Today the W3C announced a Workshop on Privacy and User–Centric Controls, to investigate strategies toward better privacy protection on the Web, especially for mobile devices.

The Workshop focus will be on users: user experience, user behavior and how we can offer controls that provide the necessary transparency of privacy-affecting interactions. We will also discuss how developers can meet users’ privacy needs on the Web, including what APIs are necessary for user privacy.

Sample Workshop topics include (but are not limited to):

• Improving the UI for stateful services, overview of states
• Defaults for expiration of stateful situations
• How to convey state information to the User
• How to deal with logging and how to provide interfaces for logged data
• Requirements for private browsing on mobile
• A privacy ontology for mobile apps and their use of personal data
• The value of privacy in paradigms for mobile UI
• Selective release of personal information to apps
• Controlling the geo-location interfaces, including UI challenges
• Enforcing data expiry

W3C membership is not required to participate. There is no cost to participate and the event is open to all. All participants are required to submit a position paper or statement of interest by 10 October 2014. Learn more how to participate.

The HTML Working Group has published a Working Draft of HTML5 Differences from HTML4. This document describes the differences of the W3C HTML5 specification from those of HTML4. Learn more about the HTML Activity.

The the CSS Working Group and the SVG Working Group jointly published a Working Draft of Geometry Interfaces Module Level 1. This specification provides basic geometric interfaces to represent points, rectangles, quadrilaterals and transformation matrices that can be used by other modules or specifications. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. Learn more about the Style Activity and the Graphics Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Clipboard API and events. This document describes APIs for clipboard operations such as copy, cut and paste in web applications. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The XML Query Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of XQuery and XPath Full Text 3.0. This document defines the syntax and formal semantics of XQuery and XPath Full Text 3.0, which is a language that extends XQuery 3.0 and XPath 3.0 with full-text search capabilities. Comments are welcome through 17 October 2014.

In addition, the XML Query Working Group and the XSLT Working Group jointly published a Group Note of XQuery Scripting Extension 1.0. This specification defines an extension to XQuery 1.0 and XQuery Update Facility. Expressions can be evaluated in a specific order, with later expressions seeing the effects of the expressions that came before them. This specification introduces several new kinds of expression, including the apply, assignment, while, and exit expression, and a block expression with local variable declarations.

Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.

The Linked Data Platform (LDP) Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Linked Data Patch Format. Linked Data Patch Format (LD Patch) defines a language for expressing a sequence of operations to apply to Linked Data resources; it is suitable for use with the HTTP PATCH, a method to perform partial modifications to Web resources. Learn more about the Data Activity.

The Research and Development Working Group (RDWG) will hold an online symposium on 3 December 2014 to explore technologies, applications, concepts, and solutions that help people with disabilities orient themselves, explore, and navigate through the physical world. The Call for Papers is open until 20 October 2014. Learn more about the Accessible Way-Finding Using Web Technologies Symposium and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Web Application Security Working Group has published a Working Draft of Mixed Content. This specification describes how user agents should handle rendering and execution of content loaded over unencrypted or unauthenticated connections in the context of an encrypted and authenticated document. Learn more about the Security Activity.

The Linked Data Platform (LDP) Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Linked Data Platform 1.0. This document describes a set of best practices and simple approach for a read-write Linked Data architecture, based on HTTP access to web resources that describe their state using the RDF data model. Comments are welcome through 7 October.

The group also published a Group Note of LDP Access Control. This note discusses use cases and requirements for Access Control for the Linked Data Platform Working Group. It also outlines a charter for developing a standard for HTTP-based access control.

Learn more about the Data Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of CSS Line Grid Module Level 1. This specification provides features to align lines and blocks to invisible grids in the document. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group today published updates of two Notes that accompany WCAG 2.0: Understanding WCAG 2.0 and Techniques for WCAG 2.0. (This is not an update to WCAG 2.0, which is a stable document.) For information on these updates, please see the Understanding WCAG and WCAG Techniques Updated September 2014 e-mail. Read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Internationalization Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Encoding. The utf-8 encoding is the most appropriate encoding for interchange of Unicode, the universal coded character set. Therefore for new protocols and formats, as well as existing formats deployed in new contexts, this specification requires (and defines) the utf-8 encoding. The other (legacy) encodings have been defined to some extent in the past. However, user agents have not always implemented them in the same way, have not always used the same labels, and often differ in dealing with undefined and former proprietary areas of encodings. This specification addresses those gaps so that new user agents do not have to reverse engineer encoding implementations and existing user agents can converge. Learn more about the Internationalization Activity.