Web Design and Applications - W3C

New translation into Swedish

2012-02-14T14:57:12+00:00

Teckenkodning för nybörjare (Character encodings for beginners)

This article was translated into Swedish thanks to Olle Olsson.

New Mobile Web “advanced” course is open for registration

2012-02-08T16:45:27+00:00

We are pleased to announce that a brand new mobile Web course is open for registration: “Mobile Web 2: Applications” will provide you with all the knowledge you need to write mobile Web applications that can ship both online and in application stores, using today’s advanced technologies.

During this course, participants will:

Understand the specifics of developing Web applications for the mobile environment.
Learn the latest HTML5 and Javascript APIs that are actually usable in real-world environments.
Discover the options at your disposal to package applications so that they work offline or can be shipped to application stores.
Be informed about what technologies are coming next so that you will be ready to use them when they become broadly available.

Developped by the W3C/MobiWebApp team, and taught by Robin Berjon, W3C Device APIs working group chair and newly elected TAG member, this new course will last 8 weeks, with a start date of 12 March 2012. Read the course description and register quickly before 1 March to benefit from the early bird rate(165€).

MultilingualWeb Limerick workshop report now available

2012-02-08T14:59:26+00:00

A report summarising the MultilingualWeb workshop in Limerick is now available from the MultilingualWeb site. Alongside the summaries are links to slides, video recordings, and the IRC log for each speaker and the discussion sessions.

Entitled “A Local Focus for the Multilingual Web”, the workshop surveyed and shared information about currently available best practices and standards that can help content creators and localizers address the needs of the multilingual Web. Attendees also heard about gaps that need to be addressed, and enjoyed opportunities to network and share information between the various different communities involved in enabling the multilingual Web.

This workshop also included a half-day Open Space discussion session run by Jaap van der Meer of TAUS, where attendees split into breakout groups to discuss topics of their own choosing.

You can also find links to videos, slides, etc as well as links to social media related to the event on the program page of the workshop.

Preparations have now begun for the next workshop, to be held in Luxembourg, on March 15-16. It will be hosted by the Directorate General for Translation of the European Commission. See the Call for Participation to register.

CSS character encoding tests updated

2012-02-07T12:22:02+00:00

These tests check whether a user agent follows the CSS 2.1 specification when dealing with character encodings for CSS style sheets. The test results have been updated to show the behaviour of the latest versions of major browsers, and the tests have been added to the W3C Test Framework.

See the page summarizing the latest results. You can also link from that page to the tests themselves.

See the tests in the W3C Test Harness or in the Internationalization Activity format.

Open Web Platform Weekly Summary - 2012-01-30 - 2012-02-05

2012-02-06T23:09:31+00:00

Time for your Open Web Platform weekly summary dose. A bit of HTML5, a bit of Web apps, a pinch of Web Architecture and HTTP and everything tied with a Web Education ribbon.

HTML5

Charles Pritchard (Jumis) is asking if the allow_popup attribute value is ready for prime time. IE has an implementation of it and Webkit has an ongoing patch. The goal of the attribute is to allow pop up in some circumstances where it is usually not possible, such as sandboxed iframes.

The abbr attribute on th elements will be added to HTML5 specification.

There is a proposal for the next version of HTML to have a DOM attribute to have access to the metadata contained in images.

There is a meta perma-thread revolving along longdesc attribute but also images map and accessibility. This discussion is not finished yet and let's hope people will reach a common understanding on the issue.

Web Apps

Robin Berjon proposed to add screen orientation lock to the rechartering of Web Apps WG. It is happening sometimes that an app will make sense only when the screen has a specific orientation. On the other hand, your body might have a position which is not the one perceived by the device. For example when you are reading news lying down on the side, and you screen suddenly rotates because of your position.

Should you be able to install Web Apps on your computer. Tim Berners-Lee (W3C) think so and argues for it.

Glen Shires (Google) proposes the creation of a Community Group for the Speech Javascript API.

The discussion on adding Image.toBlob() is still active. It is very similar to Canvas.toBlob(). Some people wondered if in fact it should not be more general and apply to any kind of binary streams.

Education

Chris Mills (Opera Software), who is actively involved in developing a neutral repository for Open Web documentation across platforms, has outlined how the group will move forward. You can join the Web Education Community Group.

HTTP

The discussion about the rechartering of HTTP WG is still going on for working on the new generation of HTTP. There is a lot of input on what are the good strategies for the future. Some people share their opinions about the SPDY experiment. Pretty sure that the IETF WG F2F in Paris (March 25-30, 2012) will be quite active. I will not be there unfortunately.

Web Architecture

Larry Masinter (Adobe) sent a proposal for working on MIME and the Web. The discussion addresses the issues around registries which come quite often. Basically how do we maintain the balance in between the flexibility of the open Web and a control set of values avoiding fragmentation.

Robin Berjon proposed a new draft about the work on API Minimization. He is looking for feedback.

This column is written by Karl Dubost, working in the Developer Relations team at Opera Software.

W3C Mobile Web tutorial @ WWW2012

2012-02-06T17:37:23+00:00

At this year’s 21th International World Wide Web Conference – WWW2012, W3C organizes a W3C tutorial track over two days, on Monday 16 and Tuesday 17 April 2012.

Half-day tutorials from leading experts will be available to researchers and developers seeking to pick up new skills on the latest developments on W3C Web standards.

One of these W3C tutorials will be about “Developing Mobile Web Applications” and will be taught by Dominique Hazaël-Massieux (W3C Mobile Web Activity Lead) and Frances de Waal (W3DevCampus trainer for the Mobile Web and Application Best Practices online training course). The tutorial informations are summarized below:

W3C tutorial on “Developing Mobile Web Applications”
by Frances de Wall and Dominique Hazaël-Massieux
on Tuesday April 17th – morning
at the Lyon Convention Centre, Lyon, France
Abstract: Participants to the tutorial will learn how to build applications for mobile devices using Web technologies. We will first focus on what makes it different to use the Web on mobile devices compared to computers: the specific constraints of these devices, as well as their increasing specific advantages. The tutorial will then look at how to exploit all the specificities of the mobile user experience, via JavaScript APIs, touch interactions, camera integration, etc.
Please register to this tutorial before 13 February to get an early bird rate!

New “startup level” for W3C Membership

2012-02-06T15:59:02+00:00

Part of the goals of our MobiWebApp project is to help more European SMEs get involved in the standardization work around Web applications on mobile devices.

As a result, we’ve been pushing for the adoption of a new W3C Membership level targeted at small enterprises, which W3C just announced is now available to any company with less than 10 employees, less than 2.25M Euros of gross revenues and has never been a W3C Member before.

The fee for most Europe-based companies is at 1950€ (as can be verified in the W3C fees calculator), making it a great opportunity for small business that would like to help shape the future standards of the Web. Don’t miss it!

New tests: HTML5 bidi

2012-02-06T08:07:49+00:00

An initial set of new tests related to bidirectional text support in HTML5 have been added to the Internationalization test suite. More tests will follow shortly.

These tests look at support for the new bdi element, and at behavior associated with newlines.

The tests are published in the i18n-html5 test suite in the W3C Test Harness as well as being accessible in the usual Internationalization Activity format.

A page summarizing the latest results is available.

New translations into Russian and Ukrainian

2012-02-03T13:27:16+00:00

Ukrainian:

Обслуговування HTML та XHTML (Serving HTML & XHTML)

Коли слід використовувати узгодження мови (When to use language negotiation)

Можливості відображення (Display capabilities)

Формати дати (Date formats)

Дати та час (Dates and Time)

Russian:

Обслуживание HTML и XHTML (Serving HTML & XHTML)

Когда следует использовать language negotiation (согласование языка) (When to use language negotiation)

Возможности отображения (Display capabilities)

Формати даты (Date formats)

Даты и время (Dates and Time)

These articles were translated thanks to Alexandr Shlapak.

MultilingualWeb speaker deadline coming, don’t delay!

2012-02-02T17:31:49+00:00

We are expecting talks from Microsoft, Wikimedia, Mozilla, Joomla, the European Commission and CNGL representatives at the MultilingualWeb workshop in Luxembourg, and we will be filling the remaining slots soon. The deadline for submission of talk proposals is 10th February, so if you want to speak at the event please register as soon as possible. You can submit your proposal on the registration form.

We also recently announced that Ivan Herman, Semantic Web Activity Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), will deliver the keynote talk.

This fourth MultilingualWeb workshop will be held in Luxembourg, hosted by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission.

The MultilingualWeb project is looking at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the Web multilingually. The project aims to raise the visibility of existing best practices and standards and identify gaps, with a view to helping content creators, localizers, tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web.

Participation is free. We welcome participation from both speakers and non-speaking attendees. For more information and to register, see the Call for Participation.