W3C

W3C is pleased to announce that registration is now open for a third edition of the most popular W3C online training course, W3C Introduction to Mobile Web and Application Best Practices.The 8-week course begins 30 January 2012. Developed by the W3C/MobiWebApp team, the course familiarizes Web designers and content producers with the Web as delivered on mobile devices. Along with the course description, read comments from past students and what they have achieved. An early bird rate of €165 is available until 9 January 2012; after that date the full price is €225. Don't miss the early bird rate - enroll now!

The Web Applications Working Group published two Widgets specifications today:

• A Candidate Recommendation of Widget Interface, which defines an application programming interface (API) for widgets that provides, among other things, functionality for accessing a widget's metadata and persistently storing data. W3C invites implementation of this specification; see the ongoing implementation report.
• A Proposed Recommendation of Widget Access Request Policy, which defines the security model controlling network access from within a widget, as well as a method for authors to request that the user agent grant access to certain network resources. Comments are welcome through 17 January 2012.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of CSS Exclusions and Shapes Module Level 3. CSS exclusions define arbitrary areas around which inline content can flow. Unlike CSS floats, which they extend, CSS exclusions can be positioned with any CSS positioning schemes. Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Provenance Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of The PROV Ontology: Model and Formal Semantics. The PROV Ontology (also PROV-O) encodes the PROV Data Model [PROV-DM] in the OWL2 Web Ontology Language (OWL2). The PROV ontology consists of a set of classes, properties, and restrictions that can be used to represent provenance information. The PROV ontology can also be specialized to create new classes and properties for modeling provenance information specific to different domain applications. The PROV ontology supports a set of entailments based on OWL2 formal semantics and provenance specific inference rules. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

W3C announces today the fourth in a series of workshops to ensure the multilingual success of the World Wide Web: The Multilingual Web – The Way Ahead, 15 - 16 March 2012, Luxembourg, hosted by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission. The event is co-located with the European Commission's Language Technology Showcase Days. Anyone may attend and participation is free. W3C welcomes participation from both speakers and non-speaking attendees, but the total number of participants is limited due to space.

Building on the success of the preceding events in Madrid, Pisa, and Limerick, this workshop will once again bring together speakers and participants with an interest in best practices and standards aimed at helping content creators, localizers, tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web. It provides further opportunities for networking across communities that span the various aspects involved. We are particularly interested in speakers who can identify gaps in current standards and best practices related to the mutilingual Web, and propose opportunities for addressing those. Registration is available online.

The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft for RDFa Lite 1.1 and an updated Working Draft for the RDFa 1.1 Primer.

One critique of RDFa is that is has too much functionality, leaving first-time authors confused about the more advanced features. RDFa Lite is a minimalist version of RDFa that helps authors easily jump into the structured data world. The goal was to outline a small subset of RDFa that will work for 80% of the Web authors out there doing simple data markup.

The RDFa Primer is a more in-depth introduction to RDFa and all of the structured data markup features that it provides.

The release of these two documents as Working Drafts is an open invitation to the general public to review and provide feedback on the direction of these documents via the RDF Web Applications Working Group mailing list. These documents are intended to be the last Working drafts before RDFa enters Last Call. You can learn more about similar projects to RDFa in W3C's Semantic Web Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group invites implementation of two Candidate Recommendations:

• The WebSocket API, which defines an API that enables Web pages to use the WebSocket protocol for two-way communication with a remote host.
• Web Storage, which defines an API for persistent data storage of key-value pair data in Web clients.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.