W3C

The MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 2.0. ITS 2.0 provides a foundation for integrating automated processing of human language into core Web technologies. ITS 2.0 bears many commonalities with its predecessor, ITS 1.0, but provides additional concepts that are designed to foster the automated creation and processing of multilingual Web content. Work on application scenarios for ITS 2.0 and gathering of usage and implementation experience will now take place in the ITS Interest Group. Learn more about the Internationalization Activity.

The Web Performance Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation and two First Public Working Drafts today:

• A W3C Recommendation of Page Visibility (Second Edition). This specification defines a means for site developers to programmatically determine the current visibility state of the page in order to develop power and CPU efficient web applications.
• A First Public Working Draft of Beacon. This specification defines an interoperable means for site developers to asynchronously transfer data from the user agent to a web server, with the user agent taking the responsibility to eventually send the data.
• A First Public Working Draft of Resource Priorities. This specification defines a means for site developers to programmatically give the User Agent hints on the download priority of a resource. This will allow User Agents to more efficiently manage the order in which resources are downloaded.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group and the SVG Working Group have published a Last Call Working Draft of CSS Masking Module Level 1. CSS Masking provides two means for partially or fully hiding portions of visual elements: masking and clipping. Masking describes how to use another graphical element or image as a luminance or alpha mask. Clipping describes the visible region of visual elements. Comments are welcome through 10 December. Learn more about the Style Activity and the Graphics Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of CSS Writing Modes Level 3. CSS Writing Modes Level 3 defines CSS support for various international writing modes, such as left-to-right (e.g. Latin or Indic), right-to-left (e.g. Hebrew or Arabic), bidirectional (e.g. mixed Latin and Arabic) and vertical (e.g. Asian scripts). Inherently bottom-to-top scripts are not handled in this version. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Custom Elements. This specification describes the method for enabling the author to define and use new types of DOM elements in a document. Comments are welcome through 21 November. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The XML Query Working Group and the XSLT Working Group have published five Proposed Recommendations today:

• XQuery 3.0: An XML Query Language. XQuery is a domain-specific language for querying collections of XDM trees.
• XML Path Language (XPath) 3.0. XPath is a domain-specific language for referencing parts of a tree represented as an instance of the XPath and XQuery Data Model (XDM).
• XQuery and XPath Data Model 3.0.This specification defines the XPath and XQuery Data Model (XDM).
• XPath and XQuery Functions and Operators 3.0. The Functions and Operators specification defines facilities for XPath and XQuery.
• XSLT and XQuery Serialization 3.0. Serialization specifies how to represent an XDM instance as XML, as HTML or as text. The XDM is most often used to represent XML documents as trees, but can also represent other data formats such as JSON, RDF or relational databases.

Comments are welcome through 19 November. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.