W3C

The Internationalization Working Group has published three documents today:

• A Last Call 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. Comments are welcome through 1 July 2014.
• A Group Note of Authoring HTML: Handling Right-to-left Scripts. This document provides advice to content authors using HTML markup and CSS style sheets about how to create pages for languages that use right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Thaana, Urdu, etc. It explains how to create content in right-to-left scripts that builds on but goes beyond the Unicode bidirectional algorithm, as well as how to prepare content for localization into right-to-left scripts.
• A Group Note of Authoring HTML: Language declarations. Specifying the language of content is useful for a wide number of applications, from linguistically-sensitive searching to applying language-specific display properties. In some cases the potential applications for language information are still waiting for implementations to catch up, whereas in others it is a necessity today. Adding markup for language information to content is something that can and should be done as content is first developed. If not, it will be much more difficult to take advantage of any future developments.

Learn more about the Internationalization Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of Non-element Selectors Module Level 1. This specification extends Selectors Level 4 and allows selecting other kinds of document nodes than elements. This is useful when selectors are used as a general document query language. Non-element Selectors are not intended to be used in CSS, but only as a separate query language in other host environments. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The IndieUI Working Group today published an updated Working Draft of IndieUI: Events 1.0 – Events for User Interface Independence. This draft includes new events and a refined technical model. IndieUI defines a way for different user interactions to be translated into simple events and communicated to Web applications. (For example, if a user wants to scroll down a page, they might use their finger on a touch screen, or click a scroll bar with a mouse, or use a scroll wheel, or say ‘scroll down’ with a voice command. With IndieUI, these are all sent to the Web app as simply: scroll down.) IndieUI will make it easier for Web applications to work in a wide range of contexts — different devices (such as mobile phones and tablets), different assistive technologies (AT), different user needs. With IndieUI, Web application developers will have a uniform way to design applications that work for multiple devices and contexts. Comments on this Draft are encouraged by 27 June 2014. Learn more from the IndieUI Overview and the Updated Working Draft: IndieUI Events e-mail; and read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Voice Browser Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction. This document describes SCXML, or the “State Chart extensible Markup Language”. SCXML provides a generic state-machine based execution environment based on CCXML and Harel State Tables. Comments are welcome through 26 June. Learn more about the Voice Browser Activity.

The System Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of The app: URL Scheme. This specification defines the app: URL scheme. The app: URL scheme can be used by packaged applications to obtain resources that are inside a container. These resources can then be used with web platform features that accept URLs. Comments are welcome through 24 June. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

The HTML Working Group has published two First Public Working Drafts today.

• W3C HTML Form HTTP Extensions. This is an addendum to the specification of HTML5 forms extending the abilities of configuring HTTP requests through HTML markup.
• W3C HTML JSON form submission. This specification defines a new form encoding algorithm that enables the transmission of form data as JSON. Instead of capturing form data as essentially an array of key-value pairs which is the bread and butter of existing form encodings, it relies on a simple name attribute syntax that makes it possible to capture rich data structures as JSON directly.

Learn more about the HTML Activity.