Call for Review: Publication Manifest and Audiobooks are W3C Proposed Recommendations

 The Publishing Working Group has published two Proposed Recommendations:

• Publication Manifest defines a general manifest format for expressing information about a digital publication. It uses schema.org metadata augmented to include various structural properties about publications, serialized in JSON-LD, to enable interoperability between publishing formats while accommodating variances in the information that needs to be expressed.
• Audiobooks describes the requirements for the creation of audiobooks, using a profile of the Publication Manifest specification.

Comments on the Proposed Recommendations are welcome through 03:59 UTC/GMT on 2020-10-31 (23:59 Boston time on 2020-10-30).

New version of the Roadmap of Web Applications on Mobile

 

W3C has published a new version of its Roadmap of Web Applications on Mobile, an overview of the various technologies developed in W3C that increase the capabilities of Web applications, and how they apply more specifically to the mobile context.

The September 2020 snapshot refreshes the list of technologies under incubation in Community Groups or on the standardization track in Working Groups. See the Change history since November 2019 for details. Standardization proposals that have emerged since last publication include:

• various proposals focused on privacy (such as the Storage Access API, the Trust Token API, Private Click Measurement, TURTLEDOVE, or the isLoggedIn proposal), described in Security and Privacy;
• exploration of standards needed for so-called MiniApps, see Application Lifecycle;
• main thread scheduling APIs to improve scheduling primitives, see Performance and Tuning;
• Web Monetization to enable continuous and small payments facilitated by the browser, see Payment and Services;

Former proposals under incubation in Community Groups have moved to the standardization track since November 2019. For instance, the WebTransport API is now in scope of the recently created WebTransport Working Group (see Network and Communications). The GPU for the Web Working Group has also been recently created to standardize the WebGPU and WebGPU Shading Language specifications, incubated in the GPU for the Web Community Group (see Graphics and Layout).

Implementation info for all features has been updated. A number of features that were previously in development, under consideration, or simply not implemented have now shipped in the new version of Edge, based on Chromium. Main technologies behind Web Components, which allow applications to encapsulate their logic in re-usable components, are now available across browsers (see Device Adaptation). Similarly, Web Animations, which allow application to manage animations via scripting, are available across main browsers (see Graphics and Layout).

Last but not least, a new groups page summarizes groups mentioned throughout the roadmap’s pages, along with the name of the specifications and features that these groups are (or were) responsible for.

Sponsored by Beihang University, this project is part of a set of roadmaps under development in a GitHub repository to document existing standards, highlight ongoing standardization efforts, point out topics under incubation, and discuss technical gaps that may need to be addressed in the future. New versions are published as needed depending on progress of key technologies of the Web platform. We encourage the community to review them and raise comments, or suggest new ones, in the repository’s issue tracker.

W3C re-energizes process for agile Web standardization and earlier Royalty-Free protection

 

The 15 September 2020 W3C Process Document and 15 September 2020 W3C Patent Policy take effect today. At a time when the Web is increasingly essential with the world going more and more virtual, these updates increase the Web Consortium’s responsiveness and strengthen standardization activities by adding a continuous standard development mode and earlier Royalty-Free protection for implementers, among other changes. Please read more in our press release.

Of the changes to the W3C Process Document, the most anticipated ones offer a real boost in helping the Web serve the community:

• streamlined community review and review for integrity (Horizontal review to ensure accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security);
• flexibility for multiple work modes, including stability of referenced versions and reflection of the current status in the technical reports list;
• a continuous development mode that enables specifications to reflect rapidly developing technology –including a living standard approach as a native capability of the W3C Recommendation Track.

These critical improvements required an important change to the W3C Patent Policy –the first major update to this groundbreaking document since its introduction to the world in 2005– to provide patent protection at earlier Candidate phases, supporting unencumbered implementation and use even as specifications continue to evolve. This change helps to de-risk Web experimentation and reinforce access to the Web’s technology as common infrastructure.

The documents were developed by the W3C Advisory Board, the public Revising W3C Process Community Group and the Patents and Standards Interest Group (PSIG). Comments and feedback on the new Process Document may be sent as issues in the public GitHub Repository.

W3C Invites Implementations of Time Ontology in OWL

W3C has republished a Candidate Recommendation of Time Ontology in OWL. OWL-Time is an OWL-2 DL ontology of temporal concepts, for describing the temporal properties of resources in the world or described in Web pages. The ontology provides a vocabulary for expressing facts about topological (ordering) relations among instants and intervals, together with information about durations, and about temporal position including date-time information. Time positions and durations may be expressed using either the conventional (Gregorian) calendar and clock, or using another temporal reference system such as Unix-time, geologic time, or different calendars.

W3C Invites Implementations of TTML Profiles for Internet Media Subtitles and Captions 1.2

The Timed Text Working Group has published a Candidate Recommendation of TTML Profiles for Internet Media Subtitles and Captions 1.2. This specification defines two profiles of [ttml2]: a text-only profile and an image-only profile. These profiles are intended to be used across subtitle and caption delivery applications worldwide, thereby simplifying interoperability, consistent rendering and conversion to other subtitling and captioning formats. This specification improves on [ttml-imsc1.1] by supporting contemporary practices, while retaining compatibility with [ttml-imsc1.1] documents. It provides one new feature, which permits external font files to be referenced explicitly. One existing feature has been clarified, and no features have been deprecated in this version.

First Public Working Draft: RTC Accessibility User Requirements (RAUR)

The Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group with the Research Questions Task Force (RQTF) has published a First Public Working Draft of the Working Group Note RTC Accessibility User Requirements (RAUR). RAUR outlines user needs, requirements, and scenarios for real-time communication (RTC) to be accessible to people with disabilities. Accessible telecommunication technology is increasingly important for people who are working remotely and relying on RTC for daily needs. The purpose of this document is to inform the development of specifications and underlying architecture at W3C and beyond. Some of the requirements apply at the system or platform level, and some are authoring requirements. RQTF would particularly like input on any user needs or requirements that are missing from this draft. For more information, see the blog post RTC Accessibility User Requirements – Call for Review.

DOM Review Draft 18 June 2019 Endorsed as a W3C Candidate Recommendation

As part of working with the WHATWG together on HTML and DOM, W3C selected today to endorse the first WHATWG DOM Review Draft as a Candidate Recommendation. DOM defines a platform-neutral model for events, aborting activities, and node trees. This document is published for purposes of patent review by WHATWG Workstream Participants and as a W3C Candidate Recommendation. We invite the community to provide feedback until 14 April 2020.

SEO Tools for optimizing websites

As a fairly technical discipline, there are many tools and software that SEOs rely on to help with optimizing websites. Below are some commonly used free and paid tools:

• Google Search Console - Google Search Console (formerly known as "Google Webmaster Tools") is a free tool provided by Google, and is a standard tool in the SEO's toolkit. GSC provides rankings and traffic reports for top keywords and pages, and can help identify and fix on-site technical issues.
• Google Ads Keyword Planner - Keyword Planner is another free tool provided by Google, as part of their Google Ads product. Even though it is designed for paid search, it can be a great tool to use for SEO since it provides keyword suggestions and keyword search volume, which can be helpful when doing keyword research.
• Backlink Analysis Tools - There are a number of link analysis tools out there, the two primary ones being AHREFs and Majestic. Backlink analysis tools allow users to analyze which websites are linking to their own website, or the websites of competitors, and can be used to find new links during link building.
• SEO Platforms - There are many different SEO platforms that bring together many of the tools that SEOs need to optimize sites. Some of the most popular include Moz, BrightEdge, Searchmetrics, and Linkdex. These platforms track keyword rankings, help with keyword research, identify on-page and off-page SEO opportunities, and many other tasks related to SEO.
• Social Media - Most social media sites don't have a direct impact on SEO, but they can be a good tool for networking with other webmasters and building relationships that can lead to link building and guest posting opportunities.

Macmillan Learning and Fondazione LIA win the ABC 2020 Awards

We are happy to share that W3C Members Macmillan Learning and Fondazione LIA are the winners of the Accessible Books Consortium’s 2020 International Excellence Awards for Accessible Publishing.

Macmillan Learning was recognized in the publisher category as the first Global Certified Accessible (GCA) publisher producing products and learning materials in accessible formats for students with different kinds of vision impairment.

Fondazione LIA was recognized in the initiative category for their achievements in improving the accessibility of e-books and other digital publications for people who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print-disabled.

“Macmillan Learning feels strongly that knowledge sharing is important, and for us accessibility speaks to the core of our mission – to improve lives through learning. The needs for accessible educational materials are universal and extend beyond an area of focus for one publisher in one country. We look forward to continuing to be part of a solution that enables students of all abilities to have a great learning experience.“
Rachel Comerford, Senior Director, Content Standards and Accessibility, Macmillan Learning

“We are really pleased that the work done by the LIA Foundation to create awareness on accessibility in the publishing industry has been recognized. This is a further stimulus to pursue our goal of creating a fully inclusive publishing ecosystem where all readers have the same opportunity to choose what they want in the publishers’ catalogues. A special thanks goes to all our stakeholders, the Italian Publishers Association and the Italian publishers, the Italian Blind and Visual Impaired Union, the Italian Dyslexia Association and the Biblioteca di Monza, without whose precious collaboration this would not be possible.“
Cristina Mussinelli, Secretary General, Fondazione LIA

This prestigious award is a noted event in the field of accessibility, in a context where over 253 million people worldwide are blind or have severe to moderate vision impairment and more than 90% of these are resident in developing countries, where the World Blind Union estimates that people who are blind have only a one in ten chance of going to school or getting a job. The lack of accessible books is a very real barrier to getting an education and leading an independent, productive life, and a reason why the Accessible Book Consortium seeks to recognize leadership and achievements in advancing the accessibility of e-books and other digital materials.

Join us in celebrating the 31st birthday of the World Wide Web

In March 1989 Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote “Information Management: A Proposal” and with that quiet act launched an idea, the World Wide Web, that has changed our lives forever.

The Web was envisioned by Tim as a global information-sharing space that would connect people and encourage understanding and sharing of knowledge. It is now an indispensable, exciting and, in some cases a vital global commons. We are incredibly grateful to our Director, Tim Berners-Lee, for the invention of the Web, for founding the World Wide Web Consortium, for all his work to keep the Web open, international, accessible, and for his decades of inspiration to so many of us.

For 25 years, the Web Consortium has developed the foundational technical standards upon which the Web has flourished. Please read more about our values in our blog post.

If you are part of our community, helping to develop technologies for the web with the Web Consortium, thank you. Let others know that the Web was made to work for everyone. Let your family and friends know why your work at the Web Consortium –to make a web for all– matters.

Thank you again, Tim! Happy Birthday, World Wide Web!

Let’s all keep doing our part to keep making the Web and the world better.

The Web Consortium: making the web work, for everyone.

W3C Team interim travel restrictions and guidance for continuity of operations

Effective immediately and through 15 May, the W3C Team travel policy prescribes that all international travel is suspended and staff are urged to consider the importance of any domestic travel before agreeing to domestic travel other than commuting. Remote teleconferencing is recommended in place of travel.

W3C Management also recommends that all W3C groups not hold physical face-to-face meetings and should instead plan virtual equivalents. W3M plans on updating the guidance as conditions continue to evolve no later than March 26.

To that effect the W3C Team has started to draft an addition to the Guidebook: Continuity of Operations under Travel Restrictions

Our primary concern is individual and community health. Slowing the spread of the COVID-19 virus improves the chances that health systems will have the capacity to continue to treat usual health issues plus those affected.

• Individual and community health: take care of yourselves and those around you. Even if an individual is not personally at-risk, COVID-19 may be contagious before symptoms appear.
• Unpredictability of border measures and quarantines: international travelers risk getting caught far from home or facing quarantine.
• Unpredictability of meeting plans: many conferences are being canceled, and many localities are canceling large gatherings.

Updated Candidate Recommendations for JSON-LD 1.1

The JSON-LD Working Group invites implementations of two revised Candidate Recommendations:

• JSON-LD 1.1 defines a JSON-based expression of Linked Data graphs. The syntax is designed to easily integrate into deployed systems that already use JSON, and provides a smooth upgrade path from JSON to JSON-LD. It enables the creation of more easily interoperable Web services, the ability to store Linked Data in JSON-based storage engines, and brings more meaningful data to Web services and APIs.
• JSON-LD 1.1 Processing Algorithms and API defines an Application Programming Interface (API) for developers implementing a set of algorithms for programmatic transformations of JSON-LD documents.

Candidate Recommendation means that the Working Group considers the technical design to be complete and is seeking implementation feedback on the documents. The group is keen to get comments and implementation experiences on these specifications as issues raised in the documents’ respective GitHub repositories (see the document headers for the exact references).

The group expects to satisfy the implementation goals (i.e., at least two, independent implementations for each of the test cases) by 3 April 2020

Four First Public Working Drafts published by the CSS Working Group

The CSS Working Group has published four First Public Working Drafts today:

• CSS Color Module Level 5 extends CSS Color [css-color-4] to add color modification functions.
• Media Queries Level 5 allows authors to test and query values or features of the user agent or display device, independent of the document being rendered. They are used in the CSS @media rule to conditionally apply styles to a document, and in various other contexts and languages, such as HTML and JavaScript.
• CSS Transforms Module Level 2 allows elements styled with CSS to be transformed in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space. This spec adds new tranform functions and properties for three-dimensional transforms, and convenience functions for simple transforms.
• CSS Conditional Rules Module Level 4 contains the features of CSS for conditional processing of parts of style sheets, conditioned on capabilities of the processor or the document the style sheet is being applied to. It includes and extends the functionality of CSS level 2 [CSS21], which builds on CSS level 1 [CSS1]. The main extensions compared to level 2 are allowing nesting of certain at-rules inside @media, and the addition of the @supports rule for conditional processing.

CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, etc.

First Public Working Draft: WCAG 2.2

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) has published a First Public Working Draft of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. WCAG provides recommendations for making web content more accessible to people with disabilities. It addresses accessibility of web content on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. Following these guidelines also makes your web content more usable to all users in a variety of situations. Please see the blog post for information on what’s new in this draft and upcoming work: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 in Development.

W3C awards Website Redesign Project to Studio 24

25 February 2020

The W3C Website redesign Request For Proposals has concluded with W3C awarding the project to Studio 24, a small, independent digital agency in the heart of Cambridge, UK, founded in 1999. The project covers a subset of the public-facing pages of our Website and will span the next 10 months. Please, read more in our joint press release.

We are aiming for this phase to scale well to cover the redesign expectations for the rest of the site. Future phases will include the Member and Team spaces, internal Work Groups homepages, specifications template, mailing lists archives, W3C Community Groups and Business Groups.

The current website was implemented ten years ago and is no longer as effective in supporting W3C’s mission and goals as it could be. We believe that by implementing current web best practices and technologies, revising the information architecture, creating a content strategy and revamping the visual design, we can provide our audiences with the best information in a more user-friendly fashion, motivate participation in the organization, and communicate the nature and impact of W3C more effectively.

First Public Working Drafts: Resize Observer; CSS Scroll Anchoring Module Level 1

The CSS Working Group has published two First Public Working Drafts today:

• Resize Observer: This specification describes an API for observing changes to Element’s size.
• CSS Scroll Anchoring Module Level 1: Changes in DOM elements above the visible region of a scrolling box can result in the page moving while the user is in the middle of consuming the content. This spec proposes a mechanism to mitigate this jarring user experience by keeping track of the position of an anchor node and adjusting the scroll offset accordingly.

CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, etc.

Trace Context is a W3C Recommendation

The Distributed Tracing Working Group has published Trace Context as a W3C Recommendation. This specification defines standard HTTP headers and a value format to propagate context information that enables distributed tracing scenarios. The specification standardizes how context information is sent and modified between services. Context information uniquely identifies individual requests in a distributed system and also defines a means to add and propagate provider-specific context information.

W3C Workshop Report: Inclusive Design for Immersive Web Standards

W3C is pleased to announce a report from the W3C Workshop on Inclusive Design for Immersive Web Standards, held on 5-6 November 2019 in Seattle, WA, USA.

This report contains a brief summary and collects highlights from the individual sessions, with links to the presentation slides. Workshop participants learned from existing approaches that have been taken in making XR experiences (on and off the Web) accessible before looking at what lessons could be derived from these existing research and experiments in the context of the Immersive Web architecture.

These lessons brought forward four aspects of accessible XR experiences: visual interactions, motricity considerations, audio aspects and assistive technologies adaptation.

The relevant follow-up work in W3C spans across at least 6 standardization Working Groups and 6 pre-standardization and incubation Community Groups, and also intersects with at least 3 Khronos Working Groups – pointing toward the need for a strong coordination effort to ensure systematic and consistent progress for the Web platform. We propose to host this coordination in the Inclusive Design for the Immersive Web Community Group via a dedicated github repository.

We thank our host, Pluto VR, Maveron, We Make Reality, Virtual World Society and Seattle Immersive Technology Association, our sponsors, Google, Twitch and Samsung Internet, the Program Committee, and all participants for making this event possible.

Updated Candidate Recommendation: Identifiers for WebRTC’s Statistics API

14 January 2020

The Web Real-Time Communications Working Group invites implementation of its updated Candidate Recommendation of Identifiers for WebRTC’s Statistics API. This document defines a set of WebIDL objects that allow access to the statistical information about a RTCPeerConnection. These objects are returned from the getStats API that is specified in [WEBRTC].

Upcoming: W3C Workshop on Web & Machine Learning

14 January 2020

W3C announced today a Workshop on Web & Machine Learning, 24-25 March 2020, in Berlin, Germany. The event is hosted by Microsoft.

The primary goal of the workshop is to bring together providers of Machine Learning tools and frameworks with Web platform practitioners to enrich the Open Web Platform with better foundations for machine learning.

The secondary goals of the workshop are as follows:

• Understand how machine learning fits into the Web technology stack,
• Understand how browser-based machine learning fits into the machine learning ecosystem,
• Explore the impact of machine learning technologies on Web browsers and Web applications,
• Evaluate the opportunities for standardization around machine learning APIs and formats.

Expected topics of discussion include:

• Dedicated machine learning APIs for browsers as explored by the Machine Learning for the Web Community Group
• Integration of browser-provided data sources in machine learning workflows
• Layering and interoperability of machine learning APIs with other computing APIs (e.g. WebGPU, WebAssembly)
• Domain-specific machine learning APIs
• Interchange format for machine learning models on the Web
• Client- and cloud-based machine learning interactions
• On-device machine learning training in browsers
• Risks and benefits of browser-based machine learning on privacy, security, accessibility
• Using machine learning primitives to help improve accessibility of Web pages and applications
• Machine learning frameworks for the Web
• Machine learning hardware accelerators

Attendance is free for all invited participants and is open to the public, whether or not W3C members. For more information on the workshop, please see the workshop details and submission instructions.

Registration is available online due by 21 February 2020.

W3C Advisory Committee Elects Technical Architecture Group

13 January 2020

The W3C Advisory Committee has elected the following people to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG): Rossen Atanassov (Microsoft Corporation), David Baron (Mozilla Foundation) and Kenneth Rohde Christiansen (Intel Corporation). They join co-Chair Tim Berners-Lee and continuing participants, Daniel Appelquist (Samsung Electronics; co-Chair), Hadley Beeman (W3C Invited Expert), Alice Boxhall (Google), Peter Linss (W3C Invited Expert; co-Chair), Sangwhan Moon (Odd Concepts), and Theresa O’Connor (Apple, Inc.). Yves Lafon continues as staff contact. Many thanks to Lukasz Olejnik (W3C Invited Expert) whose term ends at the end of this month.

The TAG is a special group within the W3C, chartered under the W3C Process Document, with stewardship of the Web architecture. 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. The elected Members of the TAG participate as individual contributors and not representatives of their organizations. TAG participants use their best judgment to find the best solutions for the Web, not just for any particular network, technology, vendor, or user. Learn more about the TAG.

First Public Working Draft: Web Share API

17 December 2019

The Web Applications Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Web Share API. 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.