W3C announces today the fourth in a series of workshops to ensure the multilingual success of the World Wide Web: The Multilingual Web – The Way Ahead, 15 - 16 March 2012, Luxembourg, hosted by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission. The event is co-located with the European Commission's Language Technology Showcase Days. Anyone may attend and participation is free. W3C welcomes participation from both speakers and non-speaking attendees, but the total number of participants is limited due to space.

Building on the success of the preceding events in Madrid, Pisa, and Limerick, this workshop will once again bring together speakers and participants with an interest in best practices and standards aimed at helping content creators, localizers, tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web. It provides further opportunities for networking across communities that span the various aspects involved. We are particularly interested in speakers who can identify gaps in current standards and best practices related to the mutilingual Web, and propose opportunities for addressing those. Registration is available online.

The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft for RDFa Lite 1.1 and an updated Working Draft for the RDFa 1.1 Primer.

One critique of RDFa is that is has too much functionality, leaving first-time authors confused about the more advanced features. RDFa Lite is a minimalist version of RDFa that helps authors easily jump into the structured data world. The goal was to outline a small subset of RDFa that will work for 80% of the Web authors out there doing simple data markup.

The RDFa Primer is a more in-depth introduction to RDFa and all of the structured data markup features that it provides.

The release of these two documents as Working Drafts is an open invitation to the general public to review and provide feedback on the direction of these documents via the RDF Web Applications Working Group mailing list. These documents are intended to be the last Working drafts before RDFa enters Last Call. You can learn more about similar projects to RDFa in W3C's Semantic Web Activity.

The SOAP-JMS Binding Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of SOAP over Java Message Service 1.0. The work described in this and related documents is aimed at a set of standards for the transport of SOAP messages over JMS [Java Message Service]. The main purpose is to ensure interoperability between the implementations of different Web services vendors. This will also enable customers to implement their own Web services for part of their infrastructure, and to have this interoperate with vendor provided Web services. Comments are welcome through 13 January. Learn more about the Web Services Activity.

The W3C HTML Speech Incubator Group has published their final report. This report provides use cases, requirements derived from those use cases and prioritized, and the following proposals: a JavaScript API for use of ASR services, a new <reco> html element that can be linked to the JS ASR API, a new <tts> html element for use of TTS services, and a protocol for how Web User Agents such as web browsers would communicate with ASR and TTS services other than the default ones provided by the Web User Agent. While the group has made astonishing progress in its goals, the proposals are far from being complete, Recommendation-level standards. The Incubator Group expects that the contents of this report will be used as the beginning of standards-track work in one or more W3C Working Groups and/or that of other Standards Development Organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force.

This publication is part of the Incubator Activity, a forum where W3C Members can innovate and experiment. This work is not on the W3C standards track.

W3C has published a new edition of Standards for Web Applications on Mobile , an overview of the various technologies developed in W3C that increase the power of Web applications, particularly in the mobile context.

A deliverable of the MobiWebApp project, this fourth edition of the document highlights changes since August 2011, including several new specifications in development at W3C (Web Real Time communications, Geolocation v2, vibration API), progress on many others, and new links to resources on mobile accessibility.

The next edition of the document is scheduled for February 2012, in time for Mobile World Congress. W3C invites attendees to visit W3C's booth (Hall 2, 2A31) to learn more about these technologies and how they are transforming the mobile industry. Learn more about the Web and Mobile Devices.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of CSS Image Values and Replaced Content Module Level 3. In CSS Levels 1 and 2, image values, such as those used in the 'background-image' property, could only be given by a single URI value. This module introduces additional ways of representing 2-dimensional images, for example as a list of URIs denoting fallbacks, as a reference to an element in the document, or as a gradient. This module also defines several properties for manipulating raster images and for sizing or positioning replaced elements such as images within the box determined by the CSS layout algorithms. It also defines in a generic way CSS's sizing algorithm for images and other replaced elements. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Indexed Database API. This document defines APIs for a database of records holding simple values and hierarchical objects. User agents need to store large numbers of objects locally in order to satisfy off-line data requirements of Web applications. The Web Storage specification is useful for storing pairs of keys and their corresponding values. However, it does not provide in-order retrieval of keys, efficient searching over values, or storage of duplicate values for a key. Indexed Database API makes it possible to perform advanced key-value data management that is at the heart of most sophisticated query processors. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.