Developers and designers are excited by the ability to use the graphical features of all modern browsers - Canvas, SVG, CSS, WebGL, and HTML5 video and audio. W3C is proud to support The Graphical Web 2012, which is both the first in a new international conference series on Open Web Graphics and the 10th conference on Scalable Vector Graphics, 11-14 September 2012. This year, the conference returns to Switzerland and the site of the first SVG Open. ETH Zürich will be hosting the conference at its Hönggerberg campus. Members of the W3C SVG Working Group, including W3C Team members Chris Lilley and Doug Schepers, will be attending the conference. The SVG Working Group will also brief attendees on recent developments around the SVG specification, including SVG2 and integration with CSS3 and HTML5. The conference includes a day of instructional courses. The deadline for presentation abstracts and course outlines is 7 May. Learn more about the W3C Graphics Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Web IDL. This document defines an interface definition language, Web IDL, that can be used to describe interfaces that are intended to be implemented in web browsers. Web IDL is an IDL variant with a number of features that allow the behavior of common script objects in the web platform to be specified more readily. How interfaces described with Web IDL correspond to constructs within ECMAScript execution environments is also detailed in this document. It is expected that this document acts as a guide to implementors of already-published specifications, and that newly published specifications reference this document to ensure conforming implementations of interfaces are interoperable. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The W3C Decisions and Decision-Making Incubator Group has published their final report. The mission of the Decisions and Decision-Making Incubator Group, part of the Incubator Activity, was to determine the requirements, use cases, and a representation of decisions and decision-making in a collaborative and networked environment suitable for leading to a potential standard for decision exchange, shared situational awareness, and measurement of the speed, effectiveness, and human factors of decision-making. The Incubator Group explored the question over the last year, including use cases, requirements and formats for representing decisions in a machine-understandable format. A standardized decision format would allow the decisions that occur everyday to be managed, archived, shared, and tracked. Two key benefits include the ability to expand and advance the meaningful use of web linked data, as well as the ability to tie-in domain knowledge to provide decision context. The final report captures the major accomplishments and results of the incubator group and ends with a recommendation to transition into a W3C Working Group for the establishment of a Decision Markup Language (DecisionML).

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.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of CSS Backgrounds and Borders Module Level 3. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. This draft contains the features of CSS level 3 relating to borders and backgrounds. It includes and extends the functionality of CSS level 2, which builds on CSS level 1. The main extensions compared to level 2 are borders consisting of images, boxes with multiple backgrounds, boxes with rounded corners and boxes with shadows. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of CSS Image Values and Replaced Content Module Level 3. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. This module contains the features of CSS level 3 relating to the <image> type and replaced elements. It includes and extends the functionality of CSS level 2, which builds on CSS level 1. The main extensions compared to level 2 are the generalization of the <url> type to the <image> type, several additions to the ‘<image>’ type, a generic sizing algorithm for images and other replaced content in CSS, and several properties controlling the interaction of replaced elements and CSS's layout models. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published two Working Draft today:

• File API: Writer. This specification defines an API for writing to files from web applications. This API is designed to be used in conjunction with, and depends on definitions in, other APIs and elements on the web platform. Most relevant among these are File API and Web Workers.
• File API: Directories and System. This specification defines an API to navigate file system hierarchies, and defines a means by which a user agent may expose sandboxed sections of a user's local filesystem to web applications. It builds on File Writer API, which in turn built on File API, each adding a different kind of functionality.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.