The W3C Advisory Committee has re-elected Ashok Malhotra (Oracle) and Henry Thompson (U. of Edinburgh) to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG). Continuing TAG participants are John Kemp (Nokia), Larry Masinter (Adobe), T.V. Raman (Google). The Director is also expected to appoint three individuals very soon. The mission of the TAG is to build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary, to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG, and to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C.

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) today published Contacting Organizations about Inaccessible Websites as part of the WAI-AGE Project. This new WAI resource guides you through telling organizations about accessibility barriers on their website. WAI would like to know how this resource works for you and how we can improve it. See the blog post: Take a few minutes to encourage web accessibility. Your voice counts. Learn about Accessibility and visit the WAI home page.

The XML Processing Model Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of XProc: An XML Pipeline Language, a language for describing operations to be performed on XML documents. A pipeline consists of steps. Like pipelines, steps take zero or more XML documents as their inputs and produce zero or more XML documents as their outputs. The inputs of a step come from the web, from the pipeline document, from the inputs to the pipeline itself, or from the outputs of other steps in the pipeline. The outputs from a step are consumed by other steps, are outputs of the pipeline as a whole, or are discarded. Comments are welcome through 02 February. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Indexed Database API. User agents need to store large numbers of objects locally in order to satisfy off-line data requirements of Web applications. The Web Storage specification is useful for storing pairs of keys and their corresponding values. However, it does not provide in-order retrieval of keys, efficient searching over values, or storage of duplicate values for a key. The current specification provides a concrete API to perform advanced key-value data management that is at the heart of most sophisticated query processors. It does so by using transactional databases to store keys and their corresponding values (one or more per key), and providing a means of traversing keys in a deterministic order. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.