W3C

The Web Notification Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of Web Notifications. Web Notifications defines an API for end-user notifications. A notification allows alerting the user outside the context of a web page of an occurrence, such as the delivery of email.

W3C launched today the Web Payments Working Group to streamline the online “check-out” process and make payments easier and more secure on the Web. W3C’s long-term goal is to enable a harmonized payment experience on the web, regardless of the device being used and whether the transaction takes place in an application or in-store.

The Web Payments Working Group will create standard Application Programming Interfaces to support a wide array of existing and future payment methods, and allow payment instrument registration and selection facilitated by the browser. Standard APIs will establish a foundation for automated secure payments, as well as simplified check-out and payment experience. This will mean more payment options for merchants and users. It will also be easier for Web developers to integrate existing and new payment flows into their applications.

Read the Web Payments Working Group Charter FAQ, the full press release and testimonials from W3C Members, including Bloomberg, Deutsche Telekom, Digital Bazaar, ETA, Federal Reserve Bank, Ingenico Labs, MAG, NACS, Qihoo360, Rabobank, Ripple and WorldPay.

The Internationalization Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Encoding. The utf-8 encoding is the most appropriate encoding for interchange of Unicode, the universal coded character set. Therefore, for new protocols and formats, as well as existing formats deployed in new contexts, this specification requires (and defines) the utf-8 encoding.

The Internationalization Working Group has published a Working Draft of Internationalization Best Practices for Spec Developers. Developers of specifications need advice to ensure that what they produce will work for communities around the globe. This document provides a checklist of internationalization-related considerations when developing a specification.

The Web Annotation Working Group has published a Working Draft of Web Annotation Data Model. Annotations are typically used to convey information about a resource or associations between resources. Simple examples include a comment or tag on a single web page or image, or a blog post about a news article.

The Web Annotation Working Group and Web Platform Working Group have published a Working Draft of FindText API. The FindText API specification describes an API for finding ranges of text in a document or part of a document, using a variety of selection criteria.

The Digital Publishing Interest Group has published a Working Draft of Portable Web Publications for the Open Web Platform. This document introduces Portable Web Publications, a vision for the future of digital publishing that is based on a fully native representation of documents within the Open Web Platform. Portable Web Publications achieve full convergence between online and offline/portable document publishing: publishers and users won’t need to choose one or the other, but can switch between them dynamically, at will.