Closed Working Groups
Working Groups are the heart of the W3C Process. Most Working Groups produce Recommendations, other technical reports, and sample code.
More information about the role of Working Groups can be found in the Process document.
(historical) Web Applications Working Group
The mission of the Web Applications (WebApps) Working Group is to provide specifications that enable improved client-side application development on the Web, including specifications both for application programming interfaces (APIs) for client-side development and for markup vocabularies for describing and controlling client-side application behavior.
Audiobooks Working Group
The mission of the Audiobooks Working Group is to maintain the Publication Manifest and Audiobooks Recommendations and related Working Group Notes.
Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group
The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group is chartered to maintain and support the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 W3C Recommendation, and develop ATAG 2, a second version of these authoring tools accessibility guidelines.
Automotive Working Group
The mission of the Automotive Working Group was to develop specifications for exposing information services for in-vehicle and cloud based uses.
CSV on the Web Working Group
The mission of the CSV on the Web Working Group is to provide technologies whereby data dependent applications on the Web can provide higher interoperability when working with datasets using the CSV (Comma-Separated Values) or similar formats. As well as single CSV files, the group will define mechanisms for interpreting a set of CSVs as relational data. This will include the definition of a vocabulary for describing tables expressed as CSV and locatable on the web, and the relationships between them.
Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group
The mission of the Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group is (1) to develop the open data ecosystem, facilitating better communication between developers and publishers; (2) to provide guidance to publishers that will improve consistency in the way data is managed, thus promoting the re-use of data; (3) to foster trust in the data among developers, whatever technology they choose to use, increasing the potential for genuine innovation.
Efficient Extensible Interchange Working Group
The main objective of the Efficient Extensible Interchange (EXI) Working Group is to develop a format that allows efficient interchange of the XML Information Set.
EPUB 3 Working Group
The mission of the EPUB 3 Working Group is to maintain and develop the EPUB 3 family of specifications, to represent the EPUB community in the W3C, and to support EPUB 3 content creators and consumers by further advancing, refining, and clarifying the current EPUB 3 specification.
Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group
The mission of the Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group (ERT WG) is to develop techniques and resources to facilitate the evaluation and repair of Web sites with regard to their conformance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, and to facilitate testing across all three WAI guidelines also including the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines and User Agent Accessibility Guidelines.
Forms Working Group
The mission of the Forms Working Group is to develop specifications to cover forms on the Web, producing a system that scales from low-end devices through to the enterprise level.
Geolocation Working Group
The mission of the Geolocation Working Group is to define a secure and privacy-sensitive interface for using client-side location information in location-aware Web applications.
HTML Media Extensions Working Group
The mission of the HTML Working Group is to continue the evolution of HTML (including classic HTML and XML syntaxes).
Independent User Interface (Indie UI) Working Group
The mission of the Indie UI Working Group, part of the WAI Technical Activity, is to develop event models for Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that facilitate interaction in Web applications that are input method independent, and hence accessible to people with disabilities.
Linked Data Platform (LDP) Working Group
The mission of the Linked Data Platform (LDP) Working Group is to produce a W3C Recommendation for HTTP-based (RESTful) application integration patterns using read/write Linked Data. This work will benefit both small-scale in-browser applications (WebApps) and large-scale Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) efforts. It will complement SPARQL and will be compatible with standards for publishing Linked Data, bringing the data integration features of RDF to RESTful, data-oriented software development.
Model-Based User Interfaces Working Group
The mission of the Model-Based UI Working Group, part of the Ubiquitous Web Activity, is to develop standards as a basis for interoperability across authoring tools for context aware user interfaces for Web-based interactive applications.
Multimodal Interaction Working Group
The mission of the Multimodal Interaction Working Group is to develop open standards that extend the Web to allow multiple modes of interaction, e.g., GUI, speech, vision, pen, gestures and haptic interfaces, so that the Web becomes truly accessible for anyone via the user's preferred modes of interaction with services (=Web for Anyone, Anywhere, Any device and Any time).
Near Field Communications Working Group
The mission of the Near Field Communications Working Group is to develop a standard API for Web applications to access NFC devices.
Permissions and Obligations Expression Working Group
The mission of the Permissions and Obligations Expression Working Group is to define a semantic data model for expressing permissions and obligations statements for digital content, and to define the technical elements to make it deployable across browsers and content systems.
Protocols and Formats Working Group
The mission of the Protocols and Formats Working Group (PFWG) is to increase the support for accessibility in Web specifications. This mission flows from the W3C mission of promoting universal access and interoperability across the Web.
RDF Data Shapes Working Group
The mission of the RDF Data Shapes Working Group is to produce a language for defining structural constraints on RDF graphs. In the same way that SPARQL made it possible to query RDF data, the product of the RDF Data Shapes WG will enable the definition of graph topologies for interface specification, code development, and data verification.
RDFa Working Group
The mission of the RDFa Working Group is to support the developing use of RDFa for embedding structured data in Web documents in general. The Working Group will publish W3C Recommendations to extend and enhance the currently published RDFa 1.0 documents, including an API. The Working Group will also support the HTML Working Group in its work on incorporating RDFa in HTML5 and XHTML5 (as a followup on the the currently published Working Draft for RDFa 1.0 in HTML5).
Research and Development Working Group
The mission of the Research and Development Working Group (RDWG) is to increase the incorporation of accessibility considerations into research on Web technologies, and to identify projects researching Web accessibility and suggest research questions that may contribute to new projects. The desired outcome of more research in Web accessibility and awareness of accessibility in mainstream Web-related research should decrease the number of potential barriers in future Web-related technologies.
System Applications Working Group
The mission of the System Applications Working Group is to define a runtime environment, security model, and associated APIs for building Web applications with comparable capabilities to native applications. This requires stronger integration with the host platform than is the case for traditional web pages. Browsers are designed to cope with the user visiting untrusted web sites, necessitating a cautious approach to security that narrowly limits what a particular website can do. The contrast between the two contexts can be illustrated by comparing a) an application with limited access to specific fields in the user's contacts, and b) an application that implements a contacts manager, where the application is entrusted with the ability to access, create, delete and update entries.
Tracking Protection Working Group
The mission of the Tracking Protection Working Group is to improve user privacy and user control by defining mechanisms for expressing user preferences around Web tracking and for blocking or allowing Web tracking elements.
TV Control Working Group
The mission of the TV Control Working Group is to provide methods that enable a Web page to browse and control channel-based audio and video sources such as a TV or a radio tuner.
User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group
The mission of the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group is to produce guidelines for the development of accessible user agents: software that retrieves and renders Web content, including text, graphics, sounds, video, images, etc. In particular, the groups seeks to support the implementation of the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 , and to collect requirements for a subsequent version of User Agent Accessibility Guidelines.
Voice Browser Working Group
The mission of the Voice Browser Working Group, part of the Voice Browser Activity, is to enable users to speak and listen to Web applications by creating standard languages for developing Web-based speech applications. The Voice Browser Working Group concentrates on languages for capturing and producing speech and managing the dialog between user and computer, while a related Group, the Multimodal Interaction Working Group, concentrates on additional input modes including keyboard and mouse, ink and pen, etc.
Web Annotation Working Group
The mission of the Web Annotation Working Group, part of the Digital Publishing Activity, is to define a generic data model for Annotations, and define the basic infrastructural elements to make it deployable in browsers and reading systems through suitable user interfaces.
Web Cryptography Working Group
The mission of this group is to define an API that lets developers implement secure application protocols on the level of Web applications, including message confidentiality and authentication services, by exposing trusted cryptographic primitives from the browser. Web application developers will no longer have to create their own or use untrusted third-party libraries for cryptographic primitives. This will improve security on the Web.
Web Notification Working Group
The mission of the Web Notification Working Group, part of the Rich Web Client Activity, is to produce specifications that define APIs to generate notifications to alert users. A Notification in this context may be displayed asynchronously and may not require user confirmation. Additionally, events are specified for managing user interactions with notifications.
Web Platform Working Group
The mission of the Web Platform Working Group is to continue the development of the HTML language and provide specifications that enable improved client-side application development on the Web, including application programming interfaces (APIs) for client-side development and markup vocabularies for describing and controlling client-side application behavior.
XML Core Working Group
The mission of the XML Core Working Group is to maintain and develop as needed core XML specifications.
XML Processing Model Working Group
The XML Processing Model Working Group is defining XProc, an XML-based language that allows the creator of any given XML document to indicate that operations on that document should be performed in a specific order for a particular result, and if so, how to apply those operations.
XML Query Working Group
The mission of the XML Query Working Group is to provide flexible query facilities to extract data from XML and virtual documents, such as contents of databases or other persistent storage that are viewed as XML via a mapping mechanism, on the Web.
XML Security Working Group
The mission of the XML Security Working Group is to take the next step in developing the XML security specifications.
XSLT Working Group
The mission of the XSL Working Group is to define and maintain a practical style and transformation language capable of supporting the transformation and presentation of, and interaction with, structured information (e.g., XML documents) for use on servers and clients. The language is designed to build transformations in support of browsing, printing, interactive editing, and transcoding of one XML vocabulary into another XML vocabulary. To enhance accessibility, XSL is able to present information both visually and non-visually. XSL is not intended to replace CSS, but will provide functionality beyond that defined by CSS, for example, element re-ordering.
Social Web Working Group
The mission of the Social Web Working Group, part of the Social Activity, is to define the techical protocols, vocabularies, and APIs to facilitate access to social functionality as part of the Open Web Platform. These technologies should allow communication between indepedent systems, federation (also called "decentralization") being part of the design.