Registration is open for new editions of three W3C online courses that begin in early 2015:

• JavaScript [Register]. This course runs for 4 weeks starting 26 January 2015. This course provides instruction about JavaScript good practices, tricks, and tools, illustrated through examples and assignments.
• HTML5 [Register]. This course runs for 6 weeks, starting 2 February 2015. This course covers video, time based animation, 2D geometric transformations, Web Audio API, Web components and much more.
• Responsive Web Design [Register]. This course runs for 5 weeks, starting 6 February 2015. This course leads you step by step through an approach that focuses on HTML and CSS to make your Web site fit in all viewport sizes.

An early bird rate is available to all above courses. Learn more about W3DevCampus, the official W3C online training for Web developers. See also our self-explanatory fun video.

Today the XSLT Working Group and the XQuery Working Group jointly published Candidate Recommendations and invite implementation of XPath 3.1 and supporting documents. The XQuery Working Group published Candidate Recommendations and invites implementation of XQuery 3.1 and XQueryX 3.1. The supporting documents are XPath Functions and Operators; XQuery and XPath Data Model. XQuery 3.1 and XPath 3.1 introduce improved support for working with JSON data with map and array data structures as well as loading and serializing JSON; additional support for HTML class attributes, HTTP dates, scientific notation, cross-calling between XSLT and XQuery and more. The Serialization specification remains a Last Call Working Draft and was not republished, in order to improve JSON, map and array support in response to a Last Call Comment; it is expected to follow the other documents in the New Year. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published two documents today:

• A First Public Working Draft of CSS Inline Layout Module Level 3. The CSS formatting model provides for a flow of elements and text inside of a container to be wrapped into lines. The formatting of elements and text within a line, its positioning in the inline progression direction, and the breaking of lines are described in CSS Text Module Level 3. This module describes the positioning in the block progression direction both of elements and text within lines and of the lines themselves. This positioning is often relative to a baseline. It also describes special features for formatting of first lines and drop caps. It extends on the model in CSS 2.1.
• A Working Draft of CSS Box Alignment Module Level 3. This module contains the features of CSS relating to the alignment of boxes within their containers in the various CSS box layout models: block layout, table layout, flex layout, and grid layout.

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.

The XML Processing Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of XProc 2.0: An XML Pipeline Language, together with a Standard Step Library. XProc is an XML pipeline language; that is, a declarative dataflow language used to express steps required to process XML documents, coordinating operations such as querying, validation, inclusion, transformation and sorting. The XProc step library defines names and characteristics for a set of pipeline steps that every XProc processor is expected to support, as well as additional optional steps. Lean more about the XML Activity.

An updated version of the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List is now available. Web accessibility evaluation tools are software programs or online services that help determine if web content meets accessibility guidelines. Information about features of evaluation tools that help with evaluation is in Selecting Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools. Web accessibility evaluation tool vendors are encouraged to submit information about their tool to the list. Learn more about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

W3C announced today the eighth MultilingualWeb workshop in a series of events exploring the mechanisms and processes needed to ensure that the World Wide Web lives up to its potential around the world and across barriers of language and culture. To be held 29 April 2015 in Riga, this workshop is made possible by the generous support of the LIDER project. The workshop is part of the Riga Summit 2015 on the Multilingual Digital Single Market (27-29 April). Anyone may attend the workshop and the summit at no charge and the W3C welcomes participation by both speakers and non-speaking attendees. Early registration is encouraged due to limited space.

Building on the success of seven highly regarded previous workshops, this workshop will emphasize new technology developments that may lead to new opportunities for the Multilingual Web. The workshop brings together participants interested in the best practices and standards needed to help content creators, localizers, language tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web. It provides further opportunities for networking across communities that span the various aspects involved. We are particularly interested in speakers who can demonstrate novel solutions for reaching out to a global, multilingual audience. Registration is available online.

The Pointer Events Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Pointer Events. This document defines events and related interfaces for handling hardware agnostic pointer input from devices including a mouse, pen, touchscreen, etc.. For compatibility with existing mouse based content, this specification also describes a mapping to fire Mouse Events for other pointer device types. Comments are welcome through 16 January 2015. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The RDFa Working Group is advancing four RDFa 1.1 documents to Proposed Edited Recommendations today:

• HTML+RDFa 1.1 – Second Edition. This specification defines rules and guidelines for adapting the RDFa Core 1.1 and RDFa Lite 1.1 specifications for use in HTML5 and XHTML5. The rules defined in this specification not only apply to HTML5 documents in non-XML and XML mode, but also to HTML4 and XHTML documents interpreted through the HTML5 parsing rules.
• RDFa Core 1.1 – Third Edition. RDFa Core is a specification for attributes to express structured data in any markup language. The embedded data already available in the markup language (e.g., HTML) can often be reused by the RDFa markup, so that publishers don’t need to repeat significant data in the document content. The underlying abstract representation is RDF, which lets publishers build their own vocabulary, extend others, and evolve their vocabulary with maximal interoperability over time. The expressed structure is closely tied to the data, so that rendered data can be copied and pasted along with its relevant structure.
• RDFa Lite 1.1 – Second Edition. RDFa Lite is a minimal subset of RDFa, the Resource Description Framework in attributes, consisting of a few attributes that may be used to express machine-readable data in Web documents like HTML, SVG, and XML. While it is not a complete solution for advanced data markup tasks, it does work for most day-to-day needs and can be learned by most Web authors in a day.
• XHTML+RDFa 1.1 – Third Edition. RDFa Core 1.1 defines attributes and syntax for embedding semantic markup in Host Languages. This document defines one such Host Language. This language is a superset of XHTML 1.1, integrating the attributes as defined in RDFa Core 1.1. This document is intended for authors who want to create XHTML Family documents that embed rich semantic markup.

Comments are welcome through 1 February 2015. Learn more about the Data Activity.

The Linked Data Platform (LDP) Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Linked Data Platform 1.0. Linked Data Platform (LDP) defines a set of rules for HTTP operations on web resources, some based on RDF, to provide an architecture for read-write Linked Data on the web. Comments are welcome through 8 January 2015.

The group also invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Linked Data Platform Paging 1.0. This document describes a HTTP-based protocol for clients and servers to be able to efficiently retrieve large Linked Data Platform Resource representations by splitting up the responses into separate URL-addressable page resources.

Learn more about the Data Activity.

The XML Core Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.1. This document specifies a processing model and syntax for general purpose inclusion. Inclusion is accomplished by merging a number of XML information sets into a single composite infoset. Specification of the XML documents (infosets) to be merged and control over the merging process is expressed in XML-friendly syntax (elements, attributes, URI references). Comments are welcome through 17 January 2015. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Custom Elements. This specification describes the method for enabling the author to define and use new types of DOM elements in a document. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Semantic Web Interest Group has published a new version of the Group Note on Microdata to RDF. HTML microdata is an extension to HTML used to embed machine-readable data into HTML documents. Whereas the microdata specification describes a means of markup, this specification describes processing rules that may be used to extract RDF from an HTML document containing microdata. The new version adds some HTML5 specific features that were finalized recently and were missing from the previous version of the Note, simplifies the RDF output as well as the processing rules to be in line with the usage practices of microdata, and updates the references to the latest version of RDF. Learn more about the Data Activity.

The Web Performance Working Group has published a Working Draft of Resource Timing. This specification defines an interface for web applications to access the complete timing information for resources in a document. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Indic Layout Task Force, part of the W3C Internationalization Interest Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Indic Layout Requirements. This document describes the basic requirements for Indian Languages layout for display purpose. It discusses some of the major layout requirements in first letter pseudo-element, vertical arrangements of characters, letter spacing, text segmentation, line breaking and collation rules in Indic languages. The minimal requirements presented in this document for Indian languages text layout will also be used in E-publishing and CSS Standard. This documents covers major issues of e-content in Indian languages in order to create standardize format of text layout to address storage, rendering problems, vertical writing, letter spacing, collation, line breaking, etc. It also describes the definition of ABNF (Augmented Backus–Naur Form) based valid segmentation-Indic syllable in order to get the proper display in the browsers. Learn more about the Internationalization Activity.