The IndieUI Working Group today published an updated Working Draft of IndieUI: Events 1.0 – Events for User Interface Independence. This draft includes new events and a refined technical model. IndieUI defines a way for different user interactions to be translated into simple events and communicated to Web applications. (For example, if a user wants to scroll down a page, they might use their finger on a touch screen, or click a scroll bar with a mouse, or use a scroll wheel, or say ‘scroll down’ with a voice command. With IndieUI, these are all sent to the Web app as simply: scroll down.) IndieUI will make it easier for Web applications to work in a wide range of contexts — different devices (such as mobile phones and tablets), different assistive technologies (AT), different user needs. With IndieUI, Web application developers will have a uniform way to design applications that work for multiple devices and contexts. Comments on this Draft are encouraged by 27 June 2014. Learn more from the IndieUI Overview and the Updated Working Draft: IndieUI Events e-mail; and read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Voice Browser Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction. This document describes SCXML, or the “State Chart extensible Markup Language”. SCXML provides a generic state-machine based execution environment based on CCXML and Harel State Tables. Comments are welcome through 26 June. Learn more about the Voice Browser Activity.

The System Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of The app: URL Scheme. This specification defines the app: URL scheme. The app: URL scheme can be used by packaged applications to obtain resources that are inside a container. These resources can then be used with web platform features that accept URLs. Comments are welcome through 24 June. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

The HTML Working Group has published two First Public Working Drafts today.

• W3C HTML Form HTTP Extensions. This is an addendum to the specification of HTML5 forms extending the abilities of configuring HTTP requests through HTML markup.
• W3C HTML JSON form submission. This specification defines a new form encoding algorithm that enables the transmission of form data as JSON. Instead of capturing form data as essentially an array of key-value pairs which is the bread and butter of existing form encodings, it relies on a simple name attribute syntax that makes it possible to capture rich data structures as JSON directly.

Learn more about the HTML Activity.