W3C

The Internationalization Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of International text layout and typography index. This document points browser implementers and specification developers to information about how to support typographic features of scripts or writing systems from around the world, and also points to relevant information in specifications, to tests, and to useful articles and papers. It is not exhaustive, and will be added to from time to time.

The XSLT Working Group invites implementations of the Candidate Recommendation of XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 3.0 . This specification defines the syntax and semantics of XSLT 3.0, a language designed primarily for transforming XML documents into other XML documents. XSLT 3.0 is a revised version of the XSLT 2.0 Recommendation XSLT 2.0 published on 23 January 2007.

The primary purpose of the changes in this version of the language is to enable transformations to be performed in streaming mode, where neither the source document nor the result document is ever held in memory in its entirety. Another important aim is to improve the modularity of large stylesheets, allowing stylesheets to be developed from independently-developed components with a high level of software engineering robustness.

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 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.

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.