W3C News

Last Call: XMLHttpRequest

2009-11-19T19:04:21Z

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of XMLHttpRequest. The XMLHttpRequest specification defines an API that provides scripted client functionality for transferring data between a client and a server. It is the ECMAScript HTTP API. Comments are welcome through 16 December. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

First Draft of File API Published

2009-11-18T03:41:58Z

The Web Applications Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of File API. This specification provides an API for representing file objects in web applications, as well as programmatically selecting them and accessing their data. This API is designed to be used in conjunction with other APIs and elements on the web platform, notably: XMLHttpRequest (e.g. with an overloaded send() method for File objects), postMessage, DataTransfer (part of the drag and drop API defined in [HTML5,]) and Web Workers. Additionally, it should be possible to programmatically obtain a list of files from the input element [HTML5] when it is in the File Upload state. These kinds of behaviors are defined in the appropriate affiliated specifications. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

Last Call: Widgets 1.0: The widget Interface

2009-11-17T16:38:20Z

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Widgets 1.0: The widget Interface. This specification defines an application programming interface (API) for widgets that provides, amongst other things, functionality for accessing a widget's metadata and persistently storing data. Comments are welcome through 08 December. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

Last Call: XML Entity definitions for Characters

2009-11-17T16:35:51Z

The Math Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of XML Entity definitions for Characters. It is difficult to write science fluently if scientific characters are not available for use. It is difficult to read science if corresponding glyphs are not available for presentation. In the majority of cases it is preferable to store characters directly as Unicode character data or as XML numeric character references. However, in some environments it is more convenient to use the ASCII input mechanism provided by XML entity references. Many entity names are in common use, and this specification aims to provide standard mappings to Unicode for each of these names. It introduces no names that have not already been used in earlier specifications. Comments are welcome through 08 December. Learn more about the Math Activity.

First Draft of Mobile Web for Social Development Roadmap Published

2009-11-17T16:23:34Z

The Mobile Web For Social Development (MW4D) Interest Group has published a Group Note of Mobile Web for Social Development Roadmap. This document describes some of the current challenges of deploying development-oriented services on mobile phones. It suggests the most promising directions for lowering barriers to developing, deploying and accessing services on mobile phones and thereby creating an enabling environment for more social-oriented services to appear. Learn more about the Mobile Web Initiative Activity.

World Wide Web Foundation Launches Operations and First Projects

2009-11-15T13:35:29Z

Speaking at the Internet Governance Forum in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, Tim Berners-Lee announced today that World Wide Web Foundation is open for business. World Wide Web Foundation was created with W3C's support in September 2008, and focuses on advancing the Web as a medium that empowers people to make positive social and economic change. Web Foundation's first two projects will help people to better leverage the Web to support agriculture in near-desert environments in Africa, and empowering youth in inner-city centers by teaching them how to create Web content. Such projects are consistent with W3C's own work to ensure that One Web is available to all, including work on mobile Web for social development, accessibility, and internationalization. W3C looks forward to collaborating with World Wide Web Foundation to further lower barriers to access and to promote the development of free and open Web standards.

W3C Technical Plenary Convenes

2009-11-04T18:37:58Z

The W3C community convenes today in Santa Clara, California for Technical Plenary (TPAC) 2009 to discuss:

Decentralized Extensibility in HTML5
Maintaining a Healthy Internet Ecosystem -- Challenges to an Open Internet Infrastructure
Privacy on the Web of Applications -- Challenges and Opportunities
Web Apps vs App. Stores
Future of the Social Web
Twelve lightning talks

This year, the Internet Society (ISOC), as part of its mission to support the development of open standards, is sponsoring TPAC 2009. Tomorrow, the public will participate in discussion at W3C's first Developer Gathering. Follow the goings-on via hash code "#tpac09" in various social networking channels. Procedings from the Plenary Day will be public.

Five API Working Drafts Updated

2009-10-30T20:02:36Z

The Web Applications Working Group has published updates to five Working Drafts of specifications for APIs that enhance the open Web platform as a runtime environment for full-featured applications:

Web Sockets API provides an API for full-duplex communication between a Web application and a remote host.
Web Storage provides APIs for Web applications to store key-value data on the client side.
Web Database defines an API for Web applications to store data in client-side databases that can be queried using a variant of SQL.
Web Workers defines an API for enabling thread-like operations (using message passing) in Web applications, so that certain application tasks can be run in parallel.
Server-Sent Events defines an API for a Web application to open an HTTP connection for receiving push notifications from a server, in the form of DOM events.

Note that the Web Storage and Web Database specifications were previously published as a single Working Draft, but have now been split out into separate Working Drafts. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

Widgets 1.0: Packaging and Configuration Draft Updated

2009-10-30T20:00:29Z

The Web Applications Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of Widgets 1.0: Packaging and Configuration, which standardizes a packaging format for software known as widgets. The specification relies on PKWare's Zip specification as the archive format, XML as a configuration document format, and provides a series of steps that widget runtimes follow when processing and verifying various aspects of a package. This updated Working Draft addresses issues reported during the first Candidate Recommendation phase (see the list of changes). Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

DataCache API First Working Draft Published

2009-10-30T19:57:42Z

The Web Applications Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of DataCache API, which provides Web applications with a means to programatically add and remove resources to a “data cache”, which can then be statically served by user agents when a particular resource is requested. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

State Chart XML (SCXML) Working Draft Published

2009-10-30T19:56:19Z

The Voice Browser Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction. SCXML is a general-purpose event-based state machine language that may be used in a number of ways, including as a high-level dialog language controlling VoiceXML 3.0's encapsulated speech modules, or as a multimodal control language in the MultiModal Interaction framework. The main difference from the previous draft is the correction of various inconsistencies. A diff-marked version of this document is also available for comparison purposes. Learn more about the Voice Browser Activity.

First Draft of Emotion Markup Language (EmotionML) 1.0 Published

2009-10-30T19:54:50Z

The Multimodal Interaction Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Emotion Markup Language (EmotionML) 1.0. EmotionML provides representations of emotions and related states for technological applications. The aim of this draft is to strike a balance between practical applicability and scientific well-foundedness of emotion specification. The language is conceived as a "plug-in" language suitable for use in three different areas: (1) manual annotation of data, (2) automatic recognition of emotion-related states from user behavior and (3) generation of emotion-related system behavior. Learn more about the Multimodal Interaction Activity.

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0: Updated Working Draft

2009-10-30T19:52:03Z

The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0. ATAG defines how authoring tools should help Web developers produce Web content that is accessible and conforms to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. ATAG also defines how to make authoring tools accessible so that people with disabilities can use them. Read the invitation to review the ATAG 2.0 Working Draft and about the Web Accessibility Initiative.

Last Call: Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0

2009-10-30T19:49:32Z

The Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of the Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Schema, updated Working Drafts of HTTP Vocabulary in RDF 1.0, Representing Content in RDF 1.0, Pointer Methods in RDF 1.0, Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Requirements, and a First Public Working Draft of the Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Guide. EARL is a machine-readable format for expressing test results. The primary motivation for developing EARL is to facilitate the processing of test results, such as those generated by Web accessibility evaluation tools, using a vendor-neutral and platform-independent format. Read the invitation to review the EARL 1.0 Last Call Working Draft and about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Web Services Fragment (WS-Fragment) First Draft Published

2009-10-30T19:44:59Z

The Web Services Resource Access Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Web Services Fragment (WS-Fragment). This specification extends the WS-Transfer [WS-Transfer] specification to enable clients to retrieve and manipulate parts or fragments of a WS-Transfer enabled resource without needing to include the entire XML representation in a message exchange. Learn more about the Web Services Activity.