The WAI Education and Outreach Working Group today published a first collection of statistics, case studies, and articles that support the business case for web accessibility, in Resources for Developing a Web Accessibility Business Case for Your Organization. To learn about sharing your resources, see Share Resources Supporting the Web Accessibility Business Case blog post. Read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Internationalization Core Working Group publishes information to help people understand and use international aspects of W3C technologies. Recently the group published Choosing a Language Tag. The appearance of RFC 5646 earlier this year added a new 'extended language' subtag to BCP 47 and around 7,000 new entries in the IANA Language Subtag Registry. This article asks, which language tag is right for me, and how do I choose the language and other subtags I need? The answer outlines the necessary decisions in a step-by-step fashion. Visit the Internationalization home page.

The WAI Education and Outreach Working Group today published Involving Users in Web Projects for Better, Easier Accessibility, which provides guidance for project managers, designers, and developers of:

• websites and web applications
• browsers, media players, and assistive technologies
• authoring tools such as content management systems (CMS), blog software, and WYSIWYG editors
• standards and policies on accessibility
• web technologies and technical specifications

Learn more about this and the related document Involving Users in Evaluating Web Accessibility in the Involving Users announcement e-mail and the blog post Discover new ways of thinking about accessibility ; and learn more about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The XML Core Working Group has published Namespaces in XML 1.0 (Third Edition) as a W3C Recommendation. XML namespaces provide a simple method for qualifying element and attribute names used in Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents by associating them with namespaces identified by URI references. This version, which supersedes the Second Edition, includes no substantive changes. Among the accumulated errata which it incorporates is one of particular importance, which removes an incompatibility with the Fifth Edition of the XML 1.0 specification itself. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.

W3C today outlines a roadmap for extending the Web to rural and underprivileged communities in developing countries. The Mobile Web for Social Development (MW4D) Roadmap examines the challenges to deploying and accessing development-oriented services and surveys the technology landscape for meeting those challenges. The document identifies two major challenges:

1. barriers to Web access faced by underprivileged communities in developing countries, and
2. barriers to authoring and deploying Web content, and accessing information, applications, and services on mobile phones.

The roadmap was published by the Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group, part of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative (MWI). Read the press release and learn more about the Mobile Web Initiative (MWI).

The Efficient XML Interchange Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format 1.0. This document is the specification of the Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) format, a very compact representation for the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Information Set that is intended to simultaneously optimize performance and the utilization of computational resources. The EXI format uses a hybrid approach drawn from the information and formal language theories, plus practical techniques verified by measurements, for entropy encoding XML information. Using a relatively simple algorithm, which is amenable to fast and compact implementation, and a small set of datatype representations, it reliably produces efficient encodings of XML event streams. The group also updated the EXI Primer. Read the group's interoperability test plan and learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Widget Access Request Policy. This specification defines the security model controlling network access from within a widget, as well as a method for widget authors to request that the user agent grant access to certain network resources or sets thereof. Comments are welcome through 13 January. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.