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!

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!

The Unicode Consortium has announced the release of Version 6.1 of the Unicode Standard, continuing Unicode’s long-term commitment to support the full diversity of languages around the world. This latest version adds characters to support additional languages of China, other Asian countries, and Africa. It also addresses educational needs in the Arabic-speaking world. A total of 732 new characters have been added.

This version of the Standard also brings technical improvements to support implementers. Improved changes to property values and their aliases mean that properties now have easy-to-specify labels. The new labels combined with a new script extensions property means that regular expressions can be more straightforward and are easier to validate.

Over 200 new Standardized Variants have been added for emoji characters, allowing implementations to distinguish preferred display styles between text and emoji styles. For example:

Among the notable property changes and additions in Unicode 6.1 are two new line break property values, which improve the line-breaking behavior of Hebrew and Japanese text. Segmentation behavior was also improved for Thai, Lao, and similar languages.

Two other important Unicode specifications are maintained in synchrony with the Unicode Standard, and have updates for Version 6.1. These will be finalized in February:

UTS #10, Unicode Collation Algorithm
UTS #46, Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing

Ivan Herman , Semantic Web Activity Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), will deliver the keynote talk at the upcoming MultilingualWeb workshop. This 4th MultilingualWeb workshop will be held in Luxembourg, hosted by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission.

Ivan will give an overview of the current work done at the W3C related to the Semantic Web, Linked Data, and related technical issues. The goal is not to give a detailed technical account but, rather, to give a general, and accessible, overview and use this is a basis for further discussions on how that particular technology can be used for the general issue of Multilingual Web.

Formerly head of the worldwide W3C Offices program, Ivan has been with the W3C since 2001, and also holds a tenure position at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam. He is a member of IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), and of SWSA (Semantic Web Science Association), the committee responsible for the International Semantic Web Conferences series.

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.

Just a quick reminder that the early bird rate for the W3C “Mobile Web and Application Best Practices” (MWABP) acclaimed course is expiring next Monday. Do registerbefore 9 January 2012 eod, and save 60 Euros!

This 3rd edition of the MWABP course will start on 30 January, and will last 8 weeks. Participants are expected to spend an average of 4-6 hours per week to both learn the course material and work on  the assignments.

The course will be lead by trainers Frances de Waal and Phil Archer. Read the past students’ feedback and find out more about the course . And again, do not forget to registerbefore 9 January 2012 to benefit from the early bird rate!

W3C is pleased to announce a third edition of its most popular online training course, “ Introduction to Mobile Web and Application Best Practices“:

• Start date: 30 January 2012
• Duration: 8 weeks
• Early bird price: 165€ (until 9 Jan. 2012)
• Full price: 225€
• Course description and other details
• Registerto this course

During the course, participants will:

• learn about and use the recommended versions of HTML and CSS to use for mobile today;
• understand the constraints of working on mobile and how to overcome them to deliver the best possible experience to the widest range of users;
• practice client side and server side content adaptation techniques;
• learn about and use the exciting new APIs available on modern mobile platforms.

The course will be lead by trainers Frances de Waal and Phil Archer. Read the past students’ feedback and find out more about the course . And do not forget to registerbefore 9 January 2012 to benefit from the early bird rate!

15 – 16 March 2012, Luxembourg. Co-located with the European Commission’s Language Technology Showcase Days, and hosted by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission.

The MultilingualWeb projectis 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. The core vehicle for this is a series of four events which are planned over two years.

After three highly successful workshops in Madrid, Pisa, and Limerick, this final workshop in the series will continue to investigate currently available best practices and standards aimed at 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, see the Call for Participation

Back in February, I announced the start of a series of updates for a standardization roadmap for Web applications on mobile devices , a compilation of the most relevant current and upcoming technologies to develop Web applications well-fitted to mobile devices, which was again updated in May and August 2011.

I have just released a fourth update to that document that takes into account the many changes that have occurred in the past 3 months. Among the highlights:

• the publication of the first draft of the Web Real-Time CommunicationsAPIs, including work on the API to access the camera and microphone;
• progress on device APIs such as the Vibration API (first draft), battery status (last call), touch events (last call), accelerometer/gyroscope support(last call).

The next smaller iteration of this document will be provided end of February, in time for Mobile Word Congress 2012. Stay tuned!

When the Web started some 20 years ago, it brought a platform for distributing and accessing text, with an added dimension brought by links: hypertext. Because it was free and could be deployed everywhere easily, it was a revolution.

For the past few years, we've seen this additional dimension brought to media content, building hypermedia: SVG and canvas make it possible to build graphics that integrate or link to content from various sources, the addition of the audio and video tags in HTML5 are the starting points for making audio-video content as integrated into the Web as images have been. The Popcorn.js project illustrates for instance how video content can benefit from hyperlinking (much in the same way I had been exploring 2 years ago with my presentation viewer). Because these technologies are, can be deployed everywhere easily, I expect this will increasingly revolutionize our consumption of media.

I believe we're now starting to see a new trend of that sort, with the emergence of what I would call hyperdevices.

As more and more devices ( mobile obviously, but also tablets, TV, cars, lightbulbs and many more) get connected, they more often that not get shipped with Web capabilities.

As the Web gains more and more access to the specific capabilities of these devices ( touch interactions , geolocation , accelerometer , and many more ), not only does it become a platform of choice to develop applications targeted at these devices (as we’re exploring in the MobiWebApp project), but it also creates new form of interactions across these devices that were not possible previously.

To illustrate that point, I've built a couple of very simple demos:

• the remote whiteboard lets you use a touch-screen device to draw on another device screen, via the browser; in other words, it gives touch-capabilities to devices that don't have touch screens (e.g. most desktops or TV sets) — see the video of the demo in action
• the 3D explorer lets you use a device with an accelerometer to rotate a 3D-graphic (in this case, the HTML5 logo ) on a separate screen (see a video of the demo in action); it thus gives the equivalent of a 3D-mouse to any Web-enabled devices; whilst there probably are some 3D mouses out there, it's by far not as ubiquitous as mobile devices that come with an accelerometer

We're still at the very early days on this wave, but there is a growing interest around it. Device and service discovery (see recent discussions on Web Intents ) will play a role there without a doubt, and the work done as part of the webinos project(where I'm involved) will hopefully also inform the technical challenges that are still to be overcome. We will also need plenty of creativity to invent user interactions that match these new capabilities.

But for sure, this is where we are going.

Follow me on Twitter: @dontcallemdom.