W3C

The HTML Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of HTML Canvas 2D Context. This specification defines the 2D Context for the HTML canvas element. The 2D Context provides objects, methods, and properties to draw and manipulate graphics on a canvas drawing surface. Comments are welcome through 11 June. Learn more about the HTML Activity.

The Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group has published a Group Note of Dataset Descriptions: HCLS Community Profile. Access to consistent, high-quality metadata is critical to finding, understanding, and reusing scientific data. This document describes a consensus among participating stakeholders in the Health Care and the Life Sciences domain on the description of datasets using the Resource Description Framework (RDF). This specification meets key functional requirements, reuses existing vocabularies to the extent that it is possible, and addresses elements of data description, versioning, provenance, discovery, exchange, query, and retrieval. Learn more about the Data Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of CSS Flexible Box Layout Module Level 1. This specification describes a CSS box model optimized for user interface design. In the flex layout model, the children of a flex container can be laid out in any direction, and can “flex” their sizes, either growing to fill unused space or shrinking to avoid overflowing the parent. Both horizontal and vertical alignment of the children can be easily manipulated. Nesting of these boxes (horizontal inside vertical, or vertical inside horizontal) can be used to build layouts in two dimensions. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. Comments are welcome through 11 June. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Protocols and Formats Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices 1.1 and updated Working Drafts of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.1 and Core Accessibility API Mappings (Core-AAM) 1.1.

WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices recommends approaches to help web application developers make widgets, navigation, and behaviors accessible using WAI-ARIA roles, states, and properties. This new version has been substantially reworked in order to provide guidance specific to WAI-ARIA 1.1. WAI-ARIA provides an ontology of roles, states, and properties that define accessible user interface elements. It is designed to improve the accessibility and interoperability of web content, particularly web applications. Core-AAM describes how user agents should expose semantics of content languages to accessibility APIs across multiple content technologies (including much of WAI-ARIA) and serves as the basis for other specifications to extend the mappings to specific technologies. Learn more from the call for review e-mail and read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The IndieUI Working Group has published a Working Draft of IndieUI: Events 1.0 – Events for User Interface Independence and IndieUI: User Context 1.0 – Contextual Information for User Interface Independence. These drafts include a reduction in scope for the 1.0 version of Events, and minor property and interface changes in User Context. IndieUI: Events defines a way for different user interactions to be translated into simple events and communicated to Web applications. IndieUI: User Context defines a set of preferences that users can choose to expose to web applications, and an API for user agents to access the preferences and listen for changes. Both IndieUI specifications 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 these technologies, Web application developers will have a uniform way to design applications that work for multiple devices and contexts. The IndieUI Working Group is currently exploring moving this work to other Working Groups; however, comments on these drafts are still welcomed, preferably by 29 May 2015. Learn more from the IndieUI Overview; and read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).