W3C will participate in the first edition of the “Open Data Conference” that will take place on September 27, 2012 in Paris, France.

This event with an international dimension will gather public and private decision makers and address some of the pressing challenges facing the Open Data paradigm, such as accountability, privacy, or data licensing.

Among the guests are professor Nigel Shadbolt, a “founding father” of Open Data in England, and Arnaud Montebourg, French Minister of Productive Recovery. Daniel Dardailler, W3C Director of International Relations, will speak on the “Open Data and Future Uses” round-table and present W3C’s involvement in the area.

Registration is open until 24 September, 2012.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group published four Working Drafts today:

• CSS Fonts Module Level 3. This CSS3 module describes how font properties are specified and how font resources are loaded dynamically. The contents of this specification are a consolidation of content previously divided into CSS3 Fonts and CSS3 Web Fonts modules.
• CSS Regions Module Level 3. The CSS regions module allows content to flow across multiple areas called regions. The regions are not necessarily contiguous in the document order. The CSS regions module provides an advanced content flow mechanism, which can be combined with positioning schemes as defined by other CSS modules such as the Multi-Column Module or the Grid Layout Module to position the regions where content flows.
• Selectors Level 4. Selectors are patterns that match against elements in a tree, and as such form one of several technologies that can be used to select nodes in an XML document. Selectors have been optimized for use with HTML and XML, and are designed to be usable in performance-critical code. They are a core component of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which uses Selectors to bind style properties to elements in the document.
• CSS Fragmentation Module Level 3. This module describes the fragmentation model that partitions a flow into pages. It builds on the Page model module and introduces and defines the fragmentation model. It adds functionality for pagination, breaking variable fragment size and orientation, widows and orphans.

Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Research and Development Working Group (RDWG) will hold an online symposium to explore the needs of people with low vision, dyslexia, and other conditions and situations that impact reading. The Call for Papers is open until 24 September 2012. Learn more about the Text Customization for Readability Symposium and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Web Real-Time Communications Working Group has published a Working Draft of WebRTC 1.0: Real-time Communication Between Browsers. This document defines a set of ECMAScript APIs in WebIDL to allow media to be sent over the network to another browser or device implementing the appropriate set of real-time protocols, and media to be received from another browser or device. This specification is being developed in conjunction with a protocol specification developed by the IETF RTCWEB group and an API specification to get access to local media devices developed by the Media Capture Task Force. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

The Protocols and Formats Working Group (PFWG) today published an updated Working Draft of WAI-ARIA 1.0 User Agent Implementation Guide, which describes how browsers and other user agents should support WAI-ARIA (the Accessible Rich Internet Applications specification); specifically, how to expose WAI-ARIA features to platform accessibility APIs. Comments are welcome through 28 September. Learn more in the call for review e-mail and read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Working Groups have published the First Public Working Draft of Compositing and Blending 1.0. Compositing describes how shapes of different elements are combined into a single image. There are various possible approaches for compositing. Previous versions of SVG used Simple Alpha Compositing. In this model, each element is rendered into its own buffer and is then merged with its backdrop using the Porter Duff source-over operator. This specification will define a new compositing model that expands upon the Simple Alpha Compositing model by offering: additional Porter Duff compositing operators; advanced blending modes which allow control of how colors mix in the areas where shapes overlap; and compositing groups. Learn more about the Style and Graphics activities.

The W3C Multimodal Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces. This document describes a loosely coupled architecture for multimodal user interfaces, which allows for co-resident and distributed implementations, and focuses on the role of markup and scripting, and the use of well defined interfaces between its constituents. Comments are welcome through 14 September. Learn more about the Multimodal Interaction Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of CSS Text Level 3. This CSS3 module defines properties for text manipulation and specifies their processing model. It covers line breaking, justification and alignment, white space handling, text decoration and text transformation. Learn more about the Style Activity.