W3C

This week, the W3C community meets in Sapporo, Japan for TPAC 2015 W3C’s annual face-to-face Membership meeting. Participants will coordinate technical directions for the Open Web Platform, explore its impact across industries and devices, discuss organizational strategy and the future of the Web. Attendees will participate in Working Group meetings, an Advisory Committee meeting, and a Plenary Day for a panel discussion on the future of the Internet and Web with Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Jun Murai, moderated by Jeff Jaffe; and breakout discussions on a a variety of topics. Nearly 580 people registered –a 15% increase compared to TPAC 2014 in California. This is our record attendance in the fifteen TPAC weeks we’ve organized since 2001. Although participation in TPAC is limited to those already in W3C groups, the TPAC proceedings are public and will be made available shortly after the meeting. Follow the meeting on social networking sites with tag #tpac. W3C also welcomes registered Web developers and interested parties this evening to a W3C Meetup.

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.