Developers and designers are excited by the ability to use SVG in all modern browsers. W3C joins other sponsors to help with SVG Open 2011, the 9th international conference on Scalable Vector Graphics, 17-20 October 2011. This year, Microsoft Corporation will be hosting the conference at their New England Research and Development (NERD) Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. SVG Open provides an opportunity for designers, developers and implementers to learn about SVG, and share ideas, experiences, products, and strategies. Members of the W3C SVG Working Group, including W3C Team members Chris Lilley and Doug Schepers, will be attending and presenting at the conference. The SVG Working Group will also brief attendees on recent developments around the SVG specification, including SVG2 and integration with CSS and HTML. The conference includes a day of workshops. The deadline for presentation abstracts and course outlines has been extended through 15 May. Learn more about the W3C Graphics Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group today updated several Working Drafts:

• WebSocket API, which enables full-duplex bidirectional communication between a Web application and a remote host.
• Indexed Database API, which defines a concrete API that a Web application can use to maintain an indexed database, and, within that database, to perform advanced key-value data management with in-order retrieval of keys, efficient searching over values, and storage of duplicate values for a key.
• Two publications that build on the the File API specification, which provides an API for representing file objects in web applications, as well as programmatically selecting them and accessing their data. The first published today is File API: Writer, which defines an API for writing to files from web applications. The second is The File API: Directories and System, which defines an API to navigate file system hierarchies, and defines sandboxed sections of a user's local filesystem to web applications, for secure local storage.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Device APIs and Policy Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Calendar API. The Calendar API defines the high-level interfaces required to obtain read access to a user's calendaring service. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published a new Working Draft of the RDFa API. This document specifies an API to access the RDF data embedded in an HTML or XHTML page using RDFa. The Working Group also published a First Public Working Draft of the RDFa 1.1 Primer; this is an updated version of the RDFa Primer that has been adapted to the features of RDFa Core 1.1 specification. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.