News

Call for Implementations: Secure Payment Confirmation published as a W3C Candidate Recommendation

15 June 2023 | Archive

Screenshot of SPC transaction dialog in ChromeThe Web Payments Working Group today published a Candidate Recommendation for Secure Payment Confirmation (SPC), a standardization milestone for a new browser capability that helps to streamline user authentication and enhance payment security during Web checkout.

SPC enables merchants, banks, payment service providers, card networks, and others to lower the friction of strong customer authentication (SCA), and produce cryptographic evidence of user consent, both important aspects of regulatory requirements such as the Payment Services Directive (PSD2) in Europe.

W3C, the FIDO Alliance, and EMVCo pursue improvements to online payment security through the development of interoperable technical specifications. Secure Payment Confirmation reflects this collaboration: it is built atop Web Authentication and is supported by both EMV® 3-D Secure (version 2.3) and EMV® Secure Remote Commerce (version 1.3). See How EMVCo, FIDO, and W3C Technologies Relate for more details.

Publication of Secure Payment Confirmation as a Candidate Recommendation indicates that the feature set is stable and has received wide review. W3C will seek additional implementation experience prior to advancing this version of Secure Payment Confirmation to Recommendation. Comments are welcome via the GitHub issues by 1 August 2023.

Please read our press release to learn more about this technology to streamline payment authentication.

W3C updates its Process Document

12 June 2023 | Archive

megaphoneThe W3C Membership approved the 2023 W3C Process Document, which takes effect today.

Notable changes include:

  • Adjustments to remove the Process dependency on the Founding Director Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and to rebalance those responsibilities onto other parts of W3C.
  • Most notably, rather than the Director, the W3C Council, which combines the W3C Advisory Board (AB), W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG), and CEO, will now hear and resolve formal objections. Over the past couple years, we have been practicing this Council process under delegation from the Director, and evolving the corresponding Process proposal in response to those experiences.
  • The W3C Team, AB, or TAG rather than the Director is now responsible for proposing group creation and forcible closure; Member Review is now required for forcible group closure, not just for group creation.
  • Appointed TAG seats now have consecutive term limits.
  • Improvements to the definitions around filing objections, what constitutes an editorial change for non-REC-track documents, and what are the acceptable outcomes to AC Review inputs.
  • Adjustment to match the new reality of a standalone W3C, as opposed to the previous Hosted model, though the impacts of that are very limited on the Process itself.

The role of Sir Tim Berners-Lee is thus evolving from Founding Director to Founder, Emeritus Director, Honorary Member of the Board of Directors. This important and significant transition has been happening progressively through several years of phasing out his direct involvement, and this has allowed for strengthening of the various mechanisms that drive web standardization.

You can read more about all changes since the 2 November 2021 Process Document, read the complete disposition of comments, or peruse the diff.

This document was developed between the W3C Advisory Board and the public Revising W3C Process Community Group. Comments and feedback on the new Process Document may be sent as issues in the public GitHub Repository.

Planning new W3C website deployment

19 June 2023 | Archive

Screenshot of the beta version of the homepage of the redesigned W3C websiteAfter almost four months in Beta during which we received constructive feedback, we are now ready to deploy the new W3C website starting Tuesday 20 June at 12:00 UTC.

Please make sure to check our “Site status” if you experience incidents. We expect some interruption for the duration of the deployment which will be done in one go and may take an hour or more.

We will send a public announcement when done.

There is more to do, since the scope of the redesign was limited to most of our public pages, but we will gradually work to include the rest of the site, starting with Chinese and Japanese localized sites.

We will invite on GitHub any feedback on website or content issues.

More information on the W3C Website redesign:

The goals of the redesign were to achieve a cleaner and modern look and greater usability, better accessibility, as well as ultimately simplifying how the site is managed. We also want to offer integrated Japanese and Chinese versions.

For several years, W3C has worked in close partnership with Studio 24 to redesign our website. This is, as many in our community know, an enormous undertaking and one which has been of great importance to us. You can read more from Studio 24’s blog post about our collaboration and process.

Upcoming: W3C Virtual Workshop on Secure the Web Forward

14 June 2023 | Archive

padlocks attached to a fence, picture by Parsoa KhorsandW3C announced today the W3C Workshop “Secure the Web Forward”, previously postponed, is now being organized as a virtual event on 26-28 September 2023.

The Secure the Web Forward W3C Workshop brings together experts in standards and best practices needed to secure Web Applications, practitioners of Security Supply Chain in Open Source contexts, developer advocates with a focus on security and developers, designers and technologists with experience in adopting and deploying Web security standards and practices. We aim to develop a comprehensive picture and roadmap to address the challenges Web developers face in ensuring their applications are secure.

The scope includes:

  • How to bring the “secure software supply chain” approach to the web development community.
  • Guidance for different types of web developers who work at different levels of the stack.
  • How to make emerging web application security standards and technologies easier to use and adopt by web developers.
  • How can open source security focused efforts better support the web developer community?
  • How can Open Source security review processes serve as inspiration for review of new web specifications?
  • How do we make security part of the goals and priorities for business owners, product owners, product managers, etc…?

Attendance is free for all invited participants and is open to the public, whether or not W3C members.

For more information on the workshop, please see the workshop details and submission instructions. Position papers are due by 28 July 2023.

Draft Note: NʼKo Layout Requirements

13 June 2023 | Archive

The Internationalization Working Group has published a first Draft Note of NʼKo Layout Requirements. This document describes requirements for the layout and presentation of text in a koiné register of Manding called Kángbɛ, using the NʼKo script when they are used by Web standards and technologies, such as HTML, CSS, Mobile Web, Digital Publications, and Unicode.

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.2 is a W3C Recommendation

6 June 2023 | Archive

The Accessible Rich Internet Applications Working Group has published Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.2 as a W3C Recommendation. Accessibility of web content requires semantic information about widgets, structures, and behaviors, in order to allow assistive technologies to convey appropriate information to persons with disabilities. This specification provides an ontology of roles, states, and properties that define accessible user interface elements and can be used to improve the accessibility and interoperability of web content and applications. These semantics are designed to allow an author to properly convey user interface behaviors and structural information to assistive technologies in document-level markup. This version adds features new since WAI-ARIA 1.1 [wai-aria-1.1] to improve interoperability with assistive technologies to form a more consistent accessibility model for [HTML] and [SVG2]. This specification complements both [HTML] and [SVG2].

This document is part of the WAI-ARIA suite described in the WAI-ARIA Overview.

First Public Working Drafts: RDF 1.2 Semantics and SPARQL 1.2 Entailment Regimes

6 June 2023 | Archive

The RDF Star Working Group has published the last two First Public Working Drafts of its Recommendation track deliverables:

  • RDF 1.2 Semantics: This document describes a precise semantics for the RDF 1.2 Concepts and Abstract Syntax [RDF12-CONCEPTS] and RDF 1.2 Schema [RDF12-SCHEMA]. It defines a number of distinct entailment regimes and corresponding patterns of entailment. It is part of a suite of documents which comprise the full specification of RDF 1.2.
  • SPARQL 1.2 Entailment Regimes: There are different possible ways of defining a basic graph pattern matching extension for an entailment relation. This document specifies one such way for a range of standard semantic web entailment relations. Such extensions of the SPARQL semantics are called entailment regimes within this document.

The W3C Membership has elected the Advisory Board

5 June 2023 | Archive

Logo for the W3C Advisory BoardThe W3C Membership has elected the following people to fill six seats on the W3C Advisory Board starting 1 July 2023: Tantek Çelik (Mozilla Foundation), Elika J Etemad (Apple Inc.), Wendy Reid (Rakuten Group, Inc.), Avneesh Singh (DAISY Consortium), Chris Wilson (Google LLC) and Song XU (China Mobile) will join continuing participants Qing An (Alibaba Group), Wei Ding (Huawei), Tatsuya Igarashi (Sony), Florian Rivoal (W3C Invited Expert) and Tzviya Siegman (Wiley). Many thanks to the 8 candidates, and thanks for contributions to the AB to the departing participants, Heejin Chung (Samsung) and Charles Nevile (ConsenSys), whose terms end this month.

Created in March 1998, the Advisory Board provides ongoing guidance to the W3C Team on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution. The Advisory Board manages the evolution of the Process Document. The elected Members of the Advisory Board participate as individual contributors and not representatives of their organizations. Advisory Board participants use their best judgment to find the best solutions for the Web, not just for any particular network, technology, vendor, or user. Read more about the Advisory Board and its work.

W3C welcomes feedback on the beta of its new website

27 February 2023 | Archive

Screenshot of the beta version of the homepage of the redesigned W3C websiteW3C invites public feedback on a beta release of the W3C website redesign. The new site features a cleaner and more modern look, a simplified information architecture, improved accessibility, and more integration throughout the site. Once the beta of the English site has concluded, we will offer sites in Japanese and Chinese.

The scope of the redesign is limited to most of our public pages, but we will gradually work to include the rest of the site.

You can read a bit more on the beta and its context in the W3C blog post, and about the redesign work and process in Studio 24’s blog post. We look forward to your feedback.

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