The Web Payments Working Group has published First Public Working Drafts of the following specifications. These are the first of a suite of specifications to make payments on the Web easier and more secure.

• Payment Request API, which describes a web API to allow merchants (i.e., web sites selling physical or digital goods) to easily accept payments through different payment methods with minimal integration.
• Basic Card Payment describes the data formats used by the Payment Request API to support payment by payment cards such as credit or debit cards.
• Payment Method Identifiers defines payment method identifier strings so that components in the payment ecosystem can determine which parties support which payment methods.

The Working Group published a FAQ and welcomes feedback on these early drafts.

W3C is pleased to announce that Tim Berners-Lee, Web Inventor and W3C Director, will deliver a keynote address on Tuesday, 10 May 2016 at IDPF DigiCon, the annual digital publishing conference hosted by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) and co-located with Book Expo America (BEA) at McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois, USA. In his talk, “Realizing the Vision of Publishing Technology with Web Technology” Berners-Lee will preview potential new ways of reading, authoring and publishing in the future that are being made possible by the new rich media environment for publishing.

For the past three years W3C’s Digital Publishing Activity has been collaborating with the IDPF and other publishing industry groups to bring key requirements of the publishing industry to the Web. For more information, see the Media Advisory. To register for the DigiCon event, see registration form.

The Web Platform Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of Web Storage (Second Edition). This specification defines an API for persistent data storage of key-value pair data in Web clients. It introduces two related mechanisms, similar to HTTP session cookies, for storing name-value pairs on the client side. The first mechanism is designed for scenarios where the user is carrying out a single transaction, but could be carrying out multiple transactions in different windows at the same time. The second mechanism is designed for storage that spans multiple windows, and lasts beyond the current session.