W3C

The FIDO Alliance, EMVCo, and W3C announced today the renewal of the Web Payment Security Interest Group, to continue to enhance the security and interoperability of various Web payments technologies. The group participants will continue to define areas of collaboration and identify gaps between existing technical specifications in order to increase compatibility among different technologies.

See the Web Payment Security Interest Group Charter for more information, and read more in the EMV® Insights Post.

The Media Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of WebCodecs today. The specification defines interfaces to codecs for encoding and decoding of audio and video. It does not specify or require any particular codec or method of encoding or decoding but provides JavaScript interfaces to implementations of existing codec technology developed elsewhere. Implementers may support any combination of codecs or none at all.

Alongside this main specification, the Media Working Group also published two First Public Working Drafts to establish a registry for WebCodecs:

• The WebCodecs Codec Registry is intended to enhance interoperability among implementations and users of WebCodecs. In particular, this registry provides the means to identify and avoid collisions among codec strings and provides a mechanism to define codec-specific members of WebCodecs codec configuration dictionaries.
• The AVC (H.264) WebCodecs Registration is the first entry in the registry. It describes, for AVC (H.264), (1) the fully qualified codec strings, (2) the VideoDecoderConfig.description bytes, and (3) the codec-specific extensions to the VideoEncoderConfig.

[At the occasion of April Fools’ Day] W3C today re-introduced the popular BLINK feature as part of the open web platform, thus mitigating the community critique about the removal of the early version.

Using state-of-the-art W3C technology, Web authors now can be sure to get the readers’ attention that their important information deserves, and web users to never miss important information again.

The new feature gives back full editing control to web authors while ensuring an inclusive user experience for all. More information is available in the press release.

The Accessibility Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) has published new Developer Modules in the Curricula on Web Accessibility. This curricula provides a framework for creating courses on digital accessibility, for including accessibility in other courses, and for reviewing existing and proposed courses. The March 2021 publication includes: updated guidance in the Curricula overview page, updated Foundation Modules, and new Developer Modules. The new modules focus on accessible markup and coding techniques, primarily for teaching front-end developers. The next modules will cover designing and authoring accessible digital content.

Today we announced the Beta of a group calendaring service, developed by the W3C Systems Team. The tool aims to help W3C Groups schedule their meetings and share them with the W3C community. A new “Calendar” tab is now available from our group pages, lists all upcoming meetings a given group has scheduled, and enables in particular viewing times in different time zones (including your own), exporting and subscribing to an iCal feed.

This has been a long-standing request from W3C Groups to manage calendars of events, subscribe to them as well as easily view them on the Web, thus facilitating participation in, and scheduling of group meetings. You can read more in Jean-Gui Rouel’s blog posts about the tool’s discovery phase and about functionalities and future roadmap.

The Web Real-Time Communications Working Group has published WebRTC 1.0: Real-Time Communication Between Browsers as a W3C Recommendation. This document defines a set of JavaScript APIs to allow media and generic application data to be exchanged with another browser or device implementing the appropriate set of real-time protocols defined in IETF.

WebRTC already serves as a cornerstone of online communication and collaboration services. The WebRTC framework provides the building blocks from which web and app developers can seamlessly add video chat and peer-to-peer data exchange to a range of applications. Billions of users can interact now that WebRTC makes live video chat easier than ever on the Web. To learn more about this timely achievement and what the future holds for WebRTC, please, read our press release.