W3C

Today we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Web and in a few months, we will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the W3C developing open standards and guidelines that foster innovative applications, profitable commerce, and the free flow of information and ideas.

In March 1989, while at CERN, Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote “Information Management: A Proposal” outlining the World Wide Web. 30 years ago today, Tim’s memo was about to revolutionize communication around the globe.

Committed to core values of an open Web that promotes innovation, neutrality, and interoperability, W3C and its community are setting the vision and standards for the Web, ensuring the building blocks of the web are open, accessible, secure, international and have been developed via the collaboration of global technical experts.

Today we celebrate a Web that is:

• Universal, International and truly “World Wide”.
• Available on any device, for any type of information, in any language.
• Accessible by people with disabilities.
• Royalty-free and built on open standards.
• Powerful – The Open Web Platform makes Web pages themselves powerful tools.
• Transformational for how business gets done; improving delivery, enhancing user satisfaction, and reducing cost.

You can read more about the celebration and listen to what Sir Tim Berners-Lee said when asked what part of the W3C’s work he’s the most proud in the W3C blog.

W3C published today the report of the W3C Workshop on Strong Authentication and Identity, held on 10-11 December 2018, in Redmond, WA (USA).

W3C brought community experts together for a series of discussions on strong authentication and identity. We looked at standards work in-progress on Web Authentication and Verifiable Claims, and opportunities for future work including Distributed Identifiers and Attestation. Participants shared motivating use cases that could be aided by web technology, from web application sign-on to supply-chain tracking, government services provision, license authorization, health care, and financial transactions. Presentations and breakout discussions helped to identify gaps and interfaces between work areas. The workshop report describes current state of the art, and offers pointers to new work proposals in and around the W3C community.

W3C thanks Microsoft for hosting, the Program Committee for organizing, and all the participants for their contributions.

Today W3C published the Simplified Chinese Authorized Translation of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Web内容无障碍指南 (WCAG) 2.1, contributed by Zhejiang University. The translation is delivered in support of updates to the draft China National Standard on Information technology – Internet content accessibility technical requirements and conformance testing, which refers to WCAG 2.1.

Translations in other languages are listed in WCAG 2 Translations. W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) particularly encourages the development of Authorized Translations of WCAG 2.1 and other technical specifications to facilitate their adoption and implementation internationally. Read about the Policy for W3C Authorized Translations.

W3C announced today a Second Workshop on on the Web of Things, 3-5 June 2019, in Munich, Germany. The event is hosted by Siemens.

This workshop disseminates the findings of the W3C Web of Things Working Group based on its standardization work and discuss the way forward with a wider set of stakeholders. To unlock the potential of an open ecosystem and open markets, the workshop will discuss how to reduce fragmentation of the IoT landscape and the future direction of the open W3C WoT standardization. A focus is on exposing and consuming services across specific IoT technologies to enable new use cases, such as common monitoring and control of assets from multiple vendors, interconnecting different application domains, and building digital twins of physical devices.

The scope includes:

• Cross-Domain Business Models, Use Cases and Scenarios:
  • Interoperability scenarios for consumer, industrial, environmental, energy management, healthcare, automotive and smart cities
  • Building a common IoT application ecosystem (tools, marketplaces, security, etc.)
  • Interworking across evolving IoT standards (e.g., OCF, OPC, LWM2M, OneM2M, etc.)
• Standardization Needs:
  • Architecture
  • Applications
  • Security and privacy

For more information on the workshop, please see details and submission instructions. Expression of Interest and position statements are due by 7 April 2019.

The Web Authentication Working Group published Web Authentication: An API for accessing Public Key Credentials Level 1 (WebAuthn) as a W3C Recommendation today. This specification defines an API enabling the creation and use of strong, attested, scoped, public key-based credentials by web applications, for the purpose of strongly authenticating users. As a core component of the FIDO Alliance’s FIDO2 set of specifications, WebAuthn is a browser/platform standard for simpler and stronger authentication. It is already supported in Windows 10, Android, and Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari Web browsers. Please read more in our Press Release.