W3C

The Web Payments Working Group Patent Advisory Group (PAG), launched in August 2016, has published a report recommending that W3C continue work on the Web Payments Specifications. W3C launches a PAG to resolve issues in the event a patent has been disclosed that may be essential, but is not available under the W3C Royalty-Free licensing terms.

W3C Membership approved the 1 March 2017 W3C Process Document, which becomes in effect today. Notable major changes of the 2017 update include:

• A process for marking a Recommendation as Obsolete (distinct from Rescinding a Recommendation);
• Voting mechanism used for AB and TAG elections is Single Transferable Vote;
• Clarified the process for continuing work on a specification initially developed under another charter (aka Supergroups).

You may read more in the W3C Blog post “What’s new in the W3C Process 2017?“. This document was developed between the W3C Advisory Board and the public Revising W3C Process Community Group.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 has been published as a First Public Working Draft. This will be the first update to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines since WCAG 2.0. Sites that conform to WCAG 2.1 will also conform to WCAG 2.0, which means they meet the requirements of any policies that reference WCAG 2.0, while also better meeting the needs of users on the current Web. This first draft includes 28 new Success Criteria, three of which have been formally accepted by the Working Group and the remainder included as proposals to provide an opportunity for early feedback. Public feedback will be important to next steps on these proposals.

Further information is available in the blog post: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 First Public Working Draft.

Please comment by filing GitHub issues in the WCAG 2.1 repository or, if this is not feasible, by email to public-agwg-comments@w3.org, by 31 March 2017. Read about the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

To further the growth of market for IoT devices and services, W3C has launched the Web of Things Working Group to develop initial standards for the Web of Things, tasked with the goal to counter the fragmentation of the IoT; reduce the costs of development; lessen the risks to both investors and customers; and encourage exponential growth in the market for IoT devices and services.

In advance of W3C’s presence at Mobile World Congress 2017 next week, where W3C executives will be available on 27-29 February, W3C CEO Dr. Jeff Jaffe commented, “There are huge, transformative opportunities not only for mobile operators but for all businesses if we can overcome the fragmentation of the IoT. As stewards of the Open Web Platform, W3C is in a unique position to create the royalty-free and platform-independent standards needed to achieve this goal.“

Read the Media Advisory to learn about the technical approach the Working Group will take and the broad range of collaboration.

The Web Annotation Working Group has just published a Recommendation for Web Annotation in the form of three documents:

• Web Annotation Data Model—specification describes a structured model and format, in JSON, to enable annotations to be shared and reused across different hardware and software platforms. Common use cases can be modeled in a manner that is simple and convenient, while at the same time enabling more complex requirements, including linking arbitrary content to a particular data point or to segments of timed multimedia resources.
• Web Annotation Vocabulary—specifies the set of RDF classes, predicates and named entities that are used by the Web Annotation Data Model. It also lists recommended terms from other ontologies that are used in the model, and provides the JSON-LD Context and profile definitions needed to use the Web Annotation JSON serialization in a Linked Data context.
• Web Annotation Protocol—describes the transport mechanisms for creating and managing annotations in a method that is consistent with the Web Architecture and REST best practices.

The group has also produced two additional Working Group Notes:

• Embedding Web Annotations in HTML—describes and illustrates potential approaches for including annotations within HTML documents. Examples also are included illustrating the use within an HTML document of annotation Selectors as fragment identifiers.
• Selectors and States—selecting part of a resource on the Web is an ubiquitous action. This document does not define any new approach to selection; instead, it relies on the formal specification and the semantics in the Web Annotation Data Model. The current document only “extracts” Selectors and States from that data model; by doing so, it makes their usage easier for applications developers whose concerns are not related to annotations.