W3C announced today Blockchains and the Web Workshop, 29–30 June 2016, in Cambridge, MA, USA, hosted by the MIT Media Lab.

Many projects and companies are looking at ways to use the Bitcoin blockchain or other public or private distributed ledgers, to record an immutable timestamped public record that can be independently verified by any stakeholder. What does this mean for Web technologies, beyond payments? What emerging capabilities could blockchains enable for the Web, such as distributed identity management? Conversely, should features be added to the Web Platform and to browsers to enable blockchain use cases, such as a JavaScript blockchain API to write to blockchain nodes? What will help Web developers to take advantage of blockchains?

We invite participation from diverse players in the blockchain community: Representatives from communities such as Bitcoin, Hyperledger, and Ethereum; browser developers interested in adding support for blockchain APIs, identity systems, and other functionality; digital currency projects; financial institutions; developers of blockchain systems who want to improve interoperability; privacy/security researchers; and more.

W3C membership is not required to participate. The event is open to all. All participants are required to submit a position paper by 27 May 2016.

The Internationalization Working Group has published a Group Note of Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages. The Unicode Standard defines the universal character set. Its primary goal is to provide an unambiguous encoding of the content of plain text, ultimately covering all languages in the world, but also major text-based notational systems for science, technology, music, and scholarship. This document contains guidelines on the use of the Unicode Standard in conjunction with markup languages such as XML.

The Digital Publishing Interest Group has published a Group Note of Digital Publishing and Accessibility in W3C Documents. This document describes how W3C guidelines (including but not limited to WCAG20, ATAG20, UAAG20, and WAI-ARIA) and their principles, guidelines, and success criteria can be applied to the needs of Digital Publishing. It provides informative guidance, but does not set requirements.

The HTML Media Extensions Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Media Source Extensions. This specification extends HTMLMediaElement to allow JavaScript to generate media streams for playback. Allowing JavaScript to generate streams facilitates a variety of use cases like adaptive streaming and time shifting live streams.