W3C

Today the W3C announced the final report from the Linking Geospatial Data workshop that was held in London 5 – 6 March 2014.

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’s participation was funded by the EU-funded SmartOpenData project.

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.

The Workshop report identifies several themes that recurred throughout the discussion. A consensus of the participants was that joint work between W3C and OGC should be pursued to address the needs identified in these themes.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group and the SVG Working Group have published a Working Draft of Web Animations 1.0. This specification defines a model for synchronization and timing of changes to the presentation of a Web page. This specification also defines an application programming interface for interacting with this model and it is expected that further specifications will define declarative means for exposing these features. Learn more about the Style Activity and the Graphics Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of Media Queries Level 4. Media Queries allow authors to test and query values or features of the user agent or display device, independent of the document being rendered. They are used in the CSS @media rule to conditionally apply styles to a document, and in various other contexts and languages, such as HTML and Javascript. Media Queries Level 4 describes the mechanism and syntax of media queries, media types, and media features. The specification extends and supersedes the features defined in Media Queries 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. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Data on the Web Best Practices Use Cases & Requirements. This document lists some use cases, compiled by the Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group, that represent scenarios of how data is commonly published on the Web and how it is used. This document also provides a set of requirements derived from these use cases that have been used to guide the development of the set of Data on the Web Best Practices and the development of two new vocabularies: Quality and Granularity Description Vocabulary and Data Usage Description Vocabulary. Learn more about the Data Activity.

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.