Four POWDER Documents published; three Last Call Drafts

2008-11-17: The Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group published four Working Drafts today. The purpose of the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) is to provide a means for individuals or organizations to describe a group of resources through the publication of machine-readable metadata.

• Description Resources (Last Call); which details the creation and lifecycle of Description Resources (DRs), which encapsulate metadata
• Grouping of Resources (Last Call); which describes how sets of IRIs can be defined such that descriptions or other data can be applied to the resources obtained by dereferencing IRIs that are elements of the set.
• Formal Semantics (Last Call); which describes how the relatively simple operational format of a POWDER document can be transformed for processing by Semantic Web tools
• Primer (First Public Draft)

Last Call comments are welcome through 5 December. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity. (Permalink)

XML Signature Best Practices First Public Draft

2008-11-17: The XML Security Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of XML Signature Best Practices. This document collects best practices for implementors and users of the XML Signature specification. Most of these best practices are related to improving security and mitigating attacks, yet others are for best practices in the practical use of XML Signature, such as signing XML that doesn't use namespaces, for example. Learn more about the Security Activity. (Permalink)

Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0 Draft Published

2008-11-17: The Math Working Group has published a Working Draft of Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0, which defines the Mathematical Markup Language, or MathML. MathML is an XML application for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and content. The goal of MathML is to enable mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the World Wide Web, just as HTML has enabled this functionality for text. Learn more about the Math Activity. (Permalink)

W3C mobileOK Scheme 1.0 Updated

2008-11-17: The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group has published an update of Working Draft of W3C mobileOK Scheme 1.0. The document provides an overview of how the mobileOK specification helps ensure that content is suitable for use on very basic mobile devices. Learn more about the Mobile Web Initiative Activity. (Permalink)

W3C Publishes XML Signature Best Practices First Public Draft

2008-11-14: The XML Security Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of XML Signature Best Practices. The XML Signature specification offers powerful and flexible mechanisms to support a variety of use cases. This flexibility has the downside of increasing the number of possible attacks. One countermeasure to the increased number of threats is to follow best practices, including a simplification of the use of XML Signature where possible. This document outlines best practices noted by the XML Security Specifications Maintenance Working Group, the XML Security Working Group, and other ideas cited at the Workshop on Next Steps for XML Security. While most of these best practices are related to improving security and mitigating attacks, yet others are for best practices in the practical use of XML Signature, such as signing XML that doesn't use namespaces. Learn more about the Security Activity. (Permalink)

Last Call: Selectors API

2008-11-14: The Web Applications Working Group has published the Last Call Working Draft of Selectors API. 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 12 December. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity. (Permalink)

New Working Group to Refine Web Services Resource Access Specifications

2008-11-07: W3C today launched the Web Services Resource Access Working Group with a mission to produce W3C Recommendations for a set of Web Services specifications by refining the WS-Transfer, WS-ResourceTransfer, WS-Enumeration, WS-MetadataExchange and WS-Eventing Member Submissions. The group will address existing issues in those specifications, and review implementation experience and interoperability feedback from implementers and considering composition with other Web services standards. Learn more about the Web Services Activity. (Permalink)

W3C Invites Implementations of Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.1 (Candidate Recommendation)

2008-11-07: The Voice Browser Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.1. The Speech Synthesis Markup Language Specification is designed to provide a rich, XML-based markup language for assisting the generation of synthetic speech in Web and other applications. The essential role of the markup language is to provide authors of synthesizable content a standard way to control aspects of speech such as pronunciation, volume, pitch, rate, etc. across different synthesis-capable platforms. See the implementation report plan and learn more about the Voice Browser Activity. (Permalink)

Note: Legacy extended IRIs for XML resource identification

2008-11-07: The XML Core Working Group has published the Group Note of Legacy extended IRIs for XML resource identification. For historic reasons, some formats have allowed variants of IRIs that are somewhat less restricted in syntax, for example XML system identifiers and W3C XML Schema anyURIs. This document provides a definition and a name (Legacy Extended IRI or LEIRI) for these variants for easy reference. These variants have to be used with care; they require further processing before being fully interchangeable as IRIs. New protocols and formats should not use Legacy Extended IRIs. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity. (Permalink)

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 is a Proposed Recommendation

2008-11-03: The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 as a Proposed Recommendation, and published updated Working Drafts of Understanding WCAG 2.0, Techniques for WCAG 2.0, and How to Meet WCAG 2.0. WCAG defines how to make Web sites, Web applications, and other Web content accessible to people with disabilities. Comments are welcome through 2 December 2008. Read the announcement, Overview of WCAG 2.0 Documents, and about the Web Accessibility Initiative. (Permalink)

Call for Review: W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 is a Proposed Recommendation

2008-11-03: The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group has published the Proposed Recommendation of W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0. This document defines the set of machine-verifiable tests that provide the basis for making a claim of W3C mobileOK Basic conformance and is based on W3C Mobile Web Best Practices. Content which passes the tests has taken some steps to provide a functional user experience for users of basic mobile devices whose capabilities at least match those of the Default Delivery Context. Comments are welcome through 1 December 2008. Learn more about the Mobile Web Initiative. (Permalink)

W3C Talks in November

2008-11-03: Browse W3C presentations and events also available as an RSS channel. (Permalink)

• 5 November, Aarhus, Denmark: E-gov and the citizen - transformation by new technology.Olle Olsson presents at jboye08.
• 6 November, Monterrey, Mexico: Improving government through better use of the Web.José Manuel Alonso gives a keynote at Seminario Internacional de Usabilidad y Accesibilidad para la Web 2008.
• 14 November, Paris, France: La mode se démode, le Style jamais.Daniel Glazman presents at Paris Web 2008.
• 18 November, Sophia Antipolis, France: The W3C Multimodal Architecture.Ingmar Kliche presents at ETSI Workshop on Multimodal Interaction on Mobile Devices .
• 28 November, Berlin, Germany: Towards eGovernment 2.0 through better use of the Web.José Manuel Alonso gives a keynote at E-Government-Standards Kongress.
• View upcoming talks by country
• More talks...

Incubator Group to Evaluate Research on Model-Based User Interfaces

2008-10-27: W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the Model-Based User Interfaces Incubator Group, sponsored by W3C Members Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, JustSystems, Siemens, Telefónica de España, and Université Catholique de Louvain. The group's mission is to evaluate research on model-based user interface design as a framework for authoring Web applications and with a view to proposing work on related standards. Read more about the Incubator Activity, an initiative to foster development of emerging Web-related technologies. Incubator Activity work is not on the W3C standards track. (Permalink)

Challenges for Future Web Bring Experts Together at W3C Global Plenary

2008-10-21: All this week, the World Wide Web Consortium holds its annual Technical Plenary week near its European host site in France. More than 350 software engineers, developers, and other experts in a wide range of technologies such as HTML, XML, CSS, Mobile Web, Semantic Web, and Video in the Web, come together to address a variety of challenges in the development of Web standards. Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the Web, will open the 22 October plenary session with a keynote and discussion on the technical direction of W3C for the next several years and where Web applications, documents, and data come together. In the keynote, Berners-Lee will also share thoughts on the future of HTML in the browser and how HTML and XML communities can learn from each other. Slides and minutes from the plenary day will be publicly available. Read the press release for more information, including information for media wishing to cover the event. (Photo credit: Karl Dubost. Permalink)

Last Call: Media Queries

2008-10-16: The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published the Last Call Working Draft of Media Queries. HTML4 and CSS2 currently support media-dependent style sheets tailored for different media types. For example, a document may use sans-serif fonts when displayed on a screen and serif fonts when printed. 'screen' and 'print' are two media types that have been defined. Media queries extend the functionality of media types by allowing more precise labeling of style sheets. Comments are welcome through 21 November. Learn more about the Style Activity. (Permalink)

Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces Fifth Working Draft Published

2008-10-16: The Multimodal Interaction Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces (MMI Architecture), which defines a loosely coupled architecture for multimodal user interfaces. The main change in this draft is the addition of the rules and guidelines which will allow modality experts to describe the features, capabilities and APIs for specific modality components in sufficient detail so that the components will be interoperable in implementations of the Multimodal Architecture. The architecture envisioned by the Working Group will provide a general and flexible framework providing interoperability among modality-specific components from different vendors - for example, speech recognition from one vendor and handwriting recognition from another. Learn more about W3C's Multimodal Interaction Activity. (Permalink)

RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing Is a W3C Recommendation; RDFa Primer Updated

2008-10-15: The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group and the XHTML2 Working Group published the W3C Recommendation RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing. This specification allows publishers to express structured data on the Web within XHTML. This allows tools to read it, enabling a new world of user functionality, allowing users to transfer structured data between applications and web sites, and allowing browsing applications to improve the user experience. For those looking for an introduction to the use of RDFa and some real-world examples, please consult the updated RDFa Primer. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity and the HTML Activity. (Permalink)