The Media Fragments Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Media Fragments URI 1.0 (basic). This document describes the Media Fragments 1.0 (basic) specification. It specifies the syntax for constructing media fragment URIs and explains how to handle them when used over the HTTP protocol. The syntax is based on the specification of particular name-value pairs that can be used in URI fragment and URI query requests to restrict a media resource to a certain fragment. The Media Fragment WG has no authority to update registries of all targeted media types. We recommend media type owners to harmonize their existing schemes with the ones proposed in this document and update or add the fragment semantics specification to their media type registration. Comments are welcome through 26 April. Learn more about the Video in the Web Activity.

The Audio Working Group has published a Working Draft of Web Audio API. This specification describes a high-level JavaScript API for processing and synthesizing audio in web applications. The primary paradigm is of an audio routing graph, where a number of AudioNode objects are connected together to define the overall audio rendering. The actual processing will primarily take place in the underlying implementation (typically optimized Assembly / C / C++ code), but direct JavaScript processing and synthesis is also supported. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Tracking Protection Working Group has published two documents today.

• A First Public Working Draft of Tracking Compliance and Scope which defines the meaning of a Do Not Track (DNT) preference and sets out practices for websites to comply with this preference.
• A First Public Working Draft of Tracking Preference Expression (DNT) which defines the technical mechanisms for expressing a tracking preference via the DNT request header field in HTTP, via an HTML DOM property readable by embedded scripts, and via properties accessible to various user agent plug-in or extension APIs. It also defines mechanisms for sites to signal whether and how they honor this preference, both in the form of a machine-readable tracking status resource at a well-known location and via a "Tk" response header field, and a mechanism for allowing the user to approve site-specific exceptions to DNT as desired.

Learn more about the Privacy Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published three documents today.

• A Last Call Working Draft of HTML5 Web Messaging which defines two mechanisms for communicating between browsing contexts in HTML documents. Comments are welcome through 03 April.
• A Last Call Working Draft of Web Workers that 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. Comments are welcome through 03 April.
• A Group Note of Widget URI scheme that defines the widget URI scheme and rules for dereferencing a widget URI, which can be used to address resources inside a package. The dereferencing model relies on HTTP semantics to return resources in a manner akin to a HTTP GET request. Doing so allows this URI scheme to be used with other technologies that rely on HTTP responses to function as intended, such as XMLHTTPRequest.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Web Performance Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Navigation Timing. This specification defines an interface for web applications to access timing information related to navigation and elements. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Web Performance Working Group has published a First Public and Last Call Working Draft of High Resolution Time. This document defines a Javascript interface that provides the current time in sub-millisecond resolution and such that it is not subject to system clock skew or adjustments. Comments are welcome through 10 April. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published three Candidate Recommendation documents for RDFa Core 1.1, RDFa Lite 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1.

Together, these documents outline the vision for RDFa in a variety of XML and HTML-based Web markup languages. RDFa Core 1.1 specifies the core syntax and processing rules for RDFa 1.1 and how the language is intended to be used in XML documents. RDFa Lite 1.1 provides a simple subset of RDFa for novice web authors. XHTML+RDFa 1.1 specifies the usage of RDFa in the XHTML markup language.

A number of improvements have been made to RDFa 1.1 over the past year by working closely with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and the other search engine developers. Public review and comments have resulted in a number of further refinements to the language that eases the learning curve for beginner Web authors.

The release of these Candidate Recommendation documents is a signal to developers that the Working Group believes that each specification is ready for implementation. The RDF Web Applications Working Group thus kindly asks for developers across the Web to implement the specification and provide implementation feedback via the RDF Web Applications Working Group mailing list.

You can learn more about similar projects to RDFa via the W3C's Semantic Web Activity homepage.

The XML Security Working Group has published the "XML Encryption 1.1" Candidate Recommendation. This is a new CR publication which reflects changes since the previous CR publication to address newly publicized chosen-ciphertext attacks against the CBC class of algorithms. Changes include making an authenticated encryption algorithm mandatory to implement (AES-128-GCM), updating the security considerations and adding additional algorithm choices to the RSA-OAEP key transport algorithm set to provide algorithm agility. Additional changes include various editorial improvements. Details of all changes are noted in the status section of the document.

The Working Group also has published a CR draft outlining the use of XML Signature 2.0 transforms in XML Encryption 1.1 - the "XML Encryption 1.1 CipherReference Processing using 2.0 Transforms" Candidate Recommendation.

To address patent disclosures related to the XML Signature 1.1 and XML Encryption 1.1 specifications, the W3C has chartered a Patent Advisory Group.

Learn more about the Security Activity.