W3C today published the final report of the Workshop on RDF Validation: Practical Assurances for Quality RDF Data that was held 10-11 September 2013 in Cambridge.

The goal of the Workshop was to identify use cases, requirements, and candidate technologies to address the need for interface definition and validation for RDF documents and messages. The 20 presentations focused on current and future requirements and solutions. Discussion sessions focused on consensus-building around scope and next steps.

This workshop laid the groundwork for W3C to develop a human and machine-readable description of the “shape” of the RDF graphs that a service produces or consumes. This description should be usable for validation, form-generation, as well as human-readable documentation. The participants further agreed that the solution must provide a declarative way of describing simple integrity constraints along with an extension mechanism that allows using technologies such as SPARQL to specify more complex constraints.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of CSS Style Attributes. Markup languages such as HTML and SVG provide a style attribute on most elements, to hold inline style information that applies to those elements. This draft describes the syntax and interpretation of the CSS fragment that can be used in such style attributes. Comments are welcome through 31 October. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group invites implementation of two Candidate Recommendations:

• CSS Cascading and Inheritance Level 3. This CSS module describes how to collate style rules and assign values to all properties on all elements. By way of cascading and inheritance, values are propagated for all properties on all elements. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc.
• 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. The description of font load events was moved into the CSS3 Font Load Events module.

Learn more about the Style Activity.

The HTML Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of Using WAI-ARIA in HTML. Using WAI-ARIA in HTML is a practical guide for developers on how to add accessibility information to HTML elements using the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) specification, which defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. It is developed by the HTML Accessibility Task Force in coordination with the HTML Working Group and the WAI Protocols and Formats Working Group (PFWG).Learn more about the HTML Activity and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

W3C published today the final report of the Workshop on the Publishing and the Open Web Platform that was held 16-17 September 2013 in Paris. W3C thanks IRI for hosting the event, Intel and Adobe for their sponsorship, and INRIA for their support.

The W3C Workshop in Paris was the third in a series of industry consultation events held by W3C. The goal of this Workshop was first to identify difficulties faced by existing professional publishing organizations in using tools based on the Open Web platform, including the production of printed books, and second to find ways to work on eliminating or ameliorating those difficulties. We received approximately fifty statements of interest and position papers for the two-day event, and approximately sixty people attended the Workshop. Part of the workshop were panels around a selected subset of the submissions, part was organized as open discussions.

Many of the issues raised during the discussions will provide additional input to the work started by the W3C Digital Publishing Interest Group, collecting specific technical requirements of the publishing industry for the technologies of the Open Web Platform. Furthermore, it was felt that an additional activity on education and outreach may be necessary; indeed, one of the challenges of the Publishing Industry overall is to improve technical expertise in-house, also covering the new possibilities offered by the Open Web Platform (e.g., advanced CSS control for complex typography, or interactivity of electronic books provided by scripting), as well as the missing contacts the industry may have with Web Designers and Web Application Developers. It was also felt that W3C should continue to establish liaisons with various industry organizations in the area, and also to reach out to librarians and archivists to collaborate on, for example, the metadata issues of the publishing industry. We anticipate new actions in those areas in the months to come.

The Device APIs Working Group invites implementation of two Candidate Recommendations:

• Ambient Light Events. This specification defines a means to receive events that correspond to a light sensor detecting the presence of a light.
• Proximity Events. This specification defines a means to receive events that correspond to a proximity sensor detecting the presence of a physical object.

Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

The HTML Working Group has published a Working Draft of HTML to Platform Accessibility APIs Implementation Guide. This is draft documentation mapping HTML elements and attributes to accessibility API Roles, States and Properties on a variety of platforms. It provides recommendations on deriving the accessible names and descriptions for HTML elements. It also provides accessible feature implementation examples. Learn more about the HTML Activity.

The XML Query Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of XQueryX 3.0. This document defines an XML Syntax for XQuery 3.0: An XML Query Language. Comments are welcome through 22 October. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.

W3C has published the September 2013 edition of Standards for Web Applications on Mobile, an overview of the various technologies developed in W3C that increase the power of Web applications, particularly in the mobile context.

A deliverable of the webinos project, this edition of the document includes changes and additions since March 2013, such as the newly chartered Web and Mobile IG (which will own the next iteration of the document), performance improvements through better scrolling integration and network request priorities, new early proposed approaches for responsive images and filesystem management. The report also shows graphically recent editorial activity for all the specs that it tracks

Learn more about the Web and Mobile Devices.

W3C published today the final report of the August Social Standards: The Future of Business Workshop, organized jointly with the OpenSocial Foundation. W3C thanks AppFusions for hosting the event, and IBM and the Open Mobile Alliance for their sponsorship.

This Workshop provided a way for the social business and technical community to create a roadmap for standardizing the currently fragmented social landscape in order to make social a first-class part of the Open Web Platform. Participants discussed how social can revolutionize the enterprise and next steps for technologies such as OpenSocial and ActivityStreams, both of which are in early stages of revision. This workshop was the culmination of the activity of the Social Business Community Group.

Participants of the Workshop agreed that W3C should create a Working Group defining standards around social, ranging from APIs to profile federation, as well as a community group around property graphs. Collaboration with the OpenSocial Foundation, Open Mobile Alliance, ActivityStreams community, and many other groups in order will be one of the keys to creating the next generation of standards for the social web. We anticipate one or more draft charters will be available in the coming weeks.

W3C announces today the new charter for the HTML Working Group, until the end of June 2015. The HTML Group mission remains the development of the HTML language and its associated APIs. This new charter includes an experiment where the HTML Working Group can publish some of their Recommendation-track specifications under a permissive license. This is intended to encourage collaboration and make it easier to reuse materials. See the charter and FAQ Regarding HTML Working Group Charter License Experiment for more details. The group remains on schedule to complete HTML 5.0 to W3C Recommendation in 2014. Learn more about the HTML Working Group.