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The W3C Membership has elected the Advisory Board

5 June 2023 | Archive

The W3C Membership has elected the following people to fill six seats on the W3C Advisory Board starting 1 July 2023: Tantek Çelik (Mozilla Foundation), Elika J Etemad (Apple Inc.), Wendy Reid (Rakuten Group, Inc.), Avneesh Singh (DAISY Consortium), Chris Wilson (Google LLC) and Song XU (China Mobile) will join continuing participants Qing An (Alibaba Group), Wei Ding (Huawei), Tatsuya Igarashi (Sony), Florian Rivoal (W3C Invited Expert) and Tzviya Siegman (Wiley). Many thanks to the 8 candidates, and thanks for contributions to the AB to the departing participants, Heejin Chung (Samsung) and Charles Nevile (ConsenSys), whose terms end this month.

Created in March 1998, the Advisory Board provides ongoing guidance to the W3C Team on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution. The Advisory Board manages the evolution of the Process Document. The elected Members of the Advisory Board participate as individual contributors and not representatives of their organizations. Advisory Board participants use their best judgment to find the best solutions for the Web, not just for any particular network, technology, vendor, or user. Read more about the Advisory Board and its work.

EPUB 3.3 becomes a W3C Recommendation

25 May 2023 | Archive

The EPUB 3 Working Group has published EPUB 3.3, EPUB Reading Systems 3.3 and EPUB Accessibility 1.1 as W3C Recommendations, as part of the Digital Publishing activity.

EPUB defines a distribution and interchange format for digital publications and documents. The EPUB format provides a means of representing, packaging, and encoding structured and semantically enhanced web content — including HTML, CSS, SVG, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file container.

The content specification, which is what publishers, creators, or authors are really interested in, is now separate from the reading system specification that is of primary interest for implementers only. Editorial changes made the documents more readable.

Accessibility of EPUB publications was an essential part of the group’s activity. As a result, the EPUB Accessibility specification has been updated and, for the first time in the history of EPUB, is now an integral part of the EPUB Standard. Furthermore, the EPUB Accessibility specification is compatible with the European Accessibility Act whose influence will be significant on Digital Publishing in the years to come.

Finally, please note that this edition of EPUB is dedicated to Garth Conboy, who was one of the original designers of EPUB, and an initiator of the W3C Working Group which produced these new specifications. He is, and will remain, greatly missed.

Please read our Press Release to learn more about this achievement.

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.2 is a W3C Recommendation

6 June 2023 | Archive

The Accessible Rich Internet Applications Working Group has published Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.2 as a W3C Recommendation. Accessibility of web content requires semantic information about widgets, structures, and behaviors, in order to allow assistive technologies to convey appropriate information to persons with disabilities. This specification provides an ontology of roles, states, and properties that define accessible user interface elements and can be used to improve the accessibility and interoperability of web content and applications. These semantics are designed to allow an author to properly convey user interface behaviors and structural information to assistive technologies in document-level markup. This version adds features new since WAI-ARIA 1.1 [wai-aria-1.1] to improve interoperability with assistive technologies to form a more consistent accessibility model for [HTML] and [SVG2]. This specification complements both [HTML] and [SVG2].

This document is part of the WAI-ARIA suite described in the WAI-ARIA Overview.

First Public Working Drafts: RDF 1.2 Semantics and SPARQL 1.2 Entailment Regimes

6 June 2023 | Archive

The RDF Star Working Group has published the last two First Public Working Drafts of its Recommendation track deliverables:

RDF 1.2 Semantics: This document describes a precise semantics for the RDF 1.2 Concepts and Abstract Syntax [RDF12-CONCEPTS] and RDF 1.2 Schema [RDF12-SCHEMA]. It defines a number of distinct entailment regimes and corresponding patterns of entailment. It is part of a suite of documents which comprise the full specification of RDF 1.2.
SPARQL 1.2 Entailment Regimes: There are different possible ways of defining a basic graph pattern matching extension for an entailment relation. This document specifies one such way for a range of standard semantic web entailment relations. Such extensions of the SPARQL semantics are called entailment regimes within this document.

Web Share API is a W3C Recommendation

30 May 2023 | Archive

The Web Applications Working Group has published Web Share API as a W3C Recommendation. This specification defines an API for sharing text, links and other content to an arbitrary destination of the user’s choice. The available share targets are not specified here; they are provided by the user agent. They could, for example, be apps, websites or contacts.

Updated Candidate Recommendations: UI Events KeyboardEvent code and key Values

30 May 2023 | Archive

The Web Applications Working Group invites implementations of the following two updated Candidate Recommendation Snapshots:

UI Events KeyboardEvent code Values defines the values for the KeyboardEvent.code attribute, which is defined as part of the UI Events Specification [UIEvents]. The code value contains information about the key event that can be used to identify the physical key being pressed by the user.
UI Events KeyboardEvent key Values defines the key attribute values that must be used for KeyboardEvent‘s key attribute, which is defined as part of the UI Events Specification [UIEvents].

First Public Working Draft: Verifiable Credentials JSON Schema Specification 2023

23 May 2023 | Archive

The Verifiable Credentials Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Verifiable Credentials JSON Schema Specification 2023. Among other things, the [VC-DATA-MODEL-2] specifies the models used for Verifiable Credentials, Verifiable Presentations, and explains the relationships between three parties: issuers, holders, and verifiers. Critical pieces of functionality referenced throughout the [VC-DATA-MODEL-2] are the that of verifiability, extensibility, and semantic interoperability. This specification provides a mechanism to make use of a Credential Schema in Verifiable Credential, leveraging the existing Data Schemas concept.

W3C welcomes feedback on the beta of its new website

27 February 2023 | Archive

W3C invites public feedback on a beta release of the W3C website redesign. The new site features a cleaner and more modern look, a simplified information architecture, improved accessibility, and more integration throughout the site. Once the beta of the English site has concluded, we will offer sites in Japanese and Chinese.

The scope of the redesign is limited to most of our public pages, but we will gradually work to include the rest of the site.

You can read a bit more on the beta and its context in the W3C blog post, and about the redesign work and process in Studio 24’s blog post. We look forward to your feedback.

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