W3C

W3C has published the January 2014 edition of Standards for 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.

A deliverable of the HTML5Apps project, this edition of the document includes changes and additions since September 2013, including 6 documents reaching Recommendation status (a record), which shows increased maturity of the platform; 4 FPWD and 4 new editors drafts illustrate it is still growing up nicely; and a lot of the changes are linked to performance, off-line support and packaging.

Learn more about the Web and Mobile Interest Group.

The XML Query Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of XQueryX 3.0. XQueryX is an XML representation of an XQuery. It was created by mapping the productions of the XQuery grammar into XML productions. The result is not particularly convenient for humans to read and write, but it is easy for programs to parse, and because XQueryX is represented in XML, standard XML tools can be used to create, interpret, or modify queries. Comments are welcome through 25 February 2014. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.

A complete Working Draft of Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) 1.0 was published today by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG) and Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group (ERT WG), through the joint WCAG 2.0 Evaluation Methodology Task Force (Eval TF). WCAG-EM describes an approach for evaluating how websites, including Web applications and websites for mobile devices, conform to WCAG 2.0. Comments are welcome through 28 February 2014. After the comments from this review period are addressed, WAI expects to publish this as an informative (that is, non-normative) W3C Working Group Note. Learn more from the WCAG-EM Overview and about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of XMLHttpRequest Level 1. The XMLHttpRequest specification defines an API that provides scripted client functionality for transferring data between a client and a server. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Tracking Protection Working Group has published two documents today.

• A Working Draft Tracking Preference Expression (DNT). This specification defines the DNT request header field as an HTTP mechanism for expressing the user’s preference regarding tracking, an HTML DOM property to make that expression readable by scripts, and APIs that allow scripts to register site-specific exceptions granted by the user. It also defines mechanisms for sites to communicate whether and how they honor a received preference through use of the Tk response header field and well-known resources that provide a machine-readable tracking status.
• A Working Draft of Tracking Compliance and Scope. This specification defines the meaning of a Do Not Track (DNT) preference and sets out practices for websites to comply with this preference.

Learn more about the Privacy Activity.

The Internationalization Working Group has published a Working Draft of Encoding. While encodings have been defined to some extent, implementations have not always implemented them in the same way, have not always used the same labels, and often differ in dealing with undefined and former proprietary areas of encodings. This specification attempts to fill those gaps so that new implementations do not have to reverse engineer encoding implementations of the market leaders and existing implementations can converge. Learn more about the Internationalization Activity.