&lt;p&gt;&lt;a class="imageLink" href="http://www.w3devcampus.com/"&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.w3devcampus.com/wp-content/uploads//logoW3devcampus/w3devcampus-v2.png" alt="W3DevCampus" width="106" height="40" /&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Registration is now open for two new online courses from W3C:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul class="show_items"&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://w3devcampus.com/html5-w3c-training/"&gt;HTML5&lt;/a&gt; [&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href="http://classroom.w3devcampus.com/enrol/index.php?id=83"&gt;Register&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;]. This course runs for 6 weeks, starting 22 September 2014. In addition to a JS crash course, numerous interactive examples and an &#8220;animated monster&#8221; contest, this new edition gives an introduction on Web components.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://w3devcampus.com/responsive-web-design-w3c/"&gt;Responsive Web Design&lt;/a&gt; [&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href="http://classroom.w3devcampus.com/enrol/index.php?id=75"&gt;Register&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;]. This course runs for 4 weeks starting 3 October 2014. This course focuses on best practices, accessibility and optimization.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;An &lt;strong&gt;early bird rate&lt;/strong&gt; is available for both courses until 24 August. Learn more about &lt;a href="http://w3devcampus.com/"&gt;W3DevCampus&lt;/a&gt;, the official W3C online training for Web developers and watch the &lt;a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgyKbjOGCYA"&gt;intro video&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Ian Jacobs at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2011/webappsec/"&gt;Web Application Security Working Group&lt;/a&gt; has published a First Public Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-mixed-content-20140722/"&gt;Mixed Content&lt;/a&gt;. This specification details how user agents can mitigate risks to security and privacy by limiting a resource???s ability to inadvertently communicate in the clear, or to expose non-public resources to the web at large. This specification describes how and why user agents disallow rendering and execution of content loaded over unencrypted or unauthenticated connections in the context of an encrypted and authenticated document. Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/Security/"&gt;Security Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Ian Jacobs at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;W3C today launched a new &lt;a href="/Social/"&gt;Social Activity&lt;/a&gt; to develop standards to make it easier to build and integrate social applications with the Open Web Platform. Future standards "”including vocabularies for social applications, activity streams, embedded experiences and in-context actions, and protocols to federate social information such as status updates"” will address use cases that range from social business applications, to cross-organization federation, to greater user control over personal data. Read the complete &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href="/2014/06/social.html.en"&gt;joint press release with OpenSocial Foundation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;W3C chartered two groups today to carry out these activities:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul class="show_items"&gt; &lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href="/Social/WG"&gt;Social Web Working Group&lt;/a&gt; will define the technical standards and APIs to facilitate access to social functionality as part of the Open Web Platform. These include a common JSON-based syntax for social data, a client-side API, and a Web protocol for federating social information such as status updates.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href="/Social/IG"&gt;Social Interest Group&lt;/a&gt; will co-ordinate messaging around social at the W3C and formulate a broad strategy to enable social business and federation. It will harvest use-cases and review specifications produced by technical working groups in the light of those use-cases.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;The Social Web Working Group&#8217;s first face-to-face meeting will take place the last week of October, as part of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2014/11/TPAC/"&gt;TPAC 2014&lt;/a&gt;, W3C&#8217;s annual gathering of Working Groups.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Ian Jacobs at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/html/wg/"&gt;HTML Working Group&lt;/a&gt; invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html-polyglot/"&gt;Polyglot Markup: A robust profile of the HTML5 vocabulary&lt;/a&gt;. It is sometimes valuable to be able to serve HTML5 documents that are also well formed XML documents. An author may, for example, use XML tools to generate a document, and they and others may process the document using XML tools. The language used to create documents that can be parsed by both HTML and XML parsers is called polyglot markup. Polyglot markup is the overlap language of documents that are both HTML5 documents and XML documents.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The HTML Working Group also published today an updated Candidate Recommendation of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/CR-media-source-20140717/"&gt;Media Source Extensions&lt;/a&gt;. Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Activity"&gt;HTML Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Ian Jacobs at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;Annotation, the act of creating associations between distinct pieces of information, is a widespread activity online in many guises but currently lacks a structured approach. People comment about online resources using tools built into the hosting web site, external web services, or the functionality of an annotation client. When reading eBooks, people make use the tools provided by reading systems to add and share their thoughts or highlight portions of texts. Comments about photos, videos, and audio tracks, questions or clarifications about data, maps, and social media posts or mentions are all forms of annotation.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;However, annotation currently lacks a structured approach. Comments are siloed inside the blog or comment system hosted and controlled by the publisher of the original document, or inside an eBook reader. They aren&#8217;t readily available for syndication or aggregation, and it&#8217;s difficult to find more comments by an insightful author if they are scattered around different places on the web. Worthwhile commentary is obscured by trolling, spam, or trivial comments. These are challenges both social and technical.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In April, W3C convened a &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/"&gt;Workshop on Annotations&lt;/a&gt; to discuss these challenges. Today W3C published a &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/report.html"&gt;Workshop summary&lt;/a&gt; with links to slides, videos, and position papers.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Today W3C also invites review of a &lt;a href="https://www.w3.org/2014/annotation/charter/"&gt;draft charter&lt;/a&gt; for a new Web Annotation Working Group based on the Workshop discussion. The group will develop an open approach for annotation, making it possible for browsers, reading systems, JavaScript libraries, and other tools, to develop an annotation ecosystem where users have access to their annotations from various environments, can share those annotations, can archive them, and use them how they wish.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The public is &lt;a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-new-work/2014Jul/0000.html"&gt;invited to comment&lt;/a&gt; on the draft charter.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Ian Jacobs at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/International/core/"&gt;Internationalization Working Group&lt;/a&gt; has published a Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-charmod-norm-20140715/"&gt;Character Model for the World Wide Web: String Matching and Searching&lt;/a&gt;. This document builds upon on Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals to provide authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers a common reference on string identity matching on the World Wide Web and thereby increase interoperability. Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/International/"&gt;Internationalization Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Ian Jacobs at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/html/wg/"&gt;HTML Working Group&lt;/a&gt; has published a Last Call Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-dom-20140710/"&gt;W3C DOM4&lt;/a&gt;. DOM defines a platform-neutral model for events and node trees. Comments are welcome through &lt;strong&gt;31 July 2014&lt;/strong&gt;. Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Activity"&gt;HTML Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2013/csvw/"&gt;CSV on the Web Working Group&lt;/a&gt;, part of the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2013/data/"&gt;Data Activity&lt;/a&gt;, has published two Working Drafts today:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul class="show_items"&gt; &lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-tabular-data-model-20140710/"&gt;Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web&lt;/a&gt; outlines a basic data model, or infoset, for tabular data and metadata about that tabular data. The document also contains drafts for various methods of locating metadata; finally, it also contains some non-normative information about a best practice syntax for tabular data and for mapping into that data model. The work also contributes to the standardisation of CSV syntax by IETF (as a possible update of &lt;a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4180.txt"&gt;RFC4180&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-tabular-metadata-20140710/"&gt;Metadata Vocabulary for Tabular Data&lt;/a&gt; defines a vocabulary for metadata that annotates tabular data. This can be used to provide metadata at various levels, from collections of data from CSV documents and how they relate to each other down to individual cells within a table. The vocabulary is defined using JSON, in a manner compatible with JSON-LD. This document is a First Public Working Draft.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;If you wish to make comments regarding these documents, please send them to &lt;a href="mailto:public-csv-wg@w3.org"&gt;public-csv-wg@w3.org&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2013/data/"&gt;Data Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG-EM/"&gt;Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) 1.0&lt;/a&gt; was published today as a W3C Note by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (&lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/"&gt;WCAG WG&lt;/a&gt;) and Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group (&lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/"&gt;ERT WG&lt;/a&gt;), through the joint &lt;abbr title="Web Content Accessibility Guidelines"&gt;WCAG&lt;/abbr&gt; 2.0 Evaluation Methodology Task Force (&lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/2011/eval/eval-tf"&gt;Eval TF&lt;/a&gt;). WCAG-EM describes an approach for evaluating how websites, including Web applications and websites for mobile devices, conform to &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag"&gt;WCAG 2.0&lt;/a&gt;. WCAG-EM provides guidance for individuals and organizations that evaluate web accessibility, and is also useful for those that have others evaluate their website. Learn more from the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/eval/conformance"&gt;WCAG-EM Overview&lt;/a&gt; and about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/"&gt;Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2011/webappsec/"&gt;Web Application Security Working Group&lt;/a&gt; has published a Last Call Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-CSP2-20140703/"&gt;Content Security Policy Level 2&lt;/a&gt;. This document defines a policy language used to declare a set of content restrictions for a web resource, and a mechanism for transmitting the policy from a server to a client where the policy is enforced. Comments are welcome through &lt;strong&gt;13 August 2014&lt;/strong&gt;. Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/Security/"&gt;Security Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2013/csvw/"&gt;CSV on the Web Working Group&lt;/a&gt; has published a Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-csvw-ucr-20140701/"&gt;CSV on the Web: Use Cases and Requirements&lt;/a&gt;. A large percentage of the data published on the Web is tabular data, commonly published as comma separated values (CSV) files. The CSV on the Web Working Group aim to specify technologies that provide greater interoperability for data dependent applications on the Web when working with tabular datasets comprising single or multiple files using CSV, or similar, format. This document lists the use cases considered representative of how tabular data is commonly used within data dependent applications. This document also provides a set of requirements derived from these use cases that have been used to guide the specification design. Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2013/data/"&gt;Data Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/html/wg/"&gt;HTML Working Group&lt;/a&gt; has published an updated Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-aria-in-html-20140626/"&gt;Using WAI-ARIA in HTML&lt;/a&gt;. Using WAI-ARIA in HTML is a practical guide for developers on how to to add accessibility information to HTML elements using the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (&lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/"&gt;WAI-ARIA&lt;/a&gt;) specification, which defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. WAI-ARIA is introduced in the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria"&gt;WAI-ARIA Overview&lt;/a&gt;. Using WAI-ARIA in HTML is developed by the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/html-accessibility-tf.html"&gt;HTML Accessibility Task Force&lt;/a&gt; in coordination with the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/html/wg/"&gt;HTML Working Group&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/"&gt;WAI&lt;/a&gt; Protocols and Formats Working Group (&lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/"&gt;PFWG&lt;/a&gt;). Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Activity"&gt;HTML Activity&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/"&gt;Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The CSS Working Group and the SVG Working Group have published a Last Call Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-geometry-1-20140626/"&gt;Geometry Interfaces Module Level 1&lt;/a&gt;. This specification provides basic geometric interfaces to represent points, rectangles, quadrilaterals and transformation matrices that can be used by other modules or specifications. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. Comments are welcome through &lt;strong&gt;7 August 2014&lt;/strong&gt;. Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/Style/"&gt;Style Activity&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/Graphics/"&gt;Graphics Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt; The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/IndieUI/"&gt;IndieUI Working Group&lt;/a&gt; today published a First Public Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-indie-ui-context-20140626/"&gt;IndieUI: User Context 1.0 "“ Contextual Information for User Interface Independence&lt;/a&gt;. It defines a set of preferences that users can choose to expose to web applications, and an API for user agents to access the preferences and listen for changes. Users can set preferences for features such as screen size, font size, and color. Users with disabilities can provide information about assistive technologies in use, indicate that the display is in an accessibility mode, and indicate what kind of subtitles and audio descriptions they need. Web applications can use this information to optimize the presentation without a requirement to target a specific device, operating system, or locale. IndieUI: User Context complements &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/indie-ui-events/"&gt;IndieUI: Events 1.0&lt;/a&gt; to provide web application developers a uniform way to design web applications that work in a wide range of contexts "” different devices (such as mobile phones and tablets), different assistive technologies (AT), different user needs. Comments on this Draft are encouraged by &lt;strong&gt;1 August 2014&lt;/strong&gt;. Learn more from the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/indieui"&gt;IndieUI Overview&lt;/a&gt;; read about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/"&gt;Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2012/ldp/"&gt;Linked Data Platform (LDP) Working Group&lt;/a&gt; has published a Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-ldp-primer-20140626/"&gt;Linked Data Platform 1.0 Primer&lt;/a&gt;. This primer provides an introduction to the Linked Data Platform (LDP), with examples illustrating the principal concepts such as the notion of an LDP resource and the LDP container and how they can be used by Web clients. Two sample scenarios show how an LDP client can interact with a LDP server in the context of a read-write Linked Data application i.e. how to use HTTP for accessing, updating, creating and deleting resources from servers that expose their resources as Linked Data. Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2013/data/"&gt;Data Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2010/webperf/"&gt;Web Performance Working Group&lt;/a&gt; has published a Last Call Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-beacon-20140624/"&gt;Beacon&lt;/a&gt;. This specification defines an interoperable means for site developers to asynchronously transfer small HTTP data from the User Agent to a web server. Comments are welcome through &lt;strong&gt;29 July 2014&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The group also updated the Candidate Recommendation of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/CR-resource-timing-20140624/"&gt;Resource Timing&lt;/a&gt;. This specification defines an interface for web applications to access the complete timing information for resources in a document.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2006/rwc/"&gt;Rich Web Client Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/"&gt;RDF Working Group&lt;/a&gt; has published a Group Note of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/NOTE-rdf11-primer-20140624/"&gt;RDF 1.1 Primer&lt;/a&gt;. This primer is designed to provide the reader with the basic knowledge required to effectively use RDF. It introduces the basic concepts of RDF and shows concrete examples of the use of RDF. Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2013/data/"&gt;Data Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2012/ldp/"&gt;Linked Data Platform (LDP) Working Group&lt;/a&gt; invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/CR-ldp-20140619/"&gt;Linked Data Platform 1.0&lt;/a&gt;. This document describes a set of best practices and simple approach for a read-write Linked Data architecture, based on HTTP access to web resources that describe their state using the RDF data model. Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2013/data/"&gt;Data Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2009/dap/"&gt;Device APIs Working Group&lt;/a&gt; has published three Last Call Working Drafts today:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul class="show_items"&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-vibration-20140619/"&gt;Vibration API&lt;/a&gt;. This specification defines an API that provides access to the vibration mechanism of the hosting device. Vibration is a form of tactile feedback.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-ambient-light-20140619/"&gt;Ambient Light Events&lt;/a&gt;. This specification defines a means to receive events that correspond to a light sensor detecting the presence of a light.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-html-media-capture-20140619/"&gt;HTML Media Capture&lt;/a&gt;. The HTML Media Capture specification defines an HTML form extension that facilitates user access to a device&#8217;s media capture mechanism, such as a camera, or microphone, from within a file upload control.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;Comments on these three specifications are welcome through &lt;strong&gt;24 July 2014&lt;/strong&gt;. Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/"&gt;Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a class="imageLink" href="/20/"&gt;&lt;img src="/20/img/w3c20_small.png" alt="W3C20 logo" /&gt;&lt;/a&gt; W3C today &lt;a href="/2014/06/w3c20.html.en"&gt;announced&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;a href="/20/Overview.html#program"&gt;program&lt;/a&gt; and opened &lt;a href="http://regonline.com/w3c20"&gt;registration&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href="/20/"&gt;W3C20 Anniversary Symposium: The Future of the Web&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which takes place 29 October in Santa Clara, California.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Confirmed &lt;a href="/20/Overview.html#speakers"&gt;speakers&lt;/a&gt; are:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul class="show_items"&gt; &lt;li&gt;Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the Web and W3C Director&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Fadi Chehadé, Chief Executive Officer of ICANN&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;David-Michel Davies, Executive Director, The Webby Awards &amp; the International Academy of Digital Arts &amp; Sciences&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Di-Ann Eisnor, Head of Platforms and Partnerships, Community Geographer at Waze&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Alberto Ibargüen, President and CEO, Knight Foundation&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Jun Murai, Dean and Professor at Keio University&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Sandy Pentland, Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Research Center's Internet &amp; American Life Project&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Anders Wahlquist, CEO and Founding Partner of B-Reel&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;Please join Tim Berners-Lee and other global strategists, business leaders and developers for an exciting afternoon of insights and discussion about how to keep the Web strong, followed by a gala dinner. W3C will also live stream the Symposium.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;W3C20 is made possible by the generosity of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/sponsor/org"&gt;sponsors&lt;/a&gt; Intel (Platinum), ICANN (Silver), and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (Silver).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://regonline.com/w3c20"&gt;Registration&lt;/a&gt; is open to the public for a limited number of seats. Read the full &lt;a href="/2014/06/w3c20.html.en"&gt;media advisory&lt;/a&gt; and follow us in social media with #W3C20.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/"&gt;Web Applications Working Group&lt;/a&gt; invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/CR-DOM-Parsing-20140617/"&gt;DOM Parsing and Serialization&lt;/a&gt;. This specification defines various APIs for programmatic access to HTML and generic XML parsers by web applications for use in parsing and serializing DOM nodes.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The group also published a Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-shadow-dom-20140617/"&gt;Shadow DOM&lt;/a&gt;. This specification describes a method of combining multiple DOM trees into one hierarchy and how these trees interact with each other within a document, thus enabling better composition of the DOM.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2006/rwc/"&gt;Rich Web Client Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/html/wg/"&gt;HTML Working Group&lt;/a&gt; has published a Last Call Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-html5-20140617/"&gt;HTML5&lt;/a&gt;. This specification defines the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web: the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In this version, new features are introduced to help Web application authors, new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability. Comments are welcome through &lt;strong&gt;15 July 2014&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The group also published a Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-html51-20140617/"&gt;HTML 5.1&lt;/a&gt;. HTML was primarily designed as a language for semantically describing scientific documents, although its general design and adaptations over the years have enabled it to be used to describe a number of other types of documents. The main area that has not been adequately addressed by HTML is a vague subject referred to as Web Applications. This standard attempts to rectify this, while at the same time updating the HTML language to address issues raised in the past few years.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt; Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Activity"&gt;HTML Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF"&gt;Protocols and Formats Working Group&lt;/a&gt; today published a First Public Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-core-aam-1.1-20140612/"&gt;Core Accessibility API Mappings 1.1&lt;/a&gt; (Core-AAM), which supports the updated Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-wai-aria-1.1-20140612/"&gt;Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.1&lt;/a&gt;. WAI-ARIA provides an ontology of roles, states, and properties that define accessible user interface elements. &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria"&gt;WAI-ARIA&lt;/a&gt; is designed to improve the accessibility and interoperability of web content, particularly web applications. Core-AAM describes how user agents should expose semantics of content languages to accessibility &lt;abbr title="Application Programming Interfaces"&gt;APIs&lt;/abbr&gt; across multiple content technologies (including much of WAI-ARIA). Core-AAM serves as the basis for other specifications to extend the mappings to specific technologies. Learn more from the &lt;a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2014AprJun/0190.html" title="Core-AAM and ARIA announcement June 2014"&gt;call for review e-mail&lt;/a&gt; and read about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/"&gt;Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/"&gt;Web Applications Working Group&lt;/a&gt; has published three documents today:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul class="show_items"&gt; &lt;li&gt;A First Public Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-DOM-Level-3-Events-key-20140612/"&gt;DOM Level 3 KeyboardEvent key Values&lt;/a&gt;. This specification defines the values for the &lt;code&gt;KeyboardEvent.key&lt;/code&gt; attribute, which is defined as part of the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Events Specification. The key attribute contains information about the character generated by the key event.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;A First Public Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-DOM-Level-3-Events-code-20140612/"&gt;DOM Level 3 KeyboardEvent code Values&lt;/a&gt;. This specification defines the values for the &lt;code&gt;KeyboardEvent.code&lt;/code&gt; attribute, which is defined as part of the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Events Specification. The code value contains information about the key event that can use used identify the physical key being pressed by the user.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;A Working Draft of &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-uievents-20140612/"&gt;UI Events&lt;/a&gt;. This specification extends the events and features defined in DOM Events Level 3.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;Learn more about the &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2006/rwc/"&gt;Rich Web Client Activity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

&lt;p&gt;Today the W3C announced the final &lt;a href="http://www.w3.org/2014/03/lgd/report"&gt;report from the Linking Geospatial Data workshop&lt;/a&gt; that was held in London 5 &#8211; 6 March 2014.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The report contains a summary of each of the major themes discussed and conclusions arising from them. The workshop was supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Google, the UK mapping agency Ordnance Survey and the UK government. W3C&#8217;s participation was funded by the EU-funded &lt;a href="http://www.smartopendata.eu/"&gt;SmartOpenData project&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Participants included many geospatial experts from both the government and private sectors, and the presented papers focused on integrating geospatial information systems with the Web of Data. Although carefully advertised so as not to promote Linked Data to the exclusion of other methods, this emerged strongly as the preferred technology to enable that integration.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The Workshop report identifies several themes that recurred throughout the discussion. A consensus of the participants was that joint work between W3C and &lt;a href="http://www.opengeospatial.org/"&gt;&lt;abbr title="Open Geospatial Consortium"&gt;OGC&lt;/abbr&gt;&lt;/a&gt; should be pursued to address the needs identified in these themes.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

by Coralie Mercier at July 24, 2014 04:00 AM

This week Microsoft is sending a number of engineers, including members from the IE team, to the Internet Engineering Task Force meetings in Toronto. We're looking forward to the conversations and working groups as it's always great to get together face-to-face with engineers from across the industry.

In particular, there are several discussions we're excited about including HTTP/2.0 and the safe preference header Internet proposal, which we've already been working on with several industry partners and has been enabled in IE as an early implementation.

If any of you are attending the event, please stop by and say hello.

-Adrian Bateman

by ieblog at July 20, 2014 07:39 AM

Stuff.

• What's the deal with the Amazon Fire Phone? Why does Amazon bother to enter the phone market? First decent theory I heard: in order to test the integration of online stores on mobile devices. So far, people don't shop online via mobile devices (they look at stuff, sure, but they don't buy). How do we change that? Amazon wants to find out, and needs a couple of thousand test subjects as well as a device under its control. Hence the Fire Phone.
• Useful overview of upcoming Androids and their possible default browsers. (I'm not nearly as sanguine as Firt is on the chances of Google Chrome being installed on these new devices, but I could be wrong.)
• How it becomes progressively harder to gather user data, especially by intermediaries such as operators, because data gets more and more obfuscated (i.e. its origin is hidden or hard to detect).
• Tomi wonders what Samsung’s Tizen strategy is, or whether it has such a strategy. He concludes that Tizen is more like a hobby project from some top Samsung managers. I suspect that they lost an internal political battle, and that that’s why Samsung announced Tizen phones (or watches), and then un-announced them again. In any case, Tizen is not going to amount to anything if its product placement is so broken.
• And it seems Microsoft is going to ditch Nokia X after all. I predicted the opposite, and I still think I have a point, but I was clearly wrong.

July 17, 2014 02:43 PM

Today marks one year I’ve been bed-bound with ongoing illness, treatments and lack thereof. After a full year of working my way through the complexities of the U.S. Medical Industrial Complex (it’s even called a complex!) I am finally on … Continue reading →

by mollydotcom at July 15, 2014 12:19 AM

Every day or three, I upload another batch of photos to Flickr, trying to work my way through the backlog and get caught up with the present.  This is a habit I enforce inconsistently, because I'm bad at maintaining regular habits even at the best of times.  That halfway explains the backlog.  When I do enforce it, my habit is to upload no more than 10 or 15 photos at a time, so that I can properly tag and geolocate them without having to invest hours in the process.  That explains the other half of the backlog.  Right now, as I write this, I'm about six weeks behind.

Which means that yesterday, I uploaded the first half of the pictures from Rebecca's sixth birthday party.  It's been over five weeks now since she died, but in the Flickrverse, she still has six days to live.  She's still tired but essentially herself, riding the Rocket Car and eating mini-donuts and chasing bubbles and hula hooping and blowing out the candles on her half of the enormous Frozen-themed cake shared with Ruth, her best friend in the whole world, the girl who shares her initials and whose birthday is only a few days apart from hers.

She still doesn't know, none of us know, that the experimental medicine has failed and the tumor has been growing unchecked for weeks, compressing normal brain matter and now only days away from killing her.  Just two days after her birthday party, an MRI will reveal the horrible truth, but in the Flickrverse, that day has not yet come.

Flickr and my laptop combine to become a digital slow glass, bathing me in the light of days past.  I look at those pictures, tag them, adorn them with metadata, sort some into albums, and all the while I remember how we felt that day.  We were worried, Kat and I, but we still had hope.  Everyone there still hoped that she'd find a way to survive, and that hope was not unreasonable.

And so the party was not a wake for a still-living child, but a joyful celebration of her life and the simple fact that she'd lived long enough and well enough to enjoy the party.  There had been times in the previous few weeks that we'd thought she wouldn't make it that far.  Had we held the party six days later, on her actual birthday, as originally planned, she wouldn't have.

We didn't know that then, but I know that now.  As I witness those days past, trying to taste some trace of what life was like then, I also have the horrible foreknowledge of what will happen in the days to come.  I know without question that the MRI will happen, that the news will be dire.  That she will sink into herself and lose so much of what we fought so hard to preserve, and that it will be lost quickly, in the span of a few days.  That we will believe she is leaving us the day before she actually does, and be surprised when she wakes and has a semi-normal evening, believing when that happens that she has a week or two left.  That the next day, the week will end with her actual birthday, the day that shatters us, the day she dies.

Today or tomorrow, I'll upload the second half of the party photos, and her birthday party will once more be over and that final week will once more begin.  I could stop there, just walk away from uploading forever, and a large part of me cries out to do exactly that"”but doing so would arrest more than just the glacially slow expansion of my Flickr account.  If I allow myself to stop there, arrested in the days when we could still feel hope, it will be that much harder to reconcile the past and present.  Without that reconciliation, it is very likely I will never feel hope again.

For myself and my future, the future we were unable to bring her into but must inhabit anyway, I have to keep going.  I have to upload the photos of that last week, relive the horror and anguish, the moments I captured as well as the moments I didn't but will never be able to forget.  I have to let her go again.

And so the light keeps coming through the slow glass we've built, emerging from distributed panes aglow with the light of other days, pushing closer and closer to the unwelcome present.

by Eric Meyer at July 14, 2014 06:13 PM

A friend of mine bought a fairly cheap (so probably not-too-new) Samsung smart TV to watch football, then promptly went on holiday with his family and asked me to feed the cat. In return I demanded the remote for the TV, and the manual (which turned out to be useless). So here’s my report of my first ever smart TV browser test.

The interface

Samsung’s interface where you steer a cursor by means of the arrow keys on the remote is atrocious. That’s odd, since Nokia solved this particular problem ages ago. When a Nokia cursor moves across the screen, it “snaps” to links and other clickable items, making it easy to use them. Samsung’s cursor does not: you have to be in the right spot in order to click on a link.

The cursor acceleration is also annoying, because it starts way too slow and then accelerates too much. Subtle cursor movements are not really possible. It took me about three minutes to type in the URL of my site. That’s not good.

Fortunately you can switch to link navigation, in which the arrow keys on the remote jump to the next link in the indicated direction, or scroll if there isn’t any. This solved my problems and allowed me to test stuff seriously. How many consumers will figure this out, though?

The browser

The TV browser identifies itself as Mozilla/5.0 (SMART-TV; X11; Linux armv7l) AppleWebkit/537.42 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chromium/25.0.1349.2 Chrome/25.0.1349.2 Safari/537.42; Chrome 25 on some sort of Linux flavour, in other words. This is not entirely the truth, as we shall see.

The TV is a Samsung, and as I discovered earlier, Samsung has been using Chrome on its Android phones from the S4 on. Apparently they’ve made Chrome the default browser for all their more-or-less modern smart devices — something I had not found evidence for before running this test.

This browser, however, is Samsung Chrome 25, and not Google Chrome 25, and I think that distinction is going to be important in the future. It seems several versions behind Google Chrome, but is in fact less behind than the 25 suggests.

Now I’d love to do a detail-by-detail comparison of a Google Chrome 25 and Samsung Chrome 25 (and also an Opera, Nokia, and Amazon one), but the problem is that Google doesn’t appear to have an archive of old Chrome versions. I think Google is making a mistake here, and I hope an archive of old Chrome versions will be created in the near future.

Fortunately my CSS Units and Values and Images and replaced content compatibility tables were created in the days of Chrome 25, so I have some material for comparison. (Yay for not updating compatibility tables!) It turns out that Samsung Chrome 25 supports what I call the new syntax for gradients, calc(), the ch unit, and the vmax unit, none of which were supported by Google Chrome 25. A quick check on caniuse revealed that these features have been supported from Chrome 26 on.

An additional clue is the TV browser’s support for the mouseenter event, which according to MDN was added to Chrome 30. So Samsung Chrome 25 contains features from Google Chrome 30. You see, I hope, the outlines of the next fragmentation problem. Chrome is splitting up into several branches, version numbers do not offer enough clues, and Google seems to ignore the problem.

Events

The browser does not support touch events, which is correct, given that the TV does not have a touchscreen. Then again, the browser fires the mousewheel event when you scroll, even though the remote doesn’t have a wheel.

The viewport

The viewport situation is more complicated, and centers on the Zoom menu. The various percentage options do not engage the meta viewport tag. That’s annoying — I think TV browsers should support the tag by default. It turns out that you have to select the “Adapt to screen” (translated from Dutch; actual text may differ) option in order to engage the meta viewport tag.

Thus the meta viewport tag kind-of works, but unfortunately the ideal viewport — the value set by the device-width keyword — is 1280px, which is WAY too much.

Photo borrowed from Chris Mills by kind permisson

In certain ways a TV screen is about as large as a phone or tablet screen. It’s bigger in centimeters, but it’s also further away from your eyes, and as a result it shouldn’t have a desktop screen resolution. The Samsung TV fails spectacularly here: text in responsive designs, and even old-fashioned 1024px-based ones, will be absolutely unreadable from standard TV-viewing distance when the total site width is 1280px.

I experimented with the zoom settings, and found that at 980px the text was still too small, but at 640px it was slightly too large. I’d say 768px (iPad portrait) would be in the right ballpark for this particular TV. A small tablet size, in other words. Patrick Lauke told me this ages ago, and now I’ve seen it for myself.

Incidentally, this gives us an argument for using a meta viewport width value other than device-width. If it were vital for my project to support this TV I’d use a browser detect, switch the meta viewport width value to 768, and hope the user has “Adapt to screen” selected. In fact, I think I’d do this for any TV browser. It can’t hurt, though it may not help.

Conclusion

Finally a few random items:

• screen.width/height always gives the physical screen dimensions, and not the ideal viewport size, even when the correct zoom option is checked. Chrome on Android gives the ideal viewport size, but then this browser is likely based not on Chrome on Android but on Chrome on Linux.
• The popup blocker is off by default.
• The default search engine is Bing.

From my first test it’s clear that the major problems with this Samsung TV (and likely many others) are the lousy interface and lack of support for a 768-ish ideal viewport that will allow text to be read from TV-viewing distance. Until the browser makers solve these issues consumers don’t have the slightest incentive to browse on their TVs, which saves us the trouble of using browser detects. Win-win.

Now that I’ve written this down I have plenty of ideas for more tests, and I have to feed my friend’s cat several times more. So I’ll likely publish a new set of findings later on.

July 10, 2014 10:54 AM