W3C

The Web Applications Working Group has published five documents today:

• Last Call Working Draft of The WebSocket API. This specification defines an API that enables Web pages to use the WebSocket protocol (defined by the IETF) for two-way communication with a remote host. Comments are welcome through 14 June.
• Last Call Working Draft of Indexed Database API.This document defines APIs for a database of records holding simple values and hierarchical objects. Each record consists of a key and some value. Moreover, the database maintains indexes over records it stores. An application developer directly uses an API to locate records either by their key or by using an index. A query language can be layered on this API. An indexed database can be implemented using a persistent B-tree data structure. Comments are welcome through 21 June.
• First Public Working Draft of Input Method Editor API. This specification defines an “IME API” that provides Web applications with scripted access to an IME (input-method editor) associated with a hosting user agent.
• First Public Working Draft of URL. This specification defines the term URL, various algorithms for dealing with URLs, and an API for constructing, parsing, and resolving URLs.
• Group Note of XBL 2.0. XBL (the Xenogamous Binding Language) describes the ability to associate elements in a document with script, event handlers, CSS, and more complex content models, which can be stored in another document. This can be used to re-order and wrap content so that, for instance, simple HTML or XHTML markup can have complex CSS styles applied without requiring that the markup be polluted with multiple semantically neutral div elements.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Requirements for Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0. This document gathers metadata categories – essentially items like ways to indicate whether or not specific text should be translated, support for machine translation, and so forth – developed within the MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group. The proposed metadata targets web content (primarily HTML5) and “deep Web” content, such as content stored in a content management system (CMS) or XML files from which HTML pages are generated, that facilitates its interaction with multilingual technologies and localization processes. Learn more about the Internationalization Activity.

Today W3C Launched the new Independent User Interface (Indie UI) Working Group that will collaborate with the Web Events WG to develop a way for user actions to be communicated to web applications. Indie UI will develop an intermediate layer between device- and modality-specific events and the functionality needed by web applications, e.g., scrolling the view, placing focus on an object, etc. Indie UI will define a way for different user actions (e.g., scrolling via touch screen, via mouse wheel, or via voice commend) to be translated into a simple event. Then web application developers can get these events from different devices without having to recognize how the user performed the action. Learn more from the announcement e-mail and read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Widget Interface. This specification defines an application programming interface (API) for widgets that provides, amongst other things, functionality for accessing a widget's metadata and persistently storing data. Comments are welcome through 19 June. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Internationalization Core Working Group has published a Group Note of Web Services Internationalization (WS-I18N). This document describes enhancements to SOAP messaging to provide internationalized and localized operations using locale and international preferences. These mechanisms can be used to accommodate a wide variety of development models for international usage. Learn more about the Internationalization Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published three First Public Working Drafts today:

• Introduction to Web Components. This document is a non-normative reference, which aims to provide an overview of how Web Components work. It summarizes the normative information in the respective specifications in an easy-to-digest prose and illustration.
• Shadow DOM. This specification describes a method of establishing and maintaining functional boundaries between DOM subtrees and how these subtrees interact with each other within a document tree, thus enabling better functional encapsulation within DOM.
• The Screen Orientation API. The Screen Orientation API's goal is to provide an interface for web applications to be able to read the screen orientation state, to be informed when this state changes and to be able to lock the screen orientation to a specific state.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.