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 November 2019 snapshot refreshes the list of technologies under incubation in Community Groups or on the standardization track in Working Groups. See the  Change history since April 2019  for details. New standardization proposals have notably emerged, including: WebTransport, an API similar to WebSocket but closer to UDP and based on QUIC, described in  Network and Communications ; WebCodecs to expose media encoders/decoders to web applications, described in  Media ; WebGPU, described in  Graphics and Layout , which has made significant progress in the past few months; Input for workers and worklets, described in  User Interaction ; Various low-level specifications for  Performance and T...

5 December 2019 The  WebAssembly Working Group  has published today the three WebAssembly specifications as W3C Recommendations, marking the arrival of a new language for the Web which allows code to run in the browser. WebAssembly Core Specification  defines a low-level virtual machine which closely mimicks the functionality of many microprocessors upon which it is run. Either through Just-In-Time compilation or interpretation, the WebAssembly engine can perform at nearly the speed of code compiled for a native platform. A  .wasm  resource is analogous to a Java  .class  file in that it contains static data and code segments which operate over that static data. Unlike Java, WebAssembly is typically produced as a compilation target from other programming languages like C/C++ and Rust. WebAssembly Web API  defines a Promise-based interface for requesting and executing a  .wasm  resource. The structure of a  .wasm  reso...

5 December 2019 The  Publishing Working Group  has just published a Candidate Recommendation for two documents, namely: Publication Manifest  – This specification 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  – This specification describes the requirements for the creation of audiobooks, using a profile of the Publication Manifest specification. The Group has also published an accompanying Working Group Note of  Lightweight Packaging Format (LPF) . This specification defines a file format and processing model for packaging into a single-file container the set of related resources and associated metadata that comprise a digital publica...

3 December 2019 On the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, W3C and the  UNESCO  Institute for Information Technologies in Education (UNESCO IITE) launched a new W3Cx course: “ Introduction to Web Accessibility “. The course is designed for  technical and non-technical audiences , including developers, designers, content authors, project managers, people with disabilities, and others. The course will start on 28 January 2020 and is self-paced. Please, read our  press release  and  blog post , and watch our short  teaser video  for more information about the course.  Enroll  now, and encourage others to, too.