W3C

The W3C Advisory Committee has elected the following people to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG): David Baron (Mozilla) and Andrew Betts (Financial Times / Nikkei). They join co-Chair Tim Berners-Lee and continuing participants Travis Leithead (Microsoft), Mark Nottingham (Akamai), Alex Russell (Google), Hadley Beeman (W3C Invited Expert), Daniel Appelquist (W3C Invited Expert; co-Chair), Peter Linss (HP; co-Chair) –both re-appointed by the Director. Yves Lafon continues as staff contact. W3C thanks to Yan Zhu (formerly of Yahoo!) whose term ends this month, for her contributions. The mission of the TAG is to build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary, to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG, and to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C. Learn more about the TAG.

We are pleased to announce that we upgraded today our servers to support both HTTP and HTTPS access to public resources. W3C advocates that the Web platform “actively prefer secure communication.” Thanks to recent work in the Web Application Security Working Group and supporting client implementations, and the deployment work of the W3C Systems Team, we are now able to provide HTTPS access to all W3C resources. All W3C documents, including Recommendations, DTDs, and vocabularies will be available with the authentication, integrity-protection, and confidentiality HTTPS supports.

Read about what the change involves, the challenges and some side-effects in the detailed post on the W3C Blog.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Requirements for WCAG 2.0 Extensions. This document describes the requirements that the WCAG WG is setting for the development of WCAG 2.0 extensions. Extensions are optional standards modules that build on the existing requirements for WCAG 2.0, and are designed to work in harmony with the WCAG 2.0 standard. Learn more from the call for review e-mail and “Shaping the WCAG 2.0 extensions” blog post and read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The XML Query Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of XQuery 3.1: An XML Query Language. XML is a versatile markup language, capable of labeling the information content of diverse data sources including structured and semi-structured documents, relational databases, and object repositories. A query language that uses the structure of XML intelligently can express queries across all these kinds of data, whether physically stored in XML or viewed as XML via middleware. This specification describes a query language called XQuery, which is designed to be broadly applicable across many types of XML data sources.

The XML Query Working Group and the XSLT Working Group invite implementation of the following Candidate Recommendations:

• XML Path Language (XPath) 3.1: XPath 3.1 is an expression language that allows the processing of values conforming to the data model defined in XQuery and XPath Data Model (XDM) 3.1. The data model provides a tree representation of XML documents as well as atomic values such as integers, strings, and booleans, and sequences that may contain both references to nodes in an XML document and atomic values.
• XSLT and XQuery Serialization 3.1: This document defines serialization of an instance of the data model as defined in XQuery and XPath Data Model (XDM) 3.1 into a sequence of octets. Serialization is designed to be a component that can be used by other specifications such as XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 3.0 or XQuery 3.1: An XML Query Language.

The CSV on the Web Working Group has published four Recommendations:

• Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web: An abstract model for tabular data, and how to locate metadata that enables users to better understand what the data holds. This specification also contains non-normative guidance on how to parse CSV files.
• Metadata Vocabulary for Tabular Data: A JSON-based format for expressing metadata about tabular data to inform validation, conversion, display and data entry for tabular data.
• Generating JSON from Tabular Data on the Web: For how to convert tabular data into JSON.
• Generating RDF from Tabular Data on the Web: For how to convert tabular data into RDF.

The group plans to publish a Primer at a later time to help users using these technologies.