget URI scheme and rules for dereferencing a widget URI, which can be used to address resources inside a package. The dereferencing model relies on HTTP semantics to return resources in a manner akin to a HTTP GET request. Doing so allows this URI scheme to be used with other technologies that rely on HTTP responses to function as intended, such as XMLHTTPRequest.

The Web Performance Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of “Navigation Timing.” This specification defines an interface for web applications to access timing information related to navigation and elements.

The Web Performance Working Group has published a First Public and Last Call Working Draft of “High Resolution Time.” This document defines a Javascript interface that provides the current time in sub-millisecond resolution and such that it is not subject to system clock skew or adjustments. Comments are welcome through 10 April. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published three Candidate Recommendation documents for “RDFa Core 1.1,” “RDFa Lite 1.1” and “XHTML+RDFa 1.1.”

The XML Security Working Group has published the “XML Encryption 1.1” Candidate Recommendation.

The W3C has chartered a MultilingualWeb–LT (Language Technology) Working Group, which will develop standard ways to support the (automatic and manual) translation and adaptation of Web content to local needs

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of “CSS Values and Units Module Level 3.” This CSS3 module describes the common values and units that CSS properties accept and the syntax used for describing them in CSS property definitions.

The HTML Data Task Force, Semantic Web Interest Group has published two Notes

• The HTML Data Guide aims to help publishers and consumers of HTML data. With several syntaxes (microformats, microdata, RDFa) and vocabularies (schema.org, Dublin Core, microformat vocabularies, etc.) to choose from, it provides guidance on deciding what to choose in a way that meets the publisher’s or consumer’s needs.
• The Microdata to RDF describes processing rules that may be used to extract RDF from an HTML document containing micro data.

The Device APIs Working Group and Web Real-Time Communications Working Group have published a First Public Working Draft of “MediaStream Capture Scenarios.”

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published two First Public Working Drafts

• CSS Transforms. CSS transforms allows elements styled with CSS to be transformed in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space. This specification is the convergence of the CSS 2D transforms, CSS 3D transforms and SVG transforms specifications.
• CSS Fragmentation Module Level 3. This module describes the fragmentation model that partitions a flow into pages. It builds on the Page model module and introduces and defines the fragmentation model. It adds functionality for pagination, breaking variable fragment size and orientation, widows and orphans

Whew!