W3C

The W3C Advisory Committee has filled five open seats on the W3C Advisory Board. Created in 1998, the Advisory Board provides guidance to the Team on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution. Beginning 1 July 2016, the nine Advisory Board participants are Tantek Çelik (Mozilla), Michael Champion (Microsoft), Virginie Galindo (Gemalto), Jay (Junichi) Kishigami (NTT), Charles McCathie Nevile (Yandex), David Singer (Apple), Léonie Watson (The Paciello Group), Chris Wilson (Google) and Judy Zhu (Alibaba). Many thanks to Soohong Daniel Park (Samsung Electronics), whose term ends this month. Read more about the Advisory Board.

The Spatial Data on the Web Working Group has published a Working Draft of Semantic Sensor Network Ontology. The Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (commonly known as “SSN” or sometimes “SSNO”) is an OWL-2 DL ontology for describing sensors and the observations they make of the physical world. SSN is published in a modular architecture that supports the judicious use of “just enough” ontology for diverse applications, including satellite imagery, large scale scientific monitoring, industrial and household infrastructure, citizen observers, and Web of Things. SSN is described and examples of its use are given.

The Web Authentication Working Group has published a Working Draft of Web Authentication: A Web API for accessing scoped credentials. This specification defines an API that enables web pages to access WebAuthn compliant strong cryptographic credentials through browser script. Conceptually, one or more credentials are stored on an authenticator, and each credential is scoped to a single Relying Party. Authenticators are responsible for ensuring that no operation is performed without the user’s consent. The user agent mediates access to credentials in order to preserve user privacy. Authenticators use attestation to provide cryptographic proof of their properties to the relying party. This specification also describes a functional model of a WebAuthn compliant authenticator, including its signature and attestation functionality.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of CSS Flexible Box Layout Module Level 1. The specification describes a CSS box model optimized for user interface design. In the flex layout model, the children of a flex container can be laid out in any direction, and can “flex” their sizes, either growing to fill unused space or shrinking to avoid overflowing the parent. Both horizontal and vertical alignment of the children can be easily manipulated. Nesting of these boxes (horizontal inside vertical, or vertical inside horizontal) can be used to build layouts in two dimensions.

W3C has published new global guidelines, TTML Profiles for Internet Media Subtitles and Captions 1.0 IMSC1 as a W3C Recommendation, that will improve accessibility and make it easier and less expensive for distributors of online video content to deliver subtitles and closed captions worldwide.

An application of the W3C’s Emmy® award-winning Timed Text Markup Language (TTML), TTML Profiles for IMSC1 simplifies authoring and processing of subtitles and captions worldwide by harmonizing popular profiles of TTML. In addition, W3C’s TTML Working Group updated the working draft of TTML 2, the second version of Timed Text Markup Language (TTML), which adds features introduced in IMSC1 as well as other improvements, such as additional support for East Asian language typography, stereoscopic presentations, and mapping to HTML and CSS.

Described as a harmonization point for subtitling practices around the world, the IMSC1 global standard helps to bring together standards, rather than creating further fragmentation. Compatible with common media container formats, IMSC1 integrates with existing workflows, content libraries, and captioning requirements by offering conversion from popular captioning formats. You may read more in the press release.

The W3C Social Web Working Group is calling for implementations of Webmention, which is now a Candidate Recommendation. Webmention provides a mechanism for a website to notify other websites that it has content which links to them and when the source content changes or is deleted. This mechanism is a core building block for a decentralized (social) Web because it allows sites to automatically learn about connected content without any prior setup or agreement. For users, an immediate benefit is cross-site comments. Before being brought to W3C for standardization, Webmention already had twenty-seven independent implementations in the IndieWebCamp community.