Web Design and Applications involve the standards for building and Rendering Web pages, including HTML, CSS, SVG, Ajax, and other technologies for Web Applications (“WebApps”). This section also includes information on how make pages accessible to people with disabilities (WCAG), internationalized, and work on mobile devices.
HTML and CSS are the fundamental technologies for building Web pages: HTML (html and xhtml) for structure, CSS for style and layout. Find resources for good Web page design as well as helpful tools.
Standard APIs for client-side Web Application development include those for Geolocation, XMLHttpRequest (Ajax), and mobile widgets. W3C standards for document models (the “DOM”) and technologies such as XBL allow content providers to create interactive documents through scripting.
W3C is the home of the widely deployed PNG raster format, SVG vector format, and the Canvas API. WebCGM is a more specialized format used, for example, in the fields of automotive engineering, aeronatics.
Some of the W3C formats that enable authoring audio and video presentations include HTML, SVG, and SMIL (for synchronization). W3C is also working on a timed text format for captioning and other applications.
W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has published Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to help authors create content that is accessible to people with disabilities. WAI-ARIA gives authors more tools to create accessible Web Applications by providing additional semantics about widgets and behaviors.
W3C has a mission to design technology that works across cultures and languages. W3C standards such as HTML and XML are built on Unicode, for instance. In addition, W3C has published guidance for authors related to language tags bi-directional (bidi) text, and more.
W3C promotes “One Web” that is available on any device. W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices help authors understand how to create content that provides a reasonable experience on a wide variety of devices, contexts, and locations.
The Web is a powerful tool for communications and transactions of all sorts. It is important to consider privacy and security implications of the Web as part of technology design. Although technology such as POWDER should empower users to make appropriate privacy decisions and to protect sensitive information, education is also an important element of building trust on the Web.
Mathematics and formula are used on the Web for business reports, education materials and scientific research. W3C’s MathML enables mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the World Wide Web, just as HTML has enabled this functionality for other types of content.
2009 14 NOV
Disintermediation through Aggregation: Making your Data your Own
by Steven Pemberton
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2009 19 NOV
Making Websites Accessible
by Shawn Henry
Digital Accessibility Public Forum & Training Workshop
Singapore, Singapore
2009 19 NOV
The Enabling Power of an Accessible Web
by Shawn Henry
Digital Accessibility Public Forum & Training Workshop
Singapore, Singapore
2010 13 MAR
See also the full list of W3C Talks and Appearances.