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There have been an armful of advancements along the trail to W3C Recommendation across the various working groups. During this time, the W3C also published three workshop reports addressing big issues to the web and its denizens. Details below.

New Recommendations

The Web Applications Working Group published XML Digital Signatures for Widgets.

The XML Security Working Group published XML Signature Syntax and Processing Version 1.1, XML Encryption Syntax and Processing Version 1.1, and XML Signature Properties.

The Protocols and Formats Working Group (PFWG) published Role Attribute 1.0, which supports ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications).

The Web Applications Working Group has published Selectors API Level 1.

A joint effort of members of the Business Rules, Semantic Web, and Logic Programming communities has published the Second Edition of the Rule Interchange Format (RIF).

RIF Core Dialect (Second Edition), RIF Basic Logic Dialect (Second Edition), RIF Production Rule Dialect (Second Edition), RIF Framework for Logic Dialects (Second Edition), RIF Datatypes and Built-Ins 1.0 (Second Edition), and RIF RDF and OWL Compatibility (Second Edition).

New Proposed Recommendations

The Multimodal Interaction Working Group published Emotion Markup Language

(EmotionML) 1.0

The Web Applications Working Group published Web Storage.

The Web Performance Working Group has published Page Visibility.

The SPARQL Working Group has published  SPARQL 1.1 Entailment Regimes, SPARQL 1.1 Protocol, and SPARQL 1.1 Graph Store HTTP Protocol.

New Candidate Recommendations

The Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Working Group published the EXI Profile specification.

The CSS Working Group published CSS Conditional Rules Module Level 3.

The XML Query and XSLT Working Groups published XSLT and XQuery Serialization 3.0.

The RDF Working Group has published Turtle – A Terse RDF Triple Language.

he Web Application Security Working Group and the Web Applications Working Group published  Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS).

Workshop Reports

W3C Workshop Report on Electronic Books and the Open Web Platform

W3C Workshop Report on Do Not Track and Beyond

W3C Workshop Report on Current State and Roadmap of Standards for Web Applications on Mobile

W3C member discounts

20% off registration for Semantic Technology & Business Conference, 2-5 June, San Francisco, USA http://semtechbizsf2013.semanticweb.com/

50% off registration for Tizen Developer Conference,   22-24 May 2013, San Francisco, USA https://www.tizen.org/events/tizen-developer-conference/2013

W3Conf: Practical Standards for Web Professionals

21-22 February 2013

San Francisco, CA, USA

Hosted by Adobe

http://www.w3.org/conf/

Note: There will also be a live video stream of the event; also archived

Like last year, this conference is focused on the practical side of web standards, showcasing web technologies and techniques that can be used today, with a glimpse into the future of the Open Web Platform.

This year W3C has partnered with Adobe to broaden its reach to the developer and design community. The list of speakers and schedule is now available:

http://www.w3.org/conf/#schedule

W3C is offering a $150 discount to employees of W3C members, half off the original early-bird pricing. To take advantage of this discount, contact your W3C rep (amgreiner@lbl.gov) to get the promo code. This is an ideal opportunity not only to learn new skills, but to connect with experts from both the standards world and to the community of developers.

jQuery Conference Toronto

2-3 March 2013

Toronto, Canada

http://jqueryto.com/

W3C Members benefit from a 15% discount by using the discount code when registering:

https://www.atendy.com/event/jqueryto-2013-56

Contact your W3C rep (amgreiner@lbl.gov) for the discount code. This discount will remain active until the day of the event. The organizers are bringing some of the biggest names in JavaScript and the jQuery Foundation to Toronto for this event. More details including the current confirmed Speaker roster can be found at http://jqueryto.com

W3C Member Discount for Open Mobile Summit in SF

LBNL employees can get a discount when they join mobile, Internet and app world leaders at The Open Mobile Summit and Appcelerate, November 7-9, InterContinental Hotel, San Francisco. One of the best respected events in the mobile industry calendar returns to San Francisco for its 5th annual edition.  Plus meet the leaders of the mobile app economy on Nov 9th at Appcelerate. Contact your W3C rep for the discount code.

W3C Workshop on Do Not Track and Beyond will be in Berkeley

W3C has announced a Workshop on Do Not Track and Beyond, 26-27 November in Berkeley, California. W3C is currently creating standards that define mechanisms for expressing user preferences around Web tracking. There is no fee to participate in this Workshop and W3C Membership is not required. All participants are required to submit a position paper by 19 October and space is limited.

Discount for 11th International Semantic Web Conference

The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the primary conference on the use of semantic technologies on the Web and Linked Data. This year it will be held in Boston November 11-15. LBNL employees can save $75 off registration for the full conference (not for industry day). Contact your W3C rep for the discount code.

New Recommendations of note

Media Fragments URI 1.0 (basic) specifies the syntax for constructing media fragment URIs via particular name-value pairs that can be used in URI fragment and URI query requests to restrict a media resource to a certain fragment.

R2RML: RDB to RDF Mapping Language is a language for expressing customized mappings from relational databases to RDF datasets.

A Direct Mapping of Relational Data to RDF addresses the need to expose relational data on the Web of Data in order to share that data with collaborators.

Public Drafts

The Web Cryptography Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of “Web Cryptography API.” This specification describes a JavaScript API for performing basic cryptographic operations in web applications, such as hashing, signature generation and verification, and encryption and decryption. Additionally, it describes an API for applications to generate and/or manage the keying material necessary to perform these operations. Key storage is provided for both temporary and permanent keys. Access to keying material is contingent on the same origin policy. Uses for this API range from user or service authentication, document or code signing, and the confidentiality and integrity of communications. Learn more about the Security Activity.

The Provenance Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of “Constraints of the Provenance Data Model.” This document defines a subset of PROV instances called valid PROV instances. The intent of validation is to ensure that a PROV instance represents a history of objects and their interactions which is consistent, and thus safe to use for the purpose of logical reasoning and other kinds of analysis. Comments are welcome through 10 October.

The SVG Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of “Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 2.” This specification defines the features and syntax for describing two-dimensional vector and mixed vector/raster graphics. This version of SVG improves the usability of the language and adds new features commonly requested by authors.

Calls for Participation

W3C has issued a call for participation in the Audio Working Group, part of the Rich Web Client Activity. The group is chartered to deliver the Web Audio API specification [1] and the Web MIDI API specification.

There is also a Call for Participation in the RDFa Working Group, part of the Semantic Web Activity. The charter of this Working Group includes one deliverable, namely the HTML+RDFa 1.1 specification.

 

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.

Here’s a roundup of W3C news since my last post.

This one’s a little different from most: the Multimodal Interaction Working Group has published a  Candidate Recommendation of “Emotion Markup Language  (EmotionML) 1.0.” The group also published “Vocabularies for EmotionML.”  As the web is becoming ubiquitous,  interactive, and multimodal, technology needs to deal  increasingly with human factors, including emotions. The  specification of Emotion Markup Language 1.0 aims to strike a  balance between practical applicability and scientific  well-foundedness. The language is conceived as a “plug-in”  language suitable for use in three different areas: (1) manual  annotation of data; (2) automatic recognition of  emotion-related states from user behavior; and (3) generation  of emotion-related system behavior.

On the more immediately practical side, the Geolocation Working Group has published a Proposed  Recommendation of “Geolocation API Specification.”

There were a handful of developments in the semantic web activity. W3C launched the new Linked Data Platform (LDP)  Working Group to promote the use of linked data on the Web, and the RDF Web Applications Working Group published three  Proposed Recommendations for “RDFa Core 1.1,” “RDFa Lite 1.1”  and “XHTML+RDFa 1.1.” The group also published a draft of the  “RDFa 1.1 Primer“. The SPARQL Working Group published three Last Call Working  Drafts: SPARQL 1.1 Overview, SPARQL 1.1 Graph Store HTTP Protocol, and SPARQL 1.1 Query Results CSV and TSV Formats.

The Provenance Working Group published 5 Working Drafts. PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model, Constraints of the Provenance Data Model, PROV-N: The Provenance Notation, PROV-O: The PROV Ontology, and PROV Model Primer.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group published Working Drafts of “CSS Exclusions and Shapes Module Level 3,”  “CSS Regions Module Level 3,”  and “CSS Writing Modes Module Level 3.” It published the First Public Working Draft of “CSS Variables Module Level  1.” The group has also published a  Proposed Recommendation of “Media Queries,” which allow for media-dependent style sheets tailored for different  media types.

The Web Applications Working Group invites implementation of  the Candidate Recommendation of “Web IDL.” This document  defines an interface definition language, Web IDL, that can be  used to describe programming interfaces that are intended to be implemented  in web browsers. Web IDL is an IDL variant with a number of  features that allow the behavior of common script objects in  the web platform to be specified more readily.

The Web Applications Working Group has also published two Working  Drafts for file handling by web applications: File API: Writer and File API: Directories and System.

The Efficient XML Interchange Working Group has published a  second Public Working Draft of “Efficient XML Interchange (EXI)  Profile.” This document describes a profile of the EXI 1.0  specification for devices with limited memory capacities.