W3C

W3C announced today WebVR Authoring: Opportunities and Challenges Workshop, 5-7 December 2017, in Brussels, Belgium. The event is hosted by DigitYzer.

The primary goal of the workshop is to bring together WebVR stakeholders to identify unexploited opportunities as well as technical gaps in WebVR authoring.

Participants in the workshop will:

• Share good practices and novel techniques in creating WebVR-based content
• Discuss existing and foreseen challenges in using WebVR to deploy content and services in specific usages
• Contribute to the unification of efforts for documenting and advocating the development of WebVR content

Attendance is free for all invited participants and is open to the public, whether or not W3C members. Our aim is to get a diversity of attendees from a variety of industries and communities, including:

• 360° video and VR content producers and distributors
• VR experience designers and artists
• 3D, VR and WebVR authoring tools and platforms
• authors of WebVR content
• experts in challenges and opportunities of VR for people with disabilities
• browser vendors

Expected topics of discussion include:

• Landscape of WebVR authoring tools
• Creating and packaging 3D assets for WebVR
• Managing assets for practical progressive enhancement
• Progressive enhancement applied to the variety of user input in WebVR
• Understanding and documenting WebVR constraints for 3D artists
• Optimizing delivery of 360° videos to VR headsets on the Web
• Practical approaches to building accessible WebVR experiences
• Mapping the impact of ongoing evolutions of the Web Platform (Web Assembly, WebGPU, streams) on WebVR authoring
• Impact of performance factors on authoring WebVR content
• Creating convergence on WebVR advocacy platforms

For more on the workshop, please see the workshop details and submission instructions.

Registration is available online due by 10 November 2017.

Core Accessibility API Mappings (Core-AAM) 1.1 has been published by Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) Working Group as a Candidate Recommendation and is now undergoing implementation finalization and testing. Core-AAM describes how roles, states, and properties in Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.1 should be exposed to accessibility APIs. Implementation of this specification makes it possible for users with disabilities to obtain and interact with information using assistive technologies. These mappings will also be used in part for verifying implementation success of WAI-ARIA 1.1 which is already a Candidate Recommendation. The draft implementation report shows the progress of testing. Please send implementation information or comments by 19 October 2017. Read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

W3C has just rechartered the Web Commerce Interest Group to improve Commerce on the Web for users, merchants, and other stakeholders. This charter represents the next iteration of the Web Payments Interest Group. Changes to the charter reflect the broader scope of Interest Group discussions that have been taking place over the past year, including topics such as:

• digital offers (coupons, loyalty, etc.)
• payments from a variety of devices, including mobile devices, automobiles (in-car payments), televisions, virtual reality, and Internet of Things devices
• various aspects of payment flow, including initiation of payment, recurring payments, receipts, and refunds
• emerging regulations
• fraud reduction
• harmonization with other standards

Learn more about Web Commerce at W3C.

The Web of Things (WoT) Working Group has published the following three First Public Working Drafts:

Web of Things (WoT) Architecture: This document describes the abstract architecture for the W3C Web of Things, which consists of three initial building blocks, i.e., (1) WoT Thing Description, (2) WoT Scripting API and (3) WoT Binding Templates.

Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description: This document describes a formal model and common representation for a Web of Things Thing Description. A Thing Description describes the metadata and interfaces of Things, where a Thing is an abstraction of a physical entity that provides interactions to and participates in the Web of Things.

Web of Things (WoT) Scripting API: This document describes a programming interface representing the WoT Interface that allows scripts run on a Thing to discover and consume (retrieve) other Things and to expose Things characterized by Properties, Actions and Events.

The group is planning to publish the third building block, WoT Binding Templates, as a First Public Working Draft shortly.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today called for broad implementation and testing of Web technologies to make online checkout easier for users and improve conversions and security for merchants. All major browser makers are now implementing Payment Request API and Payment Method Identifiers, which today advanced to Candidate Recommendation Status. The Web Payments Working Group encourages merchants, Web developers, and users to experiment with these early implementations and provide feedback to the group. In parallel, the Working Group will be expanding its test suite for the API to help ensure browser interoperability. Read more in the W3C Media Advisory and blog post.

The Web Platform Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Intersection Observer. This specification describes an API that can be used to understand the visibility and position of DOM elements (“targets”) relative to a containing element or to the top-level viewport (“root”). The position is delivered asynchronously and is useful for understanding the visibility of elements and implementing pre-loading and deferred loading of DOM content.

An updated Working Draft of Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT) Rules Format 1.0 was published today by the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG). This draft addresses all comments received on the previous draft, and is accompanied by fully- and semi-automated sample ACT Rules that implement this rules format. Learn more from the ACT Rules Format call for review email and read about the the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).