W3C

W3C today published the final report of the Linked Enterprise Data Workshop, hosted by W3C on the 6-7 December in Cambridge, MA, USA. This workshop provided a way for the community to meet and discuss some of the challenges when deploying application relying on the principles of Linked Data. The presentations covered many different topics, ranging from the benefits a set of additional conventions would bring to specific technical issues such as the challenges of dealing with the reality that URLs do change sometimes, as well as the need for a more robust security model, and specific gaps in the current set of standards.

Participants of the Workshop agreed that W3C should create a Working Group to define a “Linked Data Platform”. This is expected to be an enumeration of specifications which constitute Linked Data, with some small additional specifications to cover specific functionality such as pagination. We anticipate a draft charter will be available in the coming weeks.

The Web Performance Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Navigation Timing. User latency is an important quality benchmark for Web Applications. While JavaScript-based mechanisms can provide comprehensive instrumentation for user latency measurements within an application, in many cases, they are unable to provide a complete end-to-end latency picture. To address the need for complete information on user experience, this document introduces the PerformanceTiming interfaces. This interface allows JavaScript mechanisms to provide complete client-side latency measurements within applications. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of CSS Basic User Interface Module Level 3 (CSS3 UI). The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a language for describing the rendering of HTML and XML documents on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. It uses various selectors, properties and values to style basic user interface elements in a document. This specification describes those user interface related selectors, properties and values that are proposed for CSS level 3 to style HTML and XML (including XHTML and XForms). It includes and extends user interface related features from the selectors, properties and values of CSS level 2 revision 1 and Selectors specifications. Comments are welcome through 14 February. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Multimodal Interaction Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces. The specification describes a loosely coupled architecture for multimodal user interfaces, which allows for co-resident and distributed implementations, and focuses on the role of markup and scripting, and the use of well defined interfaces between its constituents. Learn more about the Multimodal Interaction Activity.

The HTML Data Task Force of the Semantic Web Interest Group has published two documents today:

• The HTML Data Guide aims to help publishers and consumers of HTML data. With several syntaxes (microformats, microdata, RDFa) and vocabularies (schema.org, Dublin Core, microformat vocabularies, etc.) to choose from, it provides guidance on deciding what to choose in a way that meets the publisher's or consumer's needs.
• The Microdata to RDF describes processing rules that may be used to extract RDF from an HTML document containing microdata.

Both documents are Working Drafts, with the goal of publishing a final version as Interest Group Notes. Comments and feedbacks are welcome; please send them to the public-html-data-tf@w3.org mailing list.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of CSS Image Values and Replaced Content Module Level 3. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. This module contains the features of CSS level 3 relating to the <image> type and replaced elements. It includes and extends the functionality of CSS level 2, which builds on CSS level 1. The main extensions compared to level 2 are the generalization of the <url> type to the <image> type, several additions to the ‘<image>’ type, a generic sizing algorithm for images and other replaced content in CSS, and several properties controlling the interaction of replaced elements and CSS's layout models. Comments are welcome through 07 February. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The W3C Advisory Committee has elected Robin Berjon (unaffiliated) and re-elected Henry Thompson (U. of Edinburgh) to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG). W3C Director and TAG co-Chair Tim Berners-Lee also re-appointed Noah Mendelsohn (unaffiliated) and Jonathan Rees (Creative Commons). They join continuing participants Peter Linss (HP), Ashok Malhotra (Oracle), Larry Masinter (Adobe), and Jeni Tennison (unaffiliated). Many thanks to Dan Appelquist whose term ends this month. 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. Read the TAG's December 2011 finding Identifying Application State and learn more about their public work plan.