W3C

The W3C and OGC Spatial Data on the Web Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of its Best Practices document for Spatial Data on the Web. This is a concerted attempt to bring together techniques used by the geospatial industry and Web technologists, especially those making use of Linked Data techniques. Typical use cases include environmental and cartographic data, transport and administrative data. Although clearly a lot remains to be done, the editors seek to illustrate the full scope of the best practices. The editors are particularly keen for reviewers to cite examples that may be used to further illustrate the best practices.

The First Public Working Draft of the Spatial Data on the Web Working Group Best Practices document is published simultaneously by the OGC and the W3C. Read more in the OGC press release.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of CSS Cascading and Inheritance Level 4. This CSS module describes how to collate style rules and assign values to all properties on all elements. By way of cascading and inheritance, values are propagated for all properties on all elements.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of CSS Fragmentation Module Level 3. This module describes the fragmentation model that partitions a flow into pages, columns, or regions. It builds on the Page model module and introduces and defines the fragmentation model. It adds functionality for pagination, breaking variable fragment size and orientation, widows and orphans.

The Social Web Working Group has published two First Public Working Drafts:

• Webmention: Webmention is a simple way to notify any URL when you link to it on your site. From the receiver’s perspective, it’s a way to request notifications when other sites link to it.
• Social Web Protocols: The Social Web Protocols are a collection of standards which enable various aspects of decentralized social interaction on the Web. This document describes the purposes of each, and how they fit together.

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.