W3C

The Internationalization Working Group has published First Public Working Drafts for six documents that explore gaps in language support on the Worldwide Web:

• Adlam Gap Analysis
• Hebrew Gap Analysis
• German Gap Analysis
• French Gap Analysis
• N’Ko Gap Analysis
• Osage Gap Analysis

These drafts complement the 21 Gap-analysis documents published last June.

We are looking for expert contributors who can help us move this work forward by answering questions, documenting gaps in support, and creating tests. For more information about the program, see this 15 minute overview (slides).

As part of working with the WHATWG together on HTML and DOM, W3C selected today to endorse the HTML Review Draft — Published 29 January 2020 as a W3C Recommendation. The HTML specification defines a semantic-level markup language and associated semantic-level scripting APIs for authoring accessible pages on the Web ranging from static documents to dynamic applications. For more information, see the blog post WHATWG Review Drafts of HTML and DOM endorsed as W3C Recommendations.

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) has published a First Public Working Draft of W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0. WCAG and supporting materials explain how to make web content, apps, and tools more accessible to people with disabilities. W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3 has several differences from Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.

WCAG 3 is intended to be easier to understand and more flexible than WCAG 2. The flexibility is to address different types of web content, apps, and tools — as well as organizations and people with disabilities. The goals for WCAG 3 are introduced in the Requirements for WCAG 3.0 First Public Working Draft, which was also published today. WCAG 3 proposes a different name, scope, structure, and conformance model.

We encourage you to start by reading the WCAG 3 Introduction first to get important background on WCAG 3 development, review guidance, and timeline.

We are seeking input from evaluators, developers, designers, project managers, policy makers, people with disabilities, and others — particularly on the structure and the draft conformance model. Additional review guidance is in the blog post WCAG 3 FPWD Published. Please submit comments by 26 February 2021.

W3C launched today the MiniApps Working Group. We invite W3C Members to join the group and drive collaboration on clarifying requirements and producing specifications that facilitate the development of interoperable and robust MiniApps.

MiniApp as a new form of mobile application, leveraging both Web technologies (especially CSS and JavaScript) as well as capabilities of native applications, is gaining more and more popularity. The MiniApps Working Group aims to harmonize the heterogeneous MiniApp ecosystem, enable interoperability among the different MiniApp platforms, maximize the convergence of MiniApps and the World Wide Web, reduce the development costs and facilitate the adoption of this technology.

For more information, see the MiniApps Working Group Charter and the blog post W3C Launches the MiniApps Working Group to ensure MiniApps Cohesiveness with Web Architecture.

The Audio Working Group invites implementation of an updated Candidate Recommendation of Web Audio API. This specification describes a high-level Web API for processing and synthesizing audio in web applications. The primary paradigm is of an audio routing graph, where a number of AudioNode objects are connected together to define the overall audio rendering. The actual processing will primarily take place in the underlying implementation (typically optimized Assembly / C / C++ code), but direct script processing and synthesis is also supported.

Comments are welcome by 15 February 2021.

The EPUB 3 Working Group has published four First Public Working Drafts today for EPUB 3.3. This technology defines a distribution and interchange format for digital publications and documents. The EPUB format provides a means of representing, packaging, and encoding structured and semantically enhanced Web content — including HTML, CSS, SVG, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file container.

The specification represents the third major revision and, in particular, a revision of the EPUB 3.2 document published by the EPUB 3 Community Group. This new version of the specification is now on a W3C Recommendation Track.

The four documents published by the Working Group are:

• The EPUB 3.3 specification defines the authoring requirements for EPUB Publications and represents the third major revision of the standard.
• The EPUB 3.3 Reading Systems specification defines the conformance requirements for EPUB 3 Reading Systems — the user agents that render EPUB Publications.
• The EPUB Multiple-Rendition Publications 1.1 specification defines the creation and rendering of EPUB Publications consisting of more than one Rendition. This document is not on recommendation track.
• The EPUB 3 Overview gives a high level overview of the EPUB 3.3 specification aimed primarily at non-technical readers. This document is not on recommendation track.

The Working Group welcomes comments via the GitHub repository issues.

W3C announced today the W3C Workshop on Wide Color Gamut (WCG) and High Dynamic Range (HDR) for the Web, which is being organized as a virtual event in April-May 2021.

The primary goal of the workshop is to bring together browser vendors, content creators, color scientists, and experts in other relevant areas (e.g. accessibility, scripting, security, web) to converge on technologies for enabling WCG and HDR on the Open Web Platform.

The event will be organized as a combination of pre-recorded talks (expressions of interest are due 30 January, with recorded talks to be submitted by 15 March 2021) followed by online issue raising on GitHub, and culminating in a series of live sessions in April and May, organized around three main themes:

• Wide Color Gamut on the Web
• High Dynamic Range on the Web
• WCG and HDR Standardization Landscape

The event is free and open to anyone with relevant perspectives on the topic to register for the event. For more information on the workshop, please see the workshop details and submission instructions.

Deadline to submit a proposal for a talk is 30 January 2021, and registration will be open from mid January until April.