Friday, December 16, 2011

First Drafts of Three Audio API Specifications Published

The Audio Working Group has published three First Public Working Drafts to provide an advanced audio API for the Web:
  • the Web Audio API and MediaStream Processing API specifications each define a different approach to process and synthesize audio streams directly in script. These APIs can be used for interactive applications, games, 3D environments, musical applications, educational applications, and for the purposes of accessibility. They include the ability to synchronize, visualize, or enhance sound information when used in conjunction with graphics APIs.
  • Audio Processing API introduces and compares two client-side APIs for processing and synthesizing real-time audio streams in the browser.
Read the blog post Sounding Out the Audio APIs for more information about the possibilities unlocked by an audio API, and learn more about the Rich Web Clients Activity.

Drafts Updated for XHTML+RDFa 1.1 and RDFa Core 1.1

The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of RDFa Core 1.1, a specification for attributes to express structured data in any markup language. The group also published an update to XHTML+RDFa 1.1, a Host Language for RDFa Core 1.1. This document is intended for authors who want to create XHTML Family documents that embed rich semantic markup. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

The PROV Data Model and Abstract Syntax Notation Draft Published

The Provenance Working Group has published a Working Draft of The PROV Data Model and Abstract Syntax Notation. Provenance of information is crucial in deciding whether information is to be trusted, how it should be integrated with other diverse information sources, and how to give credit to its originators when reusing it. In an open and inclusive environment such as the Web, users find information that is often contradictory or questionable: provenance can help those users to make trust judgments. PROV-DM is a data model for provenance for building representations of the entities, people and activities involved in producing a piece of data or thing in the world. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

CSS 2D Transforms Updated

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of CSS 2D Transforms. CSS 2D Transforms allows elements rendered by CSS to be transformed in two-dimensional space. Learn more about the Style Activity.

Saturday, December 3, 2011

W3C Invites Implementations of Media Fragments URI 1.0

The Media Fragments Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Media Fragments URI 1.0. Audio and video resources on the World Wide Web are currently treated as "foreign" objects, which can only be embedded using a plugin that is capable of decoding and interacting with the media resource. Specific media servers are generally required to provide for server-side features such as direct access to time offsets into a video without the need to retrieve the entire resource. Support for such media fragment access varies between different media formats and inhibits standard means of dealing with such content on the Web. This specification provides for a media-format independent, standard means of addressing media fragments on the Web using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). The Working Group also published today the first draft of a companion document, Protocol for Media Fragments 1.0 Resolution in HTTP, which describes various recipes for processing media fragments URI when used over the HTTP protocol. Learn more about the Video in the Web Activity.

Last Calls: Geolocation API Specification Level 2; DeviceOrientation Event

The Geolocation Working Group has published two Last Call Working Drafts: Geolocation API Specification Level 2 and DeviceOrientation Event Specification. The former defines a high-level interface to location information associated only with the device hosting the implementation, such as latitude and longitude. The API itself is agnostic of the underlying location information sources. Common sources of location information include Global Positioning System (GPS) and location inferred from network signals such as IP address, RFID, WiFi and Bluetooth MAC addresses, and GSM/CDMA cell IDs, as well as user input.

Content Security Policy Draft Published

The Web Application Security Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Content Security Policy. This document defines Content Security Policy, a mechanism web applications can use to mitigate the broad class of content injection vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting (XSS). Content Security Policy is a declarative policy that lets the authors (or server administrators) of a web application restrict from where the application can load resources. Learn more about the Security Activity.

Interest Group Note: Requirements for Home Networking Scenarios

The Web and TV Interest Group published an Interest Group Note of Requirements for Home Networking Scenarios. This document lists the design goals and requirements that potential W3C recommendations should support in order to enable access to services and content provided by home network devices on other devices, including the discovery and playback of content available to those devices, both from services such as traditional broadcast media and internet based services but also from the home network. Learn more about Web and TV.