The MultilingualWeb Project, funded by the European Commission and coordinated by the W3C, is looking at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the multilingual Web. The project will raise visibility of what's available and identify gaps via a series of four events, over two years. The first Workshop takes place in Madrid, Spain on 26-27 October 2010. It is free and open to the public. A first view of the workshop program has just been published. Speakers represent a wide range of organizations and interests, including: BBC, DFKI, European Commission, Facebook, Google, Loquendo, LRC, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, SAP, W3C, WHO, and the World Wide Web Foundation. Session titles include: Developers, Creators, Localizers, Machines, and Users. The Workshop should provide useful cross-domain networking opportunities. Learn more about participation and registration in the Call for Participation and learn more about Internationalization at W3C.

After 13 years of successful work at STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, the W3C UK and Ireland Office has a new home at Nominet. Nominet runs the one of the world’s largest Internet registries, the registry for .uk domain names, with over eight million domain names. Phil Kingsland, Director of Marketing and Communications at Nominet, will be the new Office manager. He said, "We believe the work W3C does promoting web accessibility standards, and developing other standards that help web users to trust in the reputation of the Internet is well aligned with Nominet’s public purpose remit and vision, which is to be a leading force in making the Internet a trusted space, which everyone can be part of and has a positive impact on people’s lives." The Office plans a ceremonial launch later this year.

W3C would like to thank STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the W3C UK and Ireland Office staff, led by Michel D Wilson and his predecessors Stuart Robinson and Bob Hopgood, for their contributions to W3C and the Web. Learn more about the W3C Offices, regional W3C representatives that help promote the W3C mission.

The explosion of the mobile device market demonstrates how consumers have come to expect and rely on access to the network from anywhere, at any time. Increasingly, people expect similar access to the Web from consumer electronics such as televisions. W3C has begun to organize a series of workshops to discuss this convergence with television industry and other producers of consumer electronics.

The first workshop in the series took place in Japan on 2-3 September. There, 150 participants from various industries discussed key use cases and important requirements for smarter integration of Web, broadcasting and consumer electronics technologies. A summary of the workshop is now available.

One recommendation from the participants was for W3C to create "Web and TV" Interest Group. A draft charter is now available; W3C invites public comment on public-web-and-tv@w3.org. The proposed scope for the group is:

• Minimum clarification about the conceptual relationship between Web and TV, especially the architectural relationship between the services on Web and the TV services;
• Identification of important requirements for the Web to function effectively with TV services on TV devices and TV-like devices;
• Identification of important requirements for TV to function effectively on various devices with services on the Web;
• Review and discussion of deliverables under development by other W3C groups, which touch on the use of the Web and TV;
• Exploration of barriers to the Web and TV services working on TV devices and TV-like devices, and potential solutions;
• Provide a forum for the exchange information about Web and TV activities around the world.

Learn more about a Web of devices.

The Device APIs and Policy Working Group has published two Working Drafts: HTML Media Capture and The Media Capture API. The first defines HTML form enhancements that provide access to the audio, image and video capture capabilities of the device. Providing streaming access to these capabilities is outside of the scope of this specification. The second defines an API that provides access to the audio, image and video capture capabilities of the device. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Widget Updates. This specification defines a process and a document format to allow a user agent to update an installed widget package with a different version of a widget package. A widget cannot update itself; instead, a widget relies on the user agent to manage the update process. A user agent can perform an update over HTTP and from non-HTTP sources (e.g., directly from a device's memory card or hard disk). Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the Object Memory Modeling Incubator Group, whose mission is to define an object memory format, which allows for modeling of events or other information about individual physical artifacts - ideally over their lifetime - and which is explicitly designed to support data storage of those logs on so-called smart labels attached to the physical artifact. The following W3C Members have sponsored the charter for this group: 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.