W3C UK and Ireland Regional Office
W3C UK and Ireland Regional OfficeThe World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential as a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding. The UK and Ireland W3C Office (W3C-UK) is the national contact point for W3C activities in the UK and Ireland.
The Oxon SWIG (Semantic Web Interest Group) is a monthly get-together to discuss semantic web theory and practice. Archives include previous presentations.
Demonstrators of some recent W3C technologies are now available to show how they can be used and their potential.
W3C is not responsible for policing that the content of information on the World Wide Web conforms to the laws of any nation. If you have concerns that a web site contains information that is potentially illegal under UK law, please contact the Internet Watch Foundation, and for Irish law please contact ISPAI Hotline. In the UK, the National High Tech Crime Unit provides guidance on reporting fraud and other Internet crimes.
2008-02-19: The report of the W3C Video on the Web Workshop is now available. Thirty-seven organizations discussed video and audio codecs, spatial and temporal addressing, metadata, digital rights management, accessibility, and other topics related to ensuring the success of video as a "first class citizen" of the Web. W3C thanks Cisco for hosting the Workshop, which took place 12-13 December 2007 simultaneously in San Jose, California and Brussels, Belgium. Read the forty-two position papers and Workshop minutes. W3C welcomes feedback on the Report and the topic of video on the Web at public-video-comments@w3.org (archive). (Photo credit: Bob Freund. Permalink) (News archive)
2008-02-15: The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published the Last Call Working Draft of CSS Namespaces Module. The CSS Namespaces module defines the syntax for using namespaces in CSS. It defines the @namespace rule for declaring the default namespace and binding namespaces to namespace prefixes, and it also defines a syntax that other specifications can adopt for using those prefixes in namespace-qualified names. Comments are welcome through 7 March. Learn more about the Style Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2008-02-14: The Web Application Formats Working Group has published the Working Draft of Access Control for Cross-site Requests. Web application technologies commonly apply same-origin restrictions to network requests. These restrictions prevent a Web application running from one origin from obtaining data retrieved from another origin, and also limit the amount of unsafe HTTP requests that can be automatically launched toward destinations that differ from the running application's origin. This document defines a mechanism to enable client-side cross-site requests. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2008-02-13: The Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Working Group has published a Group Note of Best Practices for XML Internationalization. This document provides a set of guidelines for developing XML documents and schemas that are internationalized properly. Following the best practices describes here allow both the developer of XML applications, as well as the author of XML content to create material in different languages. Learn more about the Internationalization Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2008-02-12: Ten years ago, on 10 February 1998, W3C published Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation. W3C is marking the ten-year anniversary of XML by celebrating "XML10" and extending thanks to the dedicated communities -- including people who have participated in W3C's XML groups and mailing lists, the SGML community, and xml-dev -- whose efforts have created a successful family of technologies based on the solid XML 1.0 foundation. The success of XML is a strong indicator of how dedicated individuals, working within the W3C Process, can engage with a larger community to produce industry-changing results. "Today we celebrate the success of open standards in preserving Web data from proprietary ownership," said Jon Bosak, who led the W3C Working Group that produced XML 1.0. Read the press release and testimonials. Send W3C a greeting and learn more about XML at W3C. (Permalink) (News archive)
2008-02-08: W3C invites Web content authors to run the beta release of the W3C mobileOK checker and make their content work on a broad range of mobile devices. This new version provides more accurate results and a more reliable experience. Visitors of the Mobile World Congress (in Barcelona, starting Monday, 11 February) are welcome to stop by the W3C Mobile Web Initiative booth (in Hall 7) to learn more about this tool for making Web sites mobile-friendly. (Permalink) (News archive)
2008-02-06: The XML Core Working Group has published the Proposed Edited Recommendation of Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition). This revision of XML 1.0 incorporates all known errata for XML 1.0 Fourth Edition; see the diff-marked specification for changes. This version of the XML 1.0 specification contains one major change, to the definition of names, bringing one major benefit of XML 1.1 into XML 1.0; please read the background for this change as part of any review. Comments are welcome through 16 May. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2008-02-04: The Protocols and Formats Working Group published First Public Working Drafts of: (News archive)
2008-02-01: Browse W3C presentations and events also available as an RSS channel. (Permalink) (News archive)
2008-01-31: W3C has published a Workshop Report: eGovernment and the Web Workshop: "Toward More Transparent Government". Participants discussed ways to facilitate the deployment of Web standards across government sites and how to shape the ongoing research agenda in the development of Web technology and public policy in order to realize the potential of the Web for access to and use of government information. Held 18-19 June (press release), in Washington D.C., USA, the Workshop was jointly organized by W3C and WSRI. Learn more about eGovernment at W3C. (Permalink) (News archive)
2008-01-29: The XML Core Working Group has published the Proposed Recommendation of Canonical XML 1.1. The specification establishes a method for determining whether two documents are identical, or whether an application has not changed a document, except for transformations permitted by XML 1.0 and Namespaces in XML. Canonical XML 1.1 is a revision to Canonical XML 1.0 designed to address issues related to inheritance of attributes in the XML namespace when canonicalizing document subsets, including the requirement not to inherit xml:id, and to treat xml:base URI path processing properly. Comments are welcome through 07 March. Learn more about W3C's XML Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2008-01-29: The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the Working Draft of Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies. This document describes best practice recipes for publishing vocabularies or ontologies on the Web (in RDF Schema or OWL). Each recipe introduces general principles and an example configuration for use with an Apache HTTP server (which may be adapted to other environments). The recipes are all designed to be consistent with the architecture of the Web as currently specified. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2008-01-25: The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference. This document defines the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a common data model for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems via the Semantic Web. SKOS provides a standard, low-cost means to describe the semantic relationships between existing knowledge systems and to port those systems to the Semantic Web. SKOS also provides a lightweight, intuitive language for developing and sharing new knowledge organization systems. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2008-01-22: W3C today published an early draft of HTML 5, a major revision of the markup language for the Web. The HTML Working Group is creating HTML 5 to be the open, royalty-free specification for rich Web content and Web applications. "HTML is of course a very important standard," said Tim Berners-Lee, author of the first version of HTML and W3C Director. "I am glad to see that the community of developers, including browser vendors, is working together to create the best possible path for the Web." New features include APIs for drawing two-dimensional graphics and ways to embed and control audio and video content. HTML 5 helps to improve interoperability and reduce software costs by giving precise rules not only about how to handle all correct HTML documents but also how to recover from errors. Discover other new features, read the press release, and learn more about the future of HTML. (Permalink) (News archive)
2008-01-22: The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group and the WAI Education and Outreach Working Group have published the First Public Working Draft of Relationship Between Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. See the announcement email. (News archive)
2008-01-22: The W3C Advisory Committee has elected Ashok Malhotra (Oracle), T.V. Raman (Google), and Henry Thompson (University of Edinburgh) to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG). Continuing TAG participants are Noah Mendelsohn (IBM), David Orchard (BEA), Jonathan Rees (Science Commons), Norm Walsh (Sun), and Stuart Williams (HP), who co-Chairs the TAG with Tim Berners-Lee. 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. (Permalink) (News archive)
The W3C UK and Ireland Regional Office is hosted by the STFC at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
Last updated 2008-02-24
Copyright © 1994-2005 W3C ® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use and software licensing rules apply. Your interactions with this site are in accordance with our public and Member privacy statements.