W3C Invites Implementations of Performance Timeline Level 2

8 December 2016

The Web Performance Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Performance Timeline Level 2. This specification extends the High Resolution Time specification by providing methods to store and retrieve high resolution performance metric data. Accurately measuring performance characteristics of web applications is an important aspect of making web applications faster. This specification defines the necessary Performance Timeline primitives that enable web developers to access, instrument, and retrieve various performance metrics from the full lifecycle of a web application.

W3C Advisory Committee Elects Technical Architecture Group

2 December 2016

The W3C Advisory Committee has elected the following people to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG): Travis Leithead (Microsoft), Sangwhan Moon (Odd Concepts) and Alex Russell (Google), who all begin 2-year terms on 1 February 2017. The number of nominees being equal to the number of available seats, the nominees were thereby elected. There remains one seat for appointment by the Director. Travis, Sangwhan and Alex join co-Chair Tim Berners-Lee and continuing participants David Baron (Mozilla Foundation), Andrew Betts (Financial Times / Nikkei), Daniel Appelquist (W3C Invited Expert; co-Chair) and Peter Linss (HP; co-Chair). Yves Lafon continues as staff contact. W3C thanks Mark Nottingham (Akamai) whose term ends at the end of January 2017, for his contributions.

The mission of the TAG is to build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary, to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG, and to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C. Learn more about the TAG.

Web Annotation Data Model and Vocabulary are W3C Candidate Recommendations

22 November 2016

The Web Annotation Working Group has published a Candidate Recommendation for two documents:

• Web Annotation Data Model: This specification describes a structured model and format, in JSON, to enable annotations to be shared and reused across different hardware and software platforms. Common use cases can be modeled in a manner that is simple and convenient, while at the same time enabling more complex requirements, including linking arbitrary content to a particular data point or to segments of timed multimedia resources.
• Web Annotation Vocabulary: This specifies the set of RDF classes, predicates and named entities that are used by the Web Annotation Data Model. It also lists recommended terms from other ontologies that are used in the model, and provides the JSON-LD Context and profile definitions needed to use the Web Annotation JSON serialization in a Linked Data context.

This is a re-publication, without substantial change, of the Candidate Recommendation published on the 6th of September. The only significant change (beyond minor editorial clarifications and editorial changes) is that some features that are not expected to receive enough implementations to fulfill the exit criteria, have been moved into an informative appendix. No new features have been added and no normative features have been changed.

Candidate Recommendation means that the Working Group considers the technical design to be complete, and is seeking implementation feedbacks on the documents. There is a separate document how to use them and report on implementation results. The group is keen to get comments and implementation experiences on these specifications, either as issues on the Group’s GitHub repository or by posting to public-annotation@w3.org.

The group expects to satisfy the implementation goals (i.e., at least two, independent implementation for each of the test cases) by December 30, 2016.

First Public Working Draft: CSS Table Module Level 3

25 October 2016

The CSS Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of the CSS Table Module Level 3. This CSS module defines a two-dimensional grid-based layout system, optimized for tabular data rendering. In the table layout model, each display node is assigned to an intersection between a set of consecutive rows and a set of consecutive columns, themselves generated from the table structure and sized according to their content.

Two Notes Published by Spatial Data on the Web WG

25 October 2016 

The Spatial Data on the Web WG, a collaboration between W3C and the OGC, has today published two documents. The Use Cases & Requirements document is believed to be complete and underpins the WG’s considerable scope, motivating 3 standards in addition to today’s other publication, the Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices. The latter has been rewritten substantially to build expressly on the more general Data on the Web Best Practices, currently in CR. The aim is to provide guidance that bridges the gap between the practices and mindsets in the two communities so that the Web is better able to make sense of location and geospatial systems are better able to benefit from non-spatial data on the Web. A good example of this can be seen in yesterday’s announcement by Ireland’s mapping agency that their geospatial information is now available as Linked Data.

Driven largely by geospatial specialists, the Spatial Data on the Web WG is particularly keen to receive feedback from non-geo specialists in the Web community.

W3C Invites Implementations of 3 Candidate Recommendations

The Web Annotation Working Group has published a Candidate Recommendation for three documents:

• Web Annotation Data Model: This specification describes a structured model and format, in JSON, to enable annotations to be shared and reused across different hardware and software platforms. Common use cases can be modeled in a manner that is simple and convenient, while at the same time enabling more complex requirements, including linking arbitrary content to a particular data point or to segments of timed multimedia resources.
• Web Annotation Vocabulary: specifies the set of RDF classes, predicates and named entities that are used by the Web Annotation Data Model. It also lists recommended terms from other ontologies that are used in the model, and provides the JSON-LD Context and profile definitions needed to use the Web Annotation JSON serialization in a Linked Data context.
• Web Annotation Protocol: This document describes the transport mechanisms for creating and managing annotations in a method that is consistent with the Web Architecture and REST best practices.

This is a re-publication, without substantial change, of the Candidate Recommendation published on the 5th of July for the Data Model and Vocabulary, and on the 12th of July for the Protocol. The only significant change (beyond some minor editorial clarifications and changes) is that the respective exit criteria for the Candidate Recommendation phase is now documented in the publications themselves.

Candidate Recommendation means that the Working Group considers the technical design to be complete, and is seeking implementation feedbacks on the documents. There is a separate document how to use them and report on implementation results. The group is keen to get comments and implementation experiences on these specifications, either as issues on the Group’s GitHub repository or by posting to public-annotation@w3.org.

The group expects to satisfy the implementation goals (i.e., at least two, independent implementation for each of the test cases) by September 30, 2016.

W3C Workshop Report: Blockchains and the Web

W3C published  the report of the W3C Blockchains and the Web workshop held on 29-30 June, 2016, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Participants at the workshop found many topics for possible standardization or incubation, including various aspects of identity and proof-of-existence, as well as smaller blockchain primitives that could increase interoperability across different distributed ledgers.

Discussion will continue in the Blockchain Community Group, which will coordinate across different communities and groups to foster standardization where needed, as discussed in the related blog post, “Building Blocks of Blockchains“. This popular workshop had over one hundred attendees, and was hosted by MIT Media Lab and sponsored by NTT, Blockstream, and other W3C Members.