Public Newsletter

HTML 5, Differences from HTML 4 Drafts Published

2009-04-23: The HTML Working Group has published a Working Draft of HTML 5. HTML 5 adds to the language of the Web: features to help Web application authors, new elements based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability. This particular draft specifies how authors can embed SVG in non-XML text/html content, and how browsers and other UAs should handle such embedded SVG content. See also the news about moving some parts of HTML 5 to individual drafts. The full list of changes since the previous draft are listed in the updated companion document HTML 5 differences from HTML 4. Learn more about the HTML Activity. (Permalink)

Four Web Application API Drafts Published

2009-04-23: The Web Applications Working Group has published four First Public Working Drafts of specifications for APIs that enhance the open Web platform as a runtime environment for full-featured applications:

• Web Storage provides APIs for persistent client-side data storage by Web applications.
• 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.
• Web Sockets API provides an API for full-duplex communication between a Web application and a remote host.
• Server-Sent Events defines an API for opening an HTTP connection for receiving push notifications from a server in the form of DOM events.

The Web Storage, Web Sockets API, and Server-Sent Events specifications were previously published as parts of the HTML 5 specification, but will now each become Recommendation-track deliverables within the Web Applications Working Group. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity. (Permalink)

Widgets 1.0: APIs and Events Draft Published

2009-04-23: The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Widgets 1.0: APIs and Events. Widgets are full-fledged client-side applications that are authored using Web standards. Examples range from simple clocks, stock tickers, news streamers, games and weather forecasters, to complex applications that pull data from multiple sources to be "mashed-up" and presented to a user in some interesting and useful way The APIs and Events specification defines a set of APIs and events for the Widgets 1.0 family of specifications. The specification allows application writers to access widget configuration information, monitor changes in the widget display, determine locale information, monitor updates to the widget, and more. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity. (Permalink)

W3C Invites Implementations of Media Queries

2009-04-23: The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Media Queries. HTML4 and CSS2 currently support media-dependent style sheets tailored for different media types. For example, a document may use sans-serif fonts when displayed on a screen and serif fonts when printed. ‘screen’ and ‘print’ are two media types that have been defined. Media Queries extend the functionality of media types by allowing presentations to be tailored more precisely to device characteristics. Learn more about the Style Activity. (Permalink)

CSS 2.1 Candidate Recommendation Updated

2009-04-23: The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group updated the Candidate Recommendation of Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) Specification. CSS 2.1 is a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach style (e.g., fonts and spacing) to structured documents (e.g., HTML documents and XML applications). CSS 2.1 corrects a few errors in CSS2 (the most important being a new definition of the height/width of absolutely positioned elements, more influence for HTML's "style" attribute and a new calculation of the 'clip' property), and adds a few highly requested features which have already been widely implemented. But most of all CSS 2.1 represents a "snapshot" of CSS usage: it consists of all CSS features that are implemented interoperably. This draft incorporates errata resulting from implementation experience since the previous publication. Learn more about the Style Activity. (Permalink)

WWW2009 Opens with Tim Berners-Lee Keynote "Twenty Years"

2009-04-22: Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the Web, delivered the opening keynote address at the WWW2009 Conference earlier today in Madrid, Spain; keynote slides are available. During his talk, titled "Twenty Years," he touched on the future as well, including topics such as Web applications, open social networking and open linked data. Shortly before his keynote, Berners-Lee joined Dame Wendy Hall, Robert Caillau, Vint Cerf, Dale Dougherty and Mike Shaver on a panel to share thoughts on the twentieth anniversary of the Web. W3C encourages people to join the W3C track, which this year features two "camps": the Mobile Widgets camps on 23 April and the Social Web Camp on 24 April. Follow discussion on the #w3ctrack twitter feed. (Photo credit: Thomas Tikwinski. Permalink)

Eight Proposed Recommendations for XSLT, XPath, XQuery Published

2009-04-21: The XSL and XML Query Working Groups have published eight Proposed Edited Recommendations for Second Editions of XSL Transformations (XSLT), XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language, XML Syntax for XQuery 1.0 (XQueryX) and XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0, together with their supporting documents, XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model (XDM), XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Formal Semantics, XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 Serialization and XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators. The second editions, if approved, will add the generate-id function from XSLT to XPath and XQuery, and will also incorporate the outstanding errata, including a number of clarifications that may affect implementations. Enhanced test suites are being augmented and will be published shortly. Review welcome by 31 May 2009. Learn more about XML. (Permalink)

Last Call: "rdf:text Primitive Datatype"

2009-04-21: The OWL Working Group and the Rule Interchance Format (RIF) Working Group have jointly published a Last Call Working Draft of rdf:text: A Datatype for Internationalized Text. This datatype, compatible with XML Schema 1.1 Datatypes, is used within RIF and OWL 2 to provide support for text in various languages and scripts (identified by a BCP 47 tag such as "fr" for French). The document defines the datatype, discusses its relationship to RDF Plain Literals and the XML Schema string datatype, and specifies functions (compatible with XPath) for operating on rdf:text data values. It also discusses how to use this feature within RDF serializations. Learn more about the Semantic Web. (Permalink)

First Draft: Usage Patterns For Client-Side URI parameters

2009-04-16: The Technical Architecture Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Usage Patterns For Client-Side URI parameters. The goal of this draft TAG finding is to initially collect the various usage scenarios that are leading to innovative uses of client-side URI parameters, along with the solutions that have been developed by the Web community. As highly interactive applications get built using Web parts (HTML, CSS and JavaScript component resources) that are themselves Web addressable, there is an increasing need for encoding interaction state as part of the URI. The Web is beginning to discover and codify design patterns based on fragment identifiers for many of these use cases. Learn more about the Technical Architecture Group. (Permalink)