W3C News

W3C Invites Implementations of W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD): Component Designators

2010-01-21T23:12:47Z

The XML Schema Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD): Component Designators. XML Schema: Component Designators defines a scheme for identifying XML Schema components as specified by XML Schema Part 1: Structures and XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.

Updated Draft: Use Cases and Requirements for Ontology and API for Media Resource 1.0

2010-01-21T23:07:27Z

The Media Annotations Working Group has published a Working Draft of Use Cases and Requirements for Ontology and API for Media Resource 1.0. This document specifies use cases and requirements as an input for the development of the "Ontology for Media Resource 1.0" and the "API for Media Resource 1.0". The ontology will be a simple ontology to support cross-community data integration of information related to media resources on the Web. The API will provide read access and potentially write access to media resources, relying on the definitions from the ontology. Learn more about the Video in the Web Activity.

Last Call: CSS Styling Attributes Level 1

2010-01-21T23:05:27Z

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of CSS Styling Attributes Level 1. Markup languages such as HTML and SVG provide a styling attribute on most elements, to hold a fragment of a style sheet that applies to those elements. One of the possible style sheet languages is CSS. This draft describes the syntax and interpretation of the CSS fragment that can be used in such styling attributes. Comments are welcome through 09 February. Learn more about the Style Activity.

Contacts API First Draft Published

2010-01-21T23:03:29Z

The Device APIs and Policy Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Contacts API. This API provides access to the user???s address book from within a browser environment. Learn more about JavaScript interfaces developed in W3C.

Interested in Next Steps for RDF? Come to the W3C Workshop!

2010-01-20T22:41:04Z

W3C is organizing a Workshop on the Next Steps for RDF around June 2010; we will announce the exact dates and location as soon as possible. Since its publication in 2004, the Resource Description Framework (RDF) has become the core architectural block of the Semantic Web. The standard is now widely deployed in terms of tools and applications. Due to this wide deployment, additional R&D activities, and the publication of newer standards (e.g., SPARQL, OWL, POWDER, and SKOS), a number of issues regarding RDF have come to the fore. Workshop articipants will discuss these issues and help determine whether it is time for a new version of RDF. W3C Membership is not required to participate in the Workshop, but each participant must be associated with an accepted position paper. The deadline for position papers is 29 March 2010; see the Call for Participation for more information. Updates (including the exact date and location of the Workshop) will be added to the Call for Participation and will be announced on the Semantic Web Activity News Blog.

Selectors API Level 2 First Draft Published

2010-01-19T21:08:40Z

The Web Applications Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Selectors API Level 2. 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, and for testing if a given element matches a particular selector. It is often desirable to perform DOM operations on a specific set of elements in a document. These methods simplify the process of acquiring and testing specific elements, especially compared with the more verbose techniques defined and used in the past. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

Call for Review: WebCGM 2.1 Proposed Recommendation Published

2010-01-14T15:11:43Z

The WebCGM Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of WebCGM 2.1. Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) is an ISO standard, defined by ISO/IEC 8632:1999, for the interchange of 2D vector and mixed vector/raster graphics. WebCGM is a profile of CGM, which adds Web linking and is optimized for Web applications in technical illustration, electronic documentation, geophysical data visualization, and similar fields. WebCGM 2.1, refines and completes the features of the major WebCGM 2.0 release. WebCGM 2.0 added a DOM (API) specification for programmatic access to WebCGM objects, a specification of an XML Companion File (XCF) architecture, and extended the graphical and intelligent content of WebCGM 1.0. Comments are welcome through 11 February. Learn more about the Graphics Activity. The review end date was corrected on 20 January.

Programmable HTTP Caching and Serving Draft Published

2010-01-14T15:10:22Z

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Programmable HTTP Caching and Serving. This document defines APIs for off-line serving of requests to HTTP resources using static and dynamic responses. It extends the function of application caches defined in HTML5. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

W3C Advisory Committee Elects Technical Architecture Group Participants [CORRECTION]

2010-01-11T17:39:54Z

Correction 13 January 2010 : The W3C Advisory Committee has elected Daniel Appelquist (Vodafone) and Henry Thompson (U. of Edinburgh) to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG). The Director has appointed Ashok Malhotra (Oracle), Noah Mendelsohn, and Jonathan Rees. This outcome reflects the correct application of the tie-breaking algorithm.

Original message from 11 January: The W3C Advisory Committee has re-elected Ashok Malhotra (Oracle) and Henry Thompson (U. of Edinburgh) to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG). Continuing TAG participants are John Kemp (Nokia), Larry Masinter (Adobe), T.V. Raman (Google). The Director is also expected to appoint three individuals very soon. The mission of the TAG is to build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary, to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG, and to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C.

New WAI Resource: Contacting Organizations about Inaccessible Websites

2010-01-06T14:16:51Z

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) today published Contacting Organizations about Inaccessible Websites as part of the WAI-AGE Project. This new WAI resource guides you through telling organizations about accessibility barriers on their website. WAI would like to know how this resource works for you and how we can improve it. See the blog post: Take a few minutes to encourage web accessibility. Your voice counts. Learn about Accessibility and visit the WAI home page.

Last Call: XProc: An XML Pipeline Language

2010-01-05T19:00:46Z

The XML Processing Model Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of XProc: An XML Pipeline Language, a language for describing operations to be performed on XML documents. A pipeline consists of steps. Like pipelines, steps take zero or more XML documents as their inputs and produce zero or more XML documents as their outputs. The inputs of a step come from the web, from the pipeline document, from the inputs to the pipeline itself, or from the outputs of other steps in the pipeline. The outputs from a step are consumed by other steps, are outputs of the pipeline as a whole, or are discarded. Comments are welcome through 02 February. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.

Indexed Database API Draft Published

2010-01-05T14:54:45Z

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Indexed Database API. User agents need to store large numbers of objects locally in order to satisfy off-line data requirements of Web applications. The Web Storage specification is useful for storing pairs of keys and their corresponding values. However, it does not provide in-order retrieval of keys, efficient searching over values, or storage of duplicate values for a key. The current specification provides a concrete API to perform advanced key-value data management that is at the heart of most sophisticated query processors. It does so by using transactional databases to store keys and their corresponding values (one or more per key), and providing a means of traversing keys in a deterministic order. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

Seven API Publications Advance Web Applications Stack

2009-12-22T15:15:51Z

The Web Applications Working Group has published updates to seven specifications related to APIs that enhance the open Web platform as a runtime environment for full-featured applications. W3C invites implementation experience for the two newest Candidate Recommendations:

The Widget Interface defines an application programming interface (API) for widgets that provides functionality for accessing a widget's metadata and persistently storing data. The group's implementation report will be used to track progress.
Selectors API Level 1 defines methods for retrieving Element nodes from the DOM by matching against a group of selectors (such as those used in Cascading Style Sheets). The group is developing a selectors API test suite.

Comments on these Last Call Working Drafts are welcome until 30 June 2010:

Web Storage provides APIs for Web applications to store key-value data on the client side.
Web Workers defines an API for enabling thread-like operations (using message passing) in Web applications, so that certain application tasks can be run in parallel.
Server-Sent Events defines an API for a Web application to open an HTTP connection for receiving push notifications from a server, in the form of DOM events.

The group also updated these Working Drafts:

Web Sockets API provides an API for full-duplex communication between a Web application and a remote host.
Web SQL Database defines an API for Web applications to store data in client-side databases that can be queried using a variant of SQL.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

W3C Invites Implementations of Web Security Context: User Interface Guidelines

2009-12-22T15:10:35Z

The Web Security Context Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Web Security Context: User Interface Guidelines. This specification deals with the trust decisions that users must make online, and with ways to support them in making safe and informed decisions where possible. It specifies user interactions with a goal toward making security usable, based on known best practice in this area. Read the group's expectations about implementation and testing and learn more about the Security Activity.

W3C Invites Implementations of CSS Backgrounds and Borders Module Level 3, Multi-Column Layout

2009-12-17T18:27:18Z

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group invites implementation of two Candidate Recommendations: CSS Backgrounds and Borders Module Level 3 and CSS Multi-column Layout Module. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. The main extensions in Backgrounds and Borders over CSS 2 related to borders consisting of images, boxes with multiple backgrounds, boxes with rounded corners and boxes with shadows. Multicolumn features allow authors to flow content into multiple columns with a gap and a rule between them. Learn more about the Style Activity.