W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the Unified Service Description Language Incubator Group, whose mission is to define a language for describing general and generic parts of technical and business services to allow services to become tradable and consumable. The following W3C Members have sponsored the charter for this group: Attensity Europe GmbH (formerly Empolis GmbH), German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH), SAP AG, Siemens AG. Read more about the Incubator Activity, an initiative to foster development of emerging Web-related technologies. Incubator Activity work is not on the W3C standards track but in many cases serves as a starting point for a future Working Group.

The Protocols and Formats Working Group (PFWG) has published a Last Call Working Draft of WAI-ARIA, the Accessible Rich Internet Applications technical specification for making dynamic, interactive Web content accessible to people with disabilities. The PFWG also published updated Working Drafts of the WAI-ARIA User Agent Implementation Guide that provides guidance on how browsers and other user agents should expose WAI-ARIA features to platform accessibility APIs; WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices that describes how Web content developers can develop accessible rich Web applications using WAI-ARIA; and WAI-ARIA Primer that provides a technical introduction.

These WAI-ARIA documents are introduced in the WAI-ARIA Overview. Comments are welcome through 29 October 2010. Read the WAI-ARIA review announcement for details, and about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Protocols and Formats Working Group (PFWG) has published a Working Draft of Role Attribute 1.0: An attribute to support the role classification of elements. Role Attribute allows authors to annotate markup languages with machine-extractable semantic information about the purpose of an element. Comments are welcome through 29 October 2010. Read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Timed Text Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Timed Text Markup Language (TTML) 1.0. The Timed Text Markup Language is a content type that represents timed text media for the purpose of interchange among authoring systems. Timed text is textual information that is intrinsically or extrinsically associated with timing information. It is intended to be used for the purpose of transcoding or exchanging timed text information among legacy distribution content formats presently in use for subtitling and captioning functions. Comments are welcome through 12 October. Learn more about the Video in the Web Activity.

The XML Core Working Group has published a Proposed Edited Recommendation of Associating Style Sheets with XML documents 1.0 (Second Edition). This document allows style sheets to be associated with an XML document by including one or more processing instructions with a target of xml-stylesheet in the document's prolog. Comments are welcome through 14 October. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.