W3C

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Widget Updates. This specification defines a process and a document format to allow a user agent to update an installed widget package with a different version of a widget package. A widget cannot automatically update itself; instead, a widget relies on the user agent to manage the update process. Comments are welcome through 19 April. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published two Working Drafts:

• CSS Flexible Box Layout Module describes a CSS box model optimized for user interface design. In the flexbox layout model, the children of a flexbox can be laid out in any direction, and can "flex" their sizes, either growing to fill unused space or shrinking to avoid overflowing the parent. Both horizontal and vertical alignment of the children can be easily manipulated. Nesting of these boxes (horizontal inside vertical, or vertical inside horizontal) can be used to build layouts in two dimensions.
• CSS Grid Layout which allows designers to define invisible grids of horizontal and vertical lines. Elements from a document can then be anchored to points in the grid, which aligns them visually to each other, even if they are not next to each other in the source.

Learn more about the Style Activity.

The Device APIs Working Group has published a Group Note of The Media Capture API. This specification defined an Application Programming Interface (API) that provided access to the audio, image and video capture capabilities of the device. Development on it has stopped, and further work is taking place as part of “getusermedia: Getting access to local devices that can generate multimedia streams”. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of CSS Speech Module. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a language that describes the rendering of markup documents (e.g. HTML, XML) on various supports, such as screen, paper, speech, etc. The Speech module defines aural CSS properties that enable authors to declaratively control the rendering of documents via speech synthesis, and using optional audio cues. Note that this standard was developed in cooperation with the Voice Browser Activity. Learn more about the Style Activity.

W3C announces today a Workshop on Using Open Data: policy modeling, citizen empowerment, data journalism. For many years, W3C has been a keen promoter of Open Data, fostering a culture in which public administrations make their data available, ideally in machine-processable formats. Many governments have embraced the idea with enthusiasm, setting up national data portals. As part of the FP7-funded Crossover Project, W3C and the European Commission are running a Workshop to ask a simple question: what is all the 'new' government open data being used for? The Workshop takes place 19-20 June in Brussels, Belgium at the European Commission Headquarters. W3C Membership is not required to participate, but participation is limited to 80 people and participants must submit position papers. Workshop participants will focus on uses of open data, not its publication. In particular, the intention is that participants will highlight uses of data for tools that aid policy modeling, that empower citizens, and that can be usefully visualized for data journalism. For more information, see the Workshop home page.