W3C

The Web Applications Working Group has published updates to five Working Drafts of specifications for APIs that enhance the open Web platform as a runtime environment for full-featured applications:

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

Note that the Web Storage and Web Database specifications were previously published as a single Working Draft, but have now been split out into separate Working Drafts. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of Widgets 1.0: Packaging and Configuration, which standardizes a packaging format for software known as widgets. The specification relies on PKWare's Zip specification as the archive format, XML as a configuration document format, and provides a series of steps that widget runtimes follow when processing and verifying various aspects of a package. This updated Working Draft addresses issues reported during the first Candidate Recommendation phase (see the list of changes). Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of DataCache API, which provides Web applications with a means to programatically add and remove resources to a “data cache”, which can then be statically served by user agents when a particular resource is requested. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Voice Browser Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction. SCXML is a general-purpose event-based state machine language that may be used in a number of ways, including as a high-level dialog language controlling VoiceXML 3.0's encapsulated speech modules, or as a multimodal control language in the MultiModal Interaction framework. The main difference from the previous draft is the correction of various inconsistencies. A diff-marked version of this document is also available for comparison purposes. Learn more about the Voice Browser Activity.

The Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of the Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Schema, updated Working Drafts of HTTP Vocabulary in RDF 1.0, Representing Content in RDF 1.0, Pointer Methods in RDF 1.0, Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Requirements, and a First Public Working Draft of the Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Guide. EARL is a machine-readable format for expressing test results. The primary motivation for developing EARL is to facilitate the processing of test results, such as those generated by Web accessibility evaluation tools, using a vendor-neutral and platform-independent format. Read the invitation to review the EARL 1.0 Last Call Working Draft and about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Web Services Resource Access Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Web Services Fragment (WS-Fragment). This specification extends the WS-Transfer [WS-Transfer] specification to enable clients to retrieve and manipulate parts or fragments of a WS-Transfer enabled resource without needing to include the entire XML representation in a message exchange. Learn more about the Web Services Activity.

Today W3C announces a new version of a standard for representing knowledge on the Web. OWL 2, part of W3C's Semantic Web toolkit, allows people to capture their knowledge about a particular domain (say, energy or medicine) and then use tools to manage information, search through it, and learn more from it. As an open standard based on Web technology, OWL 2 lowers the cost of merging knowledge from multiple domains. More than a dozen implementations of OWL 2 are already available. The standard consists of 13 documents, of which 4 are instructional. Read the press release , read the testimonials, and learn more about the Semantic Web.