The XML Security Working Group published four Candidate Recommendations today: XML Signature Syntax and Processing 1.1, XML Encryption Syntax and Processing 1.1, XML Security Generic Hybrid Ciphers, and XML Signature Properties. XML Signatures provide integrity, message authentication, and/or signer authentication services for data of any type, whether located within the XML that includes the signature or elsewhere. As companion documents, the Working Group has released new Working Drafts of XML Security 1.1 Requirements and Design Considerations and XML Security RELAX NG Schemas.

To address patent disclosures related to the XML Signature 1.1 and XML Encryption 1.1 specifications, W3C has chartered a Patent Advisory Group. Learn more about W3C's Security Activity.

In accordance with the W3C Patent Policy, W3C has launched a Patent Advisory Group (PAG) in response to disclosures related to the XML Encryption Syntax and Processing 1.1 and XML Signature Syntax and Processing 1.1 specifications; see the PAG charter. The XML Security Working Group develops this specification. W3C launches a PAG to resolve issues in the event a patent has been disclosed that may be essential, but is not available under the W3C Royalty-Free licensing requirements. Public comments regarding these disclosures may be sent to public-xmlsec-comments@w3.org (with public archive). Learn more about Patent Advisory Groups.

The Semantic Web Interest Group has published a Group Note of Describing Linked Datasets with the VoID Vocabulary. Semantic Web and other technologies have made it easy and beneficial to publish and share datasets. When someone wants to select a dataset, one of the fundamental questions is, what does it offer? There are datasets such as DBpedia that cover quite a range of topics, whereas there are others that only talk about a certain domain (books, places, etc.). VoID provides a bridge between the publishers and users of datasets. VoID addresses a variety of needs, ranging from data discovery to cataloging and archiving of datasets. Most importantly, VoID helps users find the right data for their tasks. Today's publication provides advice about deployment of dataset descriptions and discusses the discovery as well. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

W3C has launched the HTML5 Chinese Interest Group, whose mission is to facilitate focused discussion in Chinese of the HTML5 specification and of specifications closely related to HTML5, to gather comments and questions in Chinese about those specifications, to collect information about specific use cases in Chinese speaking region for technologies defined in those specifications, and to report the results of its activities as a group back to the HTML Working Group, as well as to other relevant groups and to the W3C membership and community. Learn more in the charter (available in Chinese as well), join the Interest Group, and learn more about the W3C HTML Activity.

The Web Notification Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Web Notifications. This specification provides an API to generate simple notifications to alert users outside of the web page. It does not specify exactly how a user agent should display these notifications; the best presentation depends on the device where the user agent is run. When this specificiation refers to displaying notifications on the "desktop", it generally refers to some static display area outside the web page, but may take several forms, including a corner of the user's display, an area within the chrome of the user agent, or the "home" screen of a mobile device. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Multimodal Interaction (MMI) Working Group today published Best practices for creating MMI Modality Components as a Group Note. Multimodal access means that people may use diverse "modalities" for interaction with the Web, including screen, keyboard, digital ink, voice, speech output, etc. The Working Group has defined a general and flexible framework providing interoperability among modality-specific components from different vendors - for example, speech recognition from one vendor and handwriting recognition from another. The current Note provides additional informative guidelines for authors of MMI modality components. Its purpose is to help authors create useful constituents that may be more easily incorporated into a multimodal system. Learn more about the Multimodal Interaction Activity.