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).

  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 ...

  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 develo...

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.

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.

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 .

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 .

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 websi...

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 t...

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 th...

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 indi...

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’...

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 applie...

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 .

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 ...

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.

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 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 f...

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 ].

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 w...