W3C

The Social Web Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of Micropub. Micropub is a client-to-server protocol used to create, update and delete social networking content. Web and native apps can use Micropub to post notes, photos, events, and many others to servers that support the protocol. Users can choose to create content in a variety of client posting interfaces, while maintaining control of where the data is stored.

Prior to being adopted by the W3C Social Web Working Group for standardization, Micropub already had over a dozen independent implementations in the IndieWeb community. There are now over a dozen independent client and server implementations across a wide variety of languages and platforms.

The CSS Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of CSS Logical Properties and Values Level 1. This module introduces logical properties and values that provide the author with the ability to control layout through logical, rather than physical, direction and dimension mappings. The module defines logical properties and values for the features defined in CSS21. These properties are writing-mode relative equivalents of their corresponding physical properties.

The Web Payments Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Payment Handler API. The Working Group has previously published Payment Request API, which provides a standard way to initiate payment requests from Web pages and applications. User agents implementing that API prompt the user to select a way to handle the payment request, after which the user agent returns a payment response to the originating site. The new Payment Handler API defines capabilities that enable Web applications to handle payment requests, helping to streamline payments on the Web.

The Device and Sensors Working Group has published a Working Draft of Orientation Sensor. This specification defines a base orientation sensor interface and concrete sensor subclasses to monitor the device’s physical orientation in relation to a stationary three dimensional Cartesian coordinate system.

The Social Web Working Group invites implementation of a revised Candidate Recommendation of ActivityPub. ActivityPub allows websites a direct social connection to user software, including Follow, Like, Share, and Comment, without an intermediate social network provider. It is built on the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format, and iterates on the design of OStatus, which last month saw a wave of mainstream interest with Mastodon. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and subscribing to content.

The CSS Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of CSS Grid Layout Module Level 1. This CSS module defines a two-dimensional grid-based layout system, optimized for user interface design. In the grid layout model, the children of a grid container can be positioned into arbitrary slots in a predefined flexible or fixed-size layout grid. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc.