The Research and Development Working Group (RDWG) will hold an online symposium to explore mobile accessibility challenges, existing resources, and areas for future research and development. The Call for Papers is open until 7 May 2012. Learn more about the Symposium on Mobile Accessibility and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The XML Schema Working Group has published W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 Part 1: Structures and Part 2: Datatypes as W3C Recommendations. The W3C XML Schema Recommendation specifies an XML language for describing the structure and constraining the content of XML documents. It provides both structures and data types, as well as facilities for people and specifications to define their own structures and data types, whether for validation, data binding, documentation or other purposes. Learn more about the XML Activity.

The Government Linked Data Working Group has published four First Public Working Drafts today:

• Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT). DCAT is an RDF vocabulary designed to facilitate interoperability between data catalogs published on the Web. This document defines the schema and provides examples for its use.
• The RDF Data Cube Vocabulary. There are many situations where it would be useful to be able to publish multi-dimensional data, such as statistics, on the web in such a way that it can be linked to related data sets and concepts. The Data Cube vocabulary provides a means to do this using the W3C RDF (Resource Description Framework) standard. The model underpinning the Data Cube vocabulary is compatible with the cube model that underlies SDMX (Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange), an ISO standard for exchanging and sharing statistical data and metadata among organizations. The Data Cube vocabulary is a core foundation which supports extension vocabularies to enable publication of other aspects of statistical data flows.
• Terms for describing people. This document defines a set of terms for describing people. It defines how to describe people's characteristics such as names or addresses and how to relate people to other things, for example to organizations or projects. For each term, guidance on the usage within a running example is provided. This document also defines mappings to widely used vocabularies to enable interoperability.
• An organization ontology. This document describes a core ontology for organizational structures, aimed at supporting linked-data publishing of organizational information across a number of domains. It is designed to allow domain-specific extensions to add classification of organzations and roles, as well as extensions to support neighbouring information such as organizational activities.

Learn more about the eGovernment Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of DOM4. DOM4 defines the event and document model the Web platform uses. The DOM is a language- and platform neutral interface that allows programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content and structure of documents. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

W3C launched today a new Web Cryptography Working Group, whose mission is to define an API that lets developers implement secure application protocols on the level of Web applications, including message confidentiality and authentication services, by exposing trusted cryptographic primitives from the browser. Web application developers will no longer have to create their own or use untrusted third-party libraries for cryptographic primitives. This will improve security on the Web. Some of the chartered use cases for this API include:

• The ability to select credentials and sign statements can be necessary to perform high-value transactions such as those involved in finance, corporate security, and identity-related claims about personal data.
• The provisioning and use of keys within Web applications can be used for scenarios such as increasing the security of user authentication and determining whether a particular device is authenticated for particular services.
• The ability to check source integrity before executing Javascript code previously stored in local storage.

Learn more about the Security Activity.

The Web Application Security Working Group has published a Working Draft of Cross-Origin Resource Sharing. This document, produced jointly with the Web Applications Working Group, defines a mechanism to enable client-side cross-origin requests. Specifications that enable an API to make cross-origin requests to resources can use the algorithms defined by this specification. If such an API is used on http://example.org resources, a resource on http://hello-world.example can opt in using the mechanism described by this specification (e.g., specifying Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://example.org as response header), which would allow that resource to be fetched cross-origin from http://example.org. Comments are welcome through 1 May 2012. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published three Working Drafts today.

• CSS Transforms.CSS transforms allows elements styled with CSS to be transformed in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space. This specification is the convergence of the CSS 2D transforms, CSS 3D transforms and SVG transforms specifications.
• CSS Animations. This CSS module describes a way for authors to animate the values of CSS properties over time, using keyframes. The behavior of these keyframe animations can be controlled by specifying their duration, number of repeats, and repeating behavior.
• CSS Transitions.CSS Transitions allows property changes in CSS values to occur smoothly over a specified duration.

Learn more about the Style Activity.

Participants in the Japanese Layout Task Force (with input from four W3C Working Groups, CSS, Internationalization Core, SVG and XSL Working Groups) published a second version of a Group Note: Requirements of Japanese Text Layout. This document describes requirements for general Japanese layout realized with technologies like CSS, SVG and XSL-FO. The document is mainly based on a standard for Japanese layout, JIS X 4051, however, it also addresses areas which are not covered by JIS X 4051. This second version of the document contains a significant amount of additional information related to hanmen design, such as handling headings, placement of illustrations and tables, handling of notes and reference marks, etc. A Japanese version is also available. Learn more about W3C's Internationalization Activity.

The HTML Working Group has published ten updated working drafts:

• the HTML5 specification
• HTML5: Edition for Web Authors
• HTML5 differences from HTML4
• HTML+RDFa 1.1
• HTML Microdata
• HTML Canvas 2D Context
• HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives
• Polyglot Markup: HTML-Compatible XHTML Documents
• HTML to Platform Accessibility APIs Implementation Guide
• HTML: The Markup Language

There is a comprehensive list of the changes made to the HTML5 spec since publication of the previous HTML Working Draft (May 2011). Most of the changes are fine-tuning refinements rather than major new additions, in keeping with the progress of the specification toward greater stability, and transitioning toward an upcoming Candidate Recommendation draft.

Learn more about HTML.

The SYMM Working Group has published a Group Note of SMIL Timesheets 1.0. This document defines an XML timing language that makes SMIL 3.0 element and attribute timing control available to a wide range of other XML languages. This language allows SMIL timing to be integrated into a wide variety of a-temporal languages, even when several such languages are combined in a compound document. Because of its similarity with external style and positioning descriptions in the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) language, this functionality has been termed SMIL Timesheets. Learn more about the W3C Synchronized Multimedia Activity.

The First Public Working Draft of Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) was published today by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG) and Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group (ERT WG), through the joint WCAG 2.0 Evaluation Methodology Task Force ( Eval TF ). WCAG-EM provides an approach for evaluating how websites - including web applications and websites for mobile devices - conform to WCAG 2.0. Learn more about WCAG-EM Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology Draft Published and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The XML Query Working Group has published three Working Drafts today.

• XQuery Update Facility 3.0 Requirements and Use Cases, a First Public Working Draft that specifies goals, requirements and use cases for the XQuery Update Facility 3.0.
• XQuery 3.0 Use Cases which specifies usage scenarios for XML Query (XQuery) 3.0.
• XQuery and XPath Full Text 3.0 Requirements and Use Cases, this First Public Working Draft, jointly developed by the W3C XML Query Working Group and the W3C XSL Working Group, specifies requirements and use cases for Full-Text Search for use in XQuery 3.0 and XPath 3.0.

Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.