The Internationalization Working Group has published a first Draft Note of Catalan Gap Analysis. This document describes and prioritises gaps for the support of Catalan on the Web and in eBooks. In particular, it is concerned with text layout. It checks that needed features are supported in W3C specifications, in particular HTML and CSS and those relating to digital publications. It also checks whether the features have been implemented in browsers and ereaders. This is a preliminary analysis.

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) and the WCAG2ICT Task Force has published Guidance on Applying WCAG 2.2 to Non-Web Information and Communications Technologies (WCAG2ICT) as a Group Draft Note. This document is a first draft update to the previous WCAG2ICT Note that provided guidance on applying WCAG 2.0 to non-web documents and software. This updated draft includes guidance for WCAG 2.1 success criteria and glossary terms. The group will add guidance for WCAG 2.2 success criteria in upcoming drafts. For an introduction, see the WCAG2ICT Overview.

The Advisory Board has published a first Draft Note of Vision for W3C. This document is an articulation of W3C’s mission, values, purpose, and principle.

The goal of this document is to:

• Help the world understand what W3C is, what it does, and why it matters.
• Be opinionated enough to provide a helpful framework when making decisions, particularly on controversial issues.
• Be grounded enough in the shared values of the W3C community to represent the emergent consensus of most of our participants.
• Be timeless enough that it does not need frequent revision.

The intent is for this document to eventually become a W3C Statement.

Today the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) published Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 as a W3C Proposed Recommendation. WCAG and supporting documents explain how to make content more accessible to people with disabilities. WCAG addresses accessibility of content on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. To learn more about WCAG, see WCAG 2 Overview. To get up-to-date information on the latest version, see What's New in WCAG 2.2.

The Web of Things Working Group has just published three Proposed Recommendations for WoT. The W3C Web of Things (WoT) enables interoperability across IoT platforms and application domains. The goal of the WoT is to preserve and complement existing IoT standards and solutions. The W3C WoT architecture is designed to describe what exists, and only prescribes new mechanisms when necessary.

The three Proposed Recommendations are:

• Web of Things (WoT) Architecture 1.1 describes the abstract architecture for the W3C Web of Things based on a set of requirements derived from use cases for multiple application domains. This specification describes a superset of the features defined in the WoT Architecture 1.0 specification.
• Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description 1.1 describes the metadata and interfaces of Things, where a Thing is an abstraction of a physical or virtual entity that provides interactions to and participates in the Web of Things. This specification describes a superset of the features defined in the WoT Thing Description 1.0 specification.
• Web of Things (WoT) Discovery describes how to discover and obtain the Thing Description of a Thing in a distributed environment for various use cases.

Comments are welcome through 8 August 2023.

The Internationalization Working Group has published a first Draft Note of Korean Layout Gap Analysis. This document describes and prioritises gaps for the support of Korean language on the Web and in eBooks. In particular, it is concerned with text layout. It checks that needed features are supported in W3C specifications, in particular HTML and CSS and those relating to digital publications. It also checks whether the features have been implemented in browsers and ereaders. This is a preliminary analysis.

The CSS Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of CSS Anchor Positioning. This allows a positioned element (such as a tooltip or pop-up footnote) to size and position itself relative to one or more "anchor elements" elsewhere on the page. Because the anchoring element could have any size or position on the page, a flexible fallback scheme is also defined whereby a series of rules is tried until one is found that does not result in the positioned element overflowing its containing block.

The Timed Text Working Group invites implementations of the IMSC Hypothetical Render Model Candidate Recommendation Snapshot. This specification specifies an Hypothetical Render Model (HRM) that constrains the presentation complexity of documents that conform to any of the TTML Profiles for Internet Media Subtitles and Captions ([IMSC]). 

The model is not intended as a specification of the processing requirements for implementations. For instance, while the model defines glyph cache for the purpose of modelling how the number of glyph drawing operations can be reduced, it neither requires the implementation of such a cache, nor models the sub-pixel glyph positioning and anti-aliased glyph rendering that can be used to produce text output. Furthermore, the model is not intended to constrain readability complexity.

Comments are welcome via the GitHub issues by 20 July 2023.

Today W3C launched its new website, thus ending four months of beta that followed three years of work. We invite on GitHub any feedback on the website, or content issues. 

There is more to do to since the scope of the redesign was limited to most of our public pages, but we will gradually work to include the rest of the site, starting with Chinese and Japanese localized sites.

The goals of the redesign were to achieve a cleaner and modern look and greater usability, better accessibility, as well as ultimately simplifying how the site is managed. Please read more in our blog post.

After almost four months in Beta during which we received constructive feedback, we are now ready to deploy the new W3C website starting Tuesday 20 June at 12:00 UTC.

Please make sure to check our “Site status” if you experience incidents. We expect some interruption for the duration of the deployment which will be done in one go and may take an hour or more.

We will send a public announcement when done.

There is more to do, since the scope of the redesign was limited to most of our public pages, but we will gradually work to include the rest of the site, starting with Chinese and Japanese localized sites.

We will invite on GitHub any feedback on website or content issues.

More information on the W3C Website redesign:

The goals of the redesign were to achieve a cleaner and modern look and greater usability, better accessibility, as well as ultimately simplifying how the site is managed. We also want to offer integrated Japanese and Chinese versions.

For several years, W3C has worked in close partnership with Studio 24 to redesign our website. This is, as many in our community know, an enormous undertaking and one which has been of great importance to us. You can read more from Studio 24’s blog post about our collaboration and process.

The Web Payments Working Group today published a Candidate Recommendation for Secure Payment Confirmation (SPC), a standardization milestone for a new browser capability that helps to streamline user authentication and enhance payment security during Web checkout.

SPC enables merchants, banks, payment service providers, card networks, and others to lower the friction of strong customer authentication (SCA), and produce cryptographic evidence of user consent, both important aspects of regulatory requirements such as the Payment Services Directive (PSD2) in Europe.

W3C, the FIDO Alliance, and EMVCo pursue improvements to online payment security through the development of interoperable technical specifications. Secure Payment Confirmation reflects this collaboration: it is built atop Web Authentication and is supported by both EMV® 3-D Secure (version 2.3) and EMV® Secure Remote Commerce (version 1.3). See How EMVCo, FIDO, and W3C Technologies Relate for more details.

Publication of Secure Payment Confirmation as a Candidate Recommendation indicates that the feature set is stable and has received wide review. W3C will seek additional implementation experience prior to advancing this version of Secure Payment Confirmation to Recommendation. Comments are welcome via the GitHub issues by 1 August 2023.

Please read our press release to learn more about this technology to streamline payment authentication.

W3C announced today the W3C Workshop “Secure the Web Forward”, previously postponed, is now being organized as a virtual event on 26-28 September 2023.

The Secure the Web Forward W3C Workshop brings together experts in standards and best practices needed to secure Web Applications, practitioners of Security Supply Chain in Open Source contexts, developer advocates with a focus on security and developers, designers and technologists with experience in adopting and deploying Web security standards and practices. We aim to develop a comprehensive picture and roadmap to address the challenges Web developers face in ensuring their applications are secure.

The scope includes:

• How to bring the “secure software supply chain” approach to the web development community.
• Guidance for different types of web developers who work at different levels of the stack.
• How to make emerging web application security standards and technologies easier to use and adopt by web developers.
• How can open source security focused efforts better support the web developer community?
• How can Open Source security review processes serve as inspiration for review of new web specifications?
• How do we make security part of the goals and priorities for business owners, product owners, product managers, etc…?

Attendance is free for all invited participants and is open to the public, whether or not W3C members.

For more information on the workshop, please see the workshop details and submission instructions. Position papers are due by 28 July 2023.

The Internationalization Working Group has published a first Draft Note of NʼKo Layout Requirements. This document describes requirements for the layout and presentation of text in a koiné register of Manding called Kángbɛ, using the NʼKo script when they are used by Web standards and technologies, such as HTML, CSS, Mobile Web, Digital Publications, and Unicode.

The W3C Membership approved the 2023 W3C Process Document, which takes effect today.

Notable changes include:

• Adjustments to remove the Process dependency on the Founding Director Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and to rebalance those responsibilities onto other parts of W3C.
• Most notably, rather than the Director, the W3C Council, which combines the W3C Advisory Board (AB), W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG), and CEO, will now hear and resolve formal objections. Over the past couple years, we have been practicing this Council process under delegation from the Director, and evolving the corresponding Process proposal in response to those experiences.
• The W3C Team, AB, or TAG rather than the Director is now responsible for proposing group creation and forcible closure; Member Review is now required for forcible group closure, not just for group creation.
• Appointed TAG seats now have consecutive term limits.
• Improvements to the definitions around filing objections, what constitutes an editorial change for non-REC-track documents, and what are the acceptable outcomes to AC Review inputs.
• Adjustment to match the new reality of a standalone W3C, as opposed to the previous Hosted model, though the impacts of that are very limited on the Process itself.

The role of Sir Tim Berners-Lee is thus evolving from Founding Director to Founder, Emeritus Director, Honorary Member of the Board of Directors. This important and significant transition has been happening progressively through several years of phasing out his direct involvement, and this has allowed for strengthening of the various mechanisms that drive web standardization.

You can read more about all changes since the 2 November 2021 Process Document, read the complete disposition of comments, or peruse the diff.

This document was developed between the W3C Advisory Board and the public Revising W3C Process Community Group. Comments and feedback on the new Process Document may be sent as issues in the public GitHub Repository.

The Accessible Rich Internet Applications Working Group has published Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.2 as a W3C Recommendation. Accessibility of web content requires semantic information about widgets, structures, and behaviors, in order to allow assistive technologies to convey appropriate information to persons with disabilities. This specification provides an ontology of roles, states, and properties that define accessible user interface elements and can be used to improve the accessibility and interoperability of web content and applications. These semantics are designed to allow an author to properly convey user interface behaviors and structural information to assistive technologies in document-level markup. This version adds features new since WAI-ARIA 1.1 [wai-aria-1.1] to improve interoperability with assistive technologies to form a more consistent accessibility model for [HTML] and [SVG2]. This specification complements both [HTML] and [SVG2].

This document is part of the WAI-ARIA suite described in the WAI-ARIA Overview.

The RDF Star Working Group has published the last two First Public Working Drafts of its Recommendation track deliverables:

• RDF 1.2 Semantics: This document describes a precise semantics for the RDF 1.2 Concepts and Abstract Syntax [RDF12-CONCEPTS] and RDF 1.2 Schema [RDF12-SCHEMA]. It defines a number of distinct entailment regimes and corresponding patterns of entailment. It is part of a suite of documents which comprise the full specification of RDF 1.2.
• SPARQL 1.2 Entailment Regimes: There are different possible ways of defining a basic graph pattern matching extension for an entailment relation. This document specifies one such way for a range of standard semantic web entailment relations. Such extensions of the SPARQL semantics are called entailment regimes within this document.

The W3C Membership has elected the following people to fill six seats on the W3C Advisory Board starting 1 July 2023: Tantek Çelik (Mozilla Foundation), Elika J Etemad (Apple Inc.), Wendy Reid (Rakuten Group, Inc.), Avneesh Singh (DAISY Consortium), Chris Wilson (Google LLC) and Song XU (China Mobile) will join continuing participants Qing An (Alibaba Group), Wei Ding (Huawei), Tatsuya Igarashi (Sony), Florian Rivoal (W3C Invited Expert) and Tzviya Siegman (Wiley). Many thanks to the 8 candidates, and thanks for contributions to the AB to the departing participants, Heejin Chung (Samsung) and Charles Nevile (ConsenSys), whose terms end this month.

Created in March 1998, the Advisory Board provides ongoing guidance to the W3C Team on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution. The Advisory Board manages the evolution of the Process Document. The elected Members of the Advisory Board participate as individual contributors and not representatives of their organizations. Advisory Board participants use their best judgment to find the best solutions for the Web, not just for any particular network, technology, vendor, or user. Read more about the Advisory Board and its work.

The Web Applications Working Group has published Web Share API as a W3C Recommendation. This specification defines an API for sharing text, links and other content to an arbitrary destination of the user’s choice. The available share targets are not specified here; they are provided by the user agent. They could, for example, be apps, websites or contacts.

The Web Applications Working Group invites implementations of the following two updated Candidate Recommendation Snapshots:

• UI Events KeyboardEvent code Values defines the values for the KeyboardEvent.code attribute, which is defined as part of the UI Events Specification [UIEvents]. The code value contains information about the key event that can be used to identify the physical key being pressed by the user.
• UI Events KeyboardEvent key Values defines the key attribute values that must be used for KeyboardEvent‘s key attribute, which is defined as part of the UI Events Specification [UIEvents].

The EPUB 3 Working Group has published EPUB 3.3, EPUB Reading Systems 3.3 and EPUB Accessibility 1.1 as W3C Recommendations, as part of the Digital Publishing activity.

EPUB defines a distribution and interchange format for digital publications and documents. The EPUB format provides a means of representing, packaging, and encoding structured and semantically enhanced web content — including HTML, CSS, SVG, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file container.

The content specification, which is what publishers, creators, or authors are really interested in, is now separate from the reading system specification that is of primary interest for implementers only. Editorial changes made the documents more readable.

Accessibility of EPUB publications was an essential part of the group’s activity. As a result, the EPUB Accessibility specification has been updated and, for the first time in the history of EPUB, is now an integral part of the EPUB Standard. Furthermore, the EPUB Accessibility specification is compatible with the European Accessibility Act whose influence will be significant on Digital Publishing in the years to come.

Finally, please note that this edition of EPUB is dedicated to Garth Conboy, who was one of the original designers of EPUB, and an initiator of the W3C Working Group which produced these new specifications. He is, and will remain, greatly missed.

Please read our Press Release to learn more about this achievement.

The Verifiable Credentials Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Verifiable Credentials JSON Schema Specification 2023. Among other things, the [VC-DATA-MODEL-2] specifies the models used for Verifiable Credentials, Verifiable Presentations, and explains the relationships between three parties: issuers, holders, and verifiers. Critical pieces of functionality referenced throughout the [VC-DATA-MODEL-2] are the that of verifiability, extensibility, and semantic interoperability. This specification provides a mechanism to make use of a Credential Schema in Verifiable Credential, leveraging the existing Data Schemas concept.

The Verifiable Credentials Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of BBS Cryptosuite v2023. This specification describes the BBS+ Signature Suite created in 2023 for the Data Integrity specification. The Signature Suite utilizes BBS+ signatures to provide the capability of zero knowledge proof disclosures.

The RDF-star Working Group has published the following 16 First Public Working Drafts, which represent the first milestone in the update of the RDF and SPARQL families of specification towards version 1.2:

1. RDF 1.2 Concepts and Abstract Syntax defines an abstract syntax (a data model) for the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which serves to link all RDF-based languages and specifications.
2. RDF 1.2 XML Syntax defines an XML syntax for RDF called RDF/XML in terms of Namespaces in XML, the XML Information Set and XML Base.
3. RDF 1.2 Turtle defines a textual syntax for RDF called Turtle that allows an RDF graph to be completely written in a compact and natural text form, with abbreviations for common usage patterns and datatypes.
4. RDF 1.2 N-Triples defines a line-based, plain text format for encoding an RDF graph.
5. RDF 1.2 N-Quads defines is a line-based, plain text format for encoding an RDF dataset.
6. RDF 1.2 TriG defines a textual syntax for RDF called TriG that allows an RDF dataset to be completely written in a compact and natural text form, with abbreviations for common usage patterns and datatypes. TriG is an extension of the Turtle format.
7. RDF 1.2 Schema defines a data-modelling vocabulary for RDF data. RDF Schema is an extension of the basic RDF vocabulary.
8. SPARQL 1.2 Query Language defines the syntax and semantics of the SPARQL query language for RDF. SPARQL can be used to express queries across diverse data sources, whether the data is stored natively as RDF or viewed as RDF via middleware.
9. SPARQL 1.2 Update describes SPARQL 1.2 Update, an update language for RDF graphs. It uses a syntax derived from the SPARQL Query Language for RDF.
10. SPARQL 1.2 Protocol specifies the SPARQL Protocol; it describes a means for conveying SPARQL queries and updates to a SPARQL processing service and returning the results via HTTP to the entity that requested them.
11. SPARQL 1.2 Query Results XML Format describes an XML format for the variable binding and boolean results formats provided by the SPARQL query language for RDF.
12. SPARQL 1.2 Query Results JSON Format describes the representation of SELECT and ASK query results using JSON.
13. SPARQL 1.2 Query Results CSV and TSV Formats describes the use of the formats CSV [RFC4180] (comma separated values) and TSV [IANA-TSV] (tab separated values) for expressing SPARQL query results from SELECT queries.
14. SPARQL 1.2 Service Description describes SPARQL service description, a method for discovering, and vocabulary for describing SPARQL services made available via the SPARQL 1.2 Protocol.
15. SPARQL 1.2 Federated Query defines the syntax and semantics of SPARQL 1.1 Federated Query extension for executing queries distributed over different SPARQL endpoints.
16. SPARQL 1.2 Graph Store Protocol describes the use of HTTP operations for the purpose of managing a collection of RDF graphs. This interface is an alternative to SPARQL 1.2 Protocol.

The W3C Advisory Committee has nominated nine individuals, and is invited today to vote until 1 June 2023 for six seats in the W3C Advisory Board (AB) election. Please, read the statements of the nominees.

Created in March 1998, the Advisory Board provides ongoing guidance to the W3C Team on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution. The Advisory Board also serves the W3C Members by tracking issues raised between Advisory Committee meetings, soliciting Member comments on such issues, and proposing actions to resolve these issues. The Advisory Board manages the evolution of the Process Document. The Advisory Board hears appeals of Member Submission requests that are rejected for reasons unrelated to Web architecture. For several years, the AB has conducted its work in a public wiki.

The elected Members of the Advisory Board participate as individual contributors and not representatives of their organizations. Advisory Board participants use their best judgment to find the best solutions for the Web, not just for any particular network, technology, vendor, or user.

The Verifiable Credentials Working Group has published the following two First Public Working Drafts:

• Verifiable Credentials Status List v2021: This specification describes a privacy-preserving, space-efficient, and high-performance mechanism for publishing status information such as suspension or revocation of Verifiable Credentials.
• Securing Verifiable Credentials using JSON Web Tokens: This specification defines how Verifiable Credentials can be represented as JSON Web Tokens (JWT) [RFC7519] and secured using JSON Web Signatures (JWS) [RFC7515].