W3C

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.

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.

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.

The Media Fragments Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Media Fragments URI 1.0. Audio and video resources on the World Wide Web are currently treated as "foreign" objects, which can only be embedded using a plugin that is capable of decoding and interacting with the media resource. Specific media servers are generally required to provide for server-side features such as direct access to time offsets into a video without the need to retrieve the entire resource. Support for such media fragment access varies between different media formats and inhibits standard means of dealing with such content on the Web. Media Fragments URI 1.0 provides for a media-format independent, standard means of addressing media fragments on the Web using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). The Working Group also updated Use cases and requirements for Media Fragments. Learn more about the Video in the Web Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Selectors Level 3. Selectors are patterns that match against elements in a tree, and as such form one of several technologies that can be used to select nodes in an XML document. Selectors have been optimized for use with HTML and XML, and are designed to be usable in performance-critical code. See the group's implementation report and disposition of Last Call comments. Comments are welcome through 31 January 2010. Learn more about the Style Activity.