W3C announces today the opening of a new W3C Germany and Austria Office, hosted at the Project Office Berlin of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the leading German research institute in the field of innovative software technology based on Artificial Intelligence. W3C and DFKI celebrate today this collaborative effort at an opening event, at Theseus Innovation Center in Berlin. "European research and industry have a clear role in shaping the future of the Web," said Dr. Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO. "Increased participation from key German and Austrian industries will not only impact positively their businesses and innovation strategies, but will also influence W3C's international landscape." Read more in the press release and learn about the W3C Offices Program.

Today W3C launches a new Web Performance Interest Group, whose mission is to create a faster user experience on the Web. The Interest Group will produce use cases and requirements for future deliverables of the Web Performance Working Group. The Interest Group will provide a forum to discuss Web performance initiatives across web publishers, vendors, developers, and users with the goal of identifying areas for standardization. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group updated three Working Drafts today: Web Workers, Web Storage, and Server-side Events. The first defines an API that allows Web application authors to spawn background workers running scripts in parallel to their main page. This allows for thread-like operation with message-passing as the coordination mechanism. The second defines an API for persistent data storage of key-value pair data in Web clients. The third defines an API for opening an HTTP connection for receiving push notifications from a server in the form of DOM events. The API is designed such that it can be extended to work with other push notification schemes such as Push SMS. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

At the occasion of the Web and TV Workshop in Berlin, W3C announces the creation of a new Web and TV Interest Group. The new group's mission is to provide a forum for Web and TV technical discussions, to review existing work, as well as the relationship between services on the Web and TV services, and to identify requirements and potential solutions to ensure that the Web will function well with TV. See the group's charter for more information. Learn more about Web and TV at W3C.