Quick Update: A Survey and Two Online Classes

Who is W3C to you?

As W3C nears its 20th anniversary in 2014, it is conducting a research project. You are invited to complete their first public survey about the W3C brand. Your responses will help guide where the organization directs its energies as it evolves the W3C brand. The survey, open through 5 May 2013, should take approximately 15 minutes to complete. Participants who complete the survey may enter to win an Apple iPad mini. This survey is confidential. W3C will receive only anonymized data. Please see the survey for the complete privacy policy.

Online Training from the W3C

The W3C offers online training for Web developers via its W3DevCampus. Registration is open for a new session of the HTML5 training  course. Experienced trainer Michel Buffa will cover the  techniques developers and designers need to create great Web pages and apps. Topics include video, animations, forms, and APIs to create location-based services, and offline applications. Training starts 3 June and lasts six weeks; students receive a certificate upon course completion. Register before May 6 to benefit from the early bird rate.

Registration is also open for a new session of the W3C mobile Web best practices training course, to start on 13 May 2013. In this course, you will learn how to “mobilize” pages and deliver a good Web experience on mobile devices. This 6-week online training course, taught by Frances de Waal, let you study step by step and at your own pace (the course effort is about 6 hours a week). The registration fee is 245€ (approx. 318US$). Enroll soon to become a mobile Web expert and learn more about W3DevCampus, the W3C online training for Web developers.

April 2013 Update

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

Discounts on Upcoming Conferences

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

January 2013 Update

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.

November Niceties

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

September Stuff

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.

 

August Additions

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.

June Jabberings

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.

May Matters

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.

April Showers

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

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.