W3C

The Timed Text Working Group has published a Working Draft of TTML Profiles for Internet Media Subtitles and Captions 1.0.1 (IMSC1). This document specifies two profiles of TTML1: a text-only profile and an image-only profile. These profiles are intended to be used across subtitle and caption delivery applications worldwide, thereby simplifying interoperability, consistent rendering and conversion to other subtitling and captioning formats.

The Multimodal Interaction Working Group has published two Group Notes:

• Discovery & Registration of Multimodal Modality Components: This document is addressed to people who want to develop Modality Components for Multimodal Applications distributed over a local network or “in the cloud”. With this goal, in a multimodal system implemented according to the Multimodal Architecture Specification, over a network, to configure the technical conditions needed for the interaction, the system must discover and register its Modality Components in order to monitor and preserve the overall state of the distributed elements. Therefore, Modality Components can be composed with automation mechanisms in order to adapt the Application to the state of the surrounding environment.
• EMMA: Extensible MultiModal Annotation markup language Version 2.0: The W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group aims to develop specifications to enable access to the Web using multimodal interaction. This document is part of a set of specifications for multimodal systems, and provides details of an XML markup language for containing and annotating the interpretation of user input and production of system output.

The Evaluation and Repairs Tool Working Group has published seven Group Notes:

• Requirements for the Evaluation and Report Language 1.0: This document describes the requirements for the scope, design, and features of the Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0. EARL is a vocabulary, the terms of which are defined across a set of specifications and technical notes, and that is used to describe test results. The primary motivation for developing this vocabulary is to facilitate the exchange of test results between Web accessibility evaluation tools in a vendor-neutral and platform-independent format. It also provides reusable terms for generic quality assurance and validation purposes.
• Evaluation and Report Language 1.0 Schema describes the formal schema of the Evaluation and Report Language 1.0. The Evaluation and Report Language defines a vocabulary for expressing test results. It enables any person, software application, or organization to assert test results for any test subject tested against any set of criteria. The test subject might be a website, an authoring tool, a user agent, or some other entity. The set of criteria may be accessibility guidelines, formal grammars, or other types of quality assurance requirements. Thus, EARL is flexible with regard to the contexts in which it can be applied.
• Developer Guide for Evaluation and Report Language 1.0: This is a guide to the Evaluation and Report Language 1.0 for developers of software tools and processes. It provides an introduction to EARL and its uses, defines conformance requirements for tools supporting EARL, and describes approaches for serializing EARL data in different formats.
• Developers’ Guide to Features of Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools: This document describes features that web authoring and quality assurance tools can incorporate, so that they support the evaluation of accessibility requirements, such as those defined by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. The main purpose of this document is to promote awareness of such tool features and to provide introductory guidance for tool developers on what kind of features they could provide in future implementations of their tools.
• HTTP Vocabulary in RDF 1.0: The identification of resources on the Web by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) alone may not be sufficient, as other factors such as HTTP content negotiation might come into play. This issue is particularly significant for quality assurance testing, conformance claims, and reporting languages like the W3C Evaluation And Report Language (EARL). It provides a representation of the HTTP vocabulary in the Resource Description Framework (RDF), to allow quality assurance tools to record the HTTP headers that have been exchanged between a client and a server. The RDF terms defined by this document represent the core HTTP specification defined by RFC 2616, as well as additional HTTP headers registered by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). These terms can also be used to record HTTPS exchanges.
• Representing Content in RDF 1.0: This document is a specification for a vocabulary to represent content in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). This vocabulary is intended to provide a flexible framework within different usage scenarios to semantically represent any type of content, be it on the Web or in local storage media. For example, it can be used by web quality assurance tools such as web accessibility evaluation tools to record a representation of the assessed web content, including text, images, or other types of formats. In many cases, it can be used together with HTTP Vocabulary in RDF 1.0, which allows quality assurance tools to record the HTTP headers that have been exchanged between a client and a server. This is particularly useful for quality assurance testing, conformance claims, and reporting languages like the W3C Evaluation And Report Language.
• Pointer Methods in RDF 1.0: This specification contains a framework for representing pointers – entities that permit identifying a portion or segment of a piece of content – making use of the Resource Description Framework (RDF). It also describes a number of specific types of pointers that permit portions of a document to be referred to in different ways. When referring to a specific part of, say, a piece of web content, it is useful to be able to have a consistent manner by which to refer to a particular segment of a web document, to have a variety of ways by which to refer to that same segment, and to make the reference robust in the face of changes to that document. This specification is part of the Evaluation And Report Language (EARL) but can be reused in other contexts too.

The CSS Working Group has published a Group Note of CSS Snapshot 2017. This document collects together into one definition all the specs that together form the current state of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as of 2017. The primary audience is CSS implementers, not CSS authors, as this definition includes modules by specification stability, not Web browser adoption rate.

The Web Performance Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Cooperative Scheduling of Background Tasks. This document defines an API that web page authors can use to cooperatively schedule background tasks such that they do not introduce delays to other high priority tasks that share the same event loop, such as input processing, animations and frame compositing. The user agent is in a better position to determine when background tasks can be run without introducing user-perceptible delays or jank in animations and input response, based on its knowledge of currently scheduled tasks, vsync deadlines, user-interaction and so on. Using this API should therefore result in more appropriate scheduling of background tasks during times when the browser would otherwise be idle.

W3C is delighted to publish its Data on the Web Best Practices as a Recommendation. The document offers 35 Best Practices for sharing data, openly or not, in a way that maximizes the potential of the Web as a data platform rather than simply as a way to send data from A to B. The Best Practices are prescriptive in their intended outcomes but not in how those outcomes are achieved. They cover everything from the basics (provide metadata!) through nuance (provide structural metadata), to topics like licensing, provenance and basic information on providing APIs through to more advanced topics like data archiving, data enrichment and republishing data.

The work is complemented by two vocabularies, covering dataset usage and data quality, that were completed last year, and is also the basis of more specialist work in spatial data that is also nearing completion. See the blog for more background.