W3C

The Devices and Sensors Working Group has re-published the Geolocation API as a First Public Working Draft. The Geolocation API provides access to geographical location information associated with the hosting device.

The specification has been updated to reflect numerous privacy and security improvements made by implementers since last publication in 2016. The specification includes a list of substantive changes since last publication.

The Working Group welcomes comments via the GitHub repository issues.

The Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group has published RTC Accessibility User Requirements (RAUR) as a Working Group Note.

Real-time communication (RTC) provides real-time peer-to-peer audio, video, and data exchange directly between supported user agents. This enables instantaneous applications for video and audio calls, text chat, file exchange, screen sharing, and gaming.

RAUR describes various accessibility related user needs, requirements, and scenarios for real-time communication (RTC) applications. These user needs should drive accessibility requirements in various related specifications and the overall architecture that enables RTC.

The Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Specification for Spoken Presentation in HTML from the Pronunciation Task Force. This document is part of W3C work on pronunciation to provide normative specifications and best practices guidance so that text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis can properly pronounce HTML content. TTS has long been used by screen readers (and other assistive technologies) for people with disabilities. It is now also widely used in popular applications such as voice assistants. Yet today there is no way for content creators to markup HTML content that will correctly and consistently present TTS generated output across all commonly used TTS engines and operating environments. This specification is intended to fill this critical gap.

This First Public Working Draft specification describes two possible technical approaches for author-controlled pronunciation of HTML content, using Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML).

Either approach will satisfy our accessibility requirements. However, we seek to establish a widely applicable approach. W3C is therefore seeking more input on these approaches, particularly from content authors and implementors who would convert the authoring techniques described into aural presentation. Please send comments by 18 June 2021.

The Web Performance Working Group has published the Page Visibility Level 2 as a W3C Candidate Recommendation Snapshot. This specification defines a means to programmatically determine the visibility state of a document. This can aid in the development of resource efficient web applications.

The document was previously published as a Proposed Recommendation and now returns to Candidate Recommendation status to allow better integration with the HTML specification. Further, this snapshot has been updated so that dependent specifications can better integrate with its various defined concepts and algorithms.

The Working Group welcomes comments via the GitHub repository issues by 18 June 2021.

The GPU for the Web Working Group has published the following two First Public Working Drafts:

• WebGPU: WebGPU exposes an API for performing operations, such as rendering and computation, on a Graphics Processing Unit.
• WebGPU Shading Language: WebGPU Shader Language (WGSL) is the shader language for WebGPU. That is, an application using the WebGPU API uses WGSL to express the programs, known as shaders, that run on the GPU.

The Web of Things Interest Group has published a First Public Interest Group Note of Web of Things (WoT): Use Cases and Requirements. This document is created to collect new IoT use cases from various domains that have been contributed by various stakeholders. These serve as a baseline for identifying requirements for the standardization work in the W3C WoT groups.