The Audio Working Group has published three First Public Working Drafts to provide an advanced audio API for the Web:

• the Web Audio API and MediaStream Processing API specifications each define a different approach to process and synthesize audio streams directly in script. These APIs can be used for interactive applications, games, 3D environments, musical applications, educational applications, and for the purposes of accessibility. They include the ability to synchronize, visualize, or enhance sound information when used in conjunction with graphics APIs.
• Audio Processing API introduces and compares two client-side APIs for processing and synthesizing real-time audio streams in the browser.

Read the blog post Sounding Out the Audio APIs for more information about the possibilities unlocked by an audio API, and learn more about the Rich Web Clients Activity.

The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of RDFa Core 1.1, a specification for attributes to express structured data in any markup language. The group also published an update to XHTML+RDFa 1.1, a Host Language for RDFa Core 1.1. This document is intended for authors who want to create XHTML Family documents that embed rich semantic markup. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

The Provenance Working Group has published a Working Draft of The PROV Data Model and Abstract Syntax Notation. Provenance of information is crucial in deciding whether information is to be trusted, how it should be integrated with other diverse information sources, and how to give credit to its originators when reusing it. In an open and inclusive environment such as the Web, users find information that is often contradictory or questionable: provenance can help those users to make trust judgments. PROV-DM is a data model for provenance for building representations of the entities, people and activities involved in producing a piece of data or thing in the world. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of CSS 2D Transforms. CSS 2D Transforms allows elements rendered by CSS to be transformed in two-dimensional space. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Web Events Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Touch Events version 1. The Touch Events specification defines a set of low-level events that represent one or more points of contact with a touch-sensitive surface, and changes of those points with respect to the surface and any DOM elements displayed upon it (e.g., for touch screens) or associated with it (e.g. for drawing tablets without displays). Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The XML Query Working Group and the XSLT Working Group have jointly published Last Call Working Drafts of XPath 3.0 and supporting specifications, together with a First Public Working Draft of Full Text 3.0; the XQuery Working Group has published Last Call Working Drafts for XQuery 3.0 and XQueryX 3.0, and also a First Public Working Draft for XQuery Update 3.0. XPath is a widely-used language for querying and selecting from XML documents or other structure; XQuery and XQueryX are query languages for operating on single XML documents, document collections, relational databases and other data sources. Learn more about XML technology.

W3C is pleased to announce that registration is now open for a third edition of the most popular W3C online training course, W3C Introduction to Mobile Web and Application Best Practices.The 8-week course begins 30 January 2012. Developed by the W3C/MobiWebApp team, the course familiarizes Web designers and content producers with the Web as delivered on mobile devices. Along with the course description, read comments from past students and what they have achieved. An early bird rate of €165 is available until 9 January 2012; after that date the full price is €225. Don't miss the early bird rate - enroll now!

The Web Applications Working Group published two Widgets specifications today:

• A Candidate Recommendation of Widget Interface, which defines an application programming interface (API) for widgets that provides, among other things, functionality for accessing a widget's metadata and persistently storing data. W3C invites implementation of this specification; see the ongoing implementation report.
• A Proposed Recommendation of Widget Access Request Policy, which defines the security model controlling network access from within a widget, as well as a method for authors to request that the user agent grant access to certain network resources. Comments are welcome through 17 January 2012.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of CSS Exclusions and Shapes Module Level 3. CSS exclusions define arbitrary areas around which inline content can flow. Unlike CSS floats, which they extend, CSS exclusions can be positioned with any CSS positioning schemes. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Provenance Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of The PROV Ontology: Model and Formal Semantics. The PROV Ontology (also PROV-O) encodes the PROV Data Model [PROV-DM] in the OWL2 Web Ontology Language (OWL2). The PROV ontology consists of a set of classes, properties, and restrictions that can be used to represent provenance information. The PROV ontology can also be specialized to create new classes and properties for modeling provenance information specific to different domain applications. The PROV ontology supports a set of entailments based on OWL2 formal semantics and provenance specific inference rules. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.