New manager of W3C Office in the Benelux: Fons Kuijk
2008-09-01:
After having served one year as Manager of the W3C Benelux Office,
Martine Roeleveld has left CWI.
W3C Benelux would like to take this opportunity to thank
Martine for her contributions to the work of
the office. As of 1 September 2008,
Fons Kuijk
will act as the new Manager of the W3C Benelux Office.
CWI continues to host the W3C Benelux Office. Fons is working at
CWI as a senior researcher.
Call for Review: Device Description Repository Simple API Proposed Recommendation
2008-09-22: The Mobile Web Initiative Device Description Working Group has published the Proposed Recommendation of Device Description Repository Simple API. Web content delivered to mobile devices usually benefits from being tailored to take into account a range of factors such as screen size, markup language support and image format support. Such information is stored in "Device Description Repositories" (DDRs). This document describes a simple API for access to DDRs, in order to ease and promote the development of Web content that adapts to its Delivery Context. Comments are welcome through 31 October. Learn more about the Mobile Web Initiative Activity.
New W3C Working Group Brings Location Information to the Web
2008-09-19: The number of location-aware Web devices has increased dramatically as of late: built-in Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and mobile phone tower triangulation services have made mobile phones location-aware, Wifi triangulation services brings location information to Wifi enabled devices, GPS receivers now have Web connectivity. Location, location, location!
Thus far there has been no standard method for these devices to make their location available to Web applications, and so in response to requests from the community W3C has created the new Geolocation Working Group, which is chartered to develop a standardized interface to provide location information to Web applications and thus enable an exciting new class applications. This new group is part of W3C's Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.
Tim Berners-Lee Announces Creation of New Foundation to Bring the Web to All People
2008-09-14: Before a gathering of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Washington, D.C. (USA), Tim Berners-Lee announced today the creation of the World Wide Web Foundation. The mission of the Foundation is:
- to advance One Web that is free and open,
- to expand the Web's capability and robustness,
- and to extend the Web's benefits to all people on the planet.
Following Berners-Lee's speech, Alberto IbargÞen, Knight Foundation's president and CEO, announced a $5 million seed grant in support of the mission. Learn more about the World Wide Web Foundation at www.webfoundation.org, which also includes a FAQ and video and photos from the event.
Call for Review: RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing Proposed Recommendation
2008-09-04: The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group and XHTML2 Working Group have published the Proposed Recommendation of RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing. The modern Web is made up of an enormous number of documents that have been created using HTML. These documents contain significant amounts of structured data, which is largely unavailable to tools and applications. When publishers can express this data more completely, and when tools can read it, a new world of user functionality becomes available, letting users transfer structured data between applications and web sites, and allowing browsing applications to improve the user experience. RDFa is a specification for attributes to express structured data in any markup language. The groups have also published an implementation report as part of the Candidate Recommendation phase. Comments are welcome through 03 October. Learn more about the Semantic Web.
The Power of Tests: New Licenses Promote Collaboration
2008-08-20: W3C announced today its new Licenses for W3C Test Suites. Two licenses promote two goals:
- A 3-clause BSD License is designed to enable developers to use test cases easily, and promote software development and bugtracking.
- A W3C Test Suite License is designed to enable a W3C Working Group to create a branded, "Authoritative W3C Test Suite" to reflect the group consensus process, and to promote interoperability and stability of performance claims.
W3C appreciates the support of those who suggested these changes, who provided use cases, and who patiently reviewed drafts.
W3C Takes Steps to Make Video "First-Class" Web Citizen
2008-08-15: Web-based video is exploding, for advertising, enterprise collaboration, entertainment, product reviews, and other applications. As prices drop for consumer electronics, amateur and professionals alike are creating increasingly high quality videos. Social networks are sprouting up around Web-delivered media. W3C today launched a new Video in the Web Activity to make video a "first-class citizen" of the Web. The initial scope of work, determined as a result of a successful W3C Workshop on Video will be conducted by three groups:
- Media Annotations, which will provide an ontology designed to facilitate cross-community data integration of information related to media objects in the Web, such as video, audio and images.
- Media Fragments, which will address temporary and spatial links (i.e., into a particular moment of a multimedia track, or location in two visual dimensions) using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).
- Timed Text, which will work on a standard for online captioning.
W3C continues to investigate the important topics of audio and video codecs on the Web. Learn more about the new Video in the Web Activity.
W3C Invites Implementations of Element Traversal Specification (Candidate Recommendation)
2008-08-13: The Web Applications Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Element Traversal Specification. This specification defines the ElementTraversal interface, intended to provide a more convenient alternative to existing Document Object Model (DOM) navigation interfaces, with a low implementation footprint. It does so by allowing script navigation of the elements of a DOM tree, excluding all other nodes in the DOM, such as text nodes. It also provides an attribute to expose the number of child elements of an element. See the disposition of Last Call Comments and learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.