W3C is pleased to launch its new brand online course, “JavaScript for Beginners”, to help Web developers understand the basic concepts of JavaScript. The course is 4 weeks long, to start on 11 November 2013. The main goal of this course is to make sure that participants master good JavaScript practices and avoid the pitfalls of the language. This course is a condensed set of tricks, advices, tools and good practices built around JavaScript, with a logical flow that is always illustrated by examples and assignments. JavaScript is one of the three major Web developer tools, along with HTML5 and CSS3, so register before October 28 to benefit from the early bird rate. Learn more about W3DevCampus, the W3C online training for Web developers.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Group Note of Selectors API Level 2. Selectors, which are widely used in CSS, are patterns that match against elements in a tree structure. The Selectors API specification defines methods for retrieving Element nodes from the DOM by matching against a group of selectors, and for testing if a given element matches a particular selector. It is often desirable to perform DOM operations on a specific set of elements in a document. These methods simplify the process of acquiring and testing specific elements, especially compared with the more verbose techniques defined and used in the past. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Media Annotations Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of API for Media Resources 1.0. This specification defines an API to access metadata information related to media resources on the Web. The overall purpose is to provide developers with a convenient access to metadata information stored in different metadata formats. The API provides means to access the set of metadata properties defined in the Ontology for Media Resources 1.0 specification. These properties are used as a pivot vocabulary in this API. The core of this specification is the definition of API interfaces for retrieving metadata information in synchronous and asynchronous. It also defines interfaces for structured return types along with the specification of the behavior of an API implementation. Comments are welcome through 25 November. Learn more about the Video in the Web Activity.