The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG) today published the First Public Working Draft of Applying WCAG 2.0 to Non-Web Information and Communications Technologies (WCAG2ICT). It is a draft of an informative (that is, not normative) W3C Working Group Note that will clarify how Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 can be applied to non-Web ICT. Please see important background information in the Call for Review e-mail. Comments are welcome through 7 September 2012. Read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Web Performance Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Navigation Timing. This specification defines an interface for web applications to access timing information related to navigation and elements. Comments are welcome through 28 August. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Web Performance Working Group invites implementation of three Candidate Recommendations:

• Page Visibility which defines a means for site developers to programmatically determine the current visibility state of the page in order to develop power and CPU efficient web applications.
• Performance Timeline which defines an unified interface to store and retrieve performance metric data. This specification does not cover individual performance metric interfaces.
• User Timing which defines an interface to help web developers measure the performance of their applications by giving them access to high precision timestamps.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Technical Architecture Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Best Practices for Fragment Identifiers and Media Type Definitions. Fragment identifiers within URIs are specified as being interpreted based on the media type of a representation. Media type definitions therefore have to provide details about how fragment identifiers are interpreted for that media type. This document recommends best practices for the authors of media type definitions, for the authors of structured syntax suffix definitions (such as +xml), for the authors of specifications that define syntax for fragment identifiers, and for authors that publish documents that are intended to be used with fragment identifiers or who refer to URIs using fragment identifiers. Learn more about the Technical Architecture Group.

W3C is pleased to announce commitments from Adobe, Google, and Microsoft for sponsorship funding that will enable W3C to provide additional staffing in support of the HTML Working Group's full range of activities, including editing several specifications and developing tests. These sponsorships will help W3C fill a position announced in June in response to an April call for editors from the HTML Working Group Chairs. In their April email, the Chairs also outlined the group's parallel efforts to finalize a stable HTML5 standard by 2014 and engage with the community on future HTML features. Learn more about the HTML Working Group.

Related story 2012-07-25: HTML Working Group Chairs announce some HTML5 editor appointments.

The Provenance Working Group published three Last Call Working Drafts today. Provenance is information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing a piece of data or thing, which can be used to form assessments about its quality, reliability or trustworthiness.

• PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model introduces the provenance concepts found in PROV and defines PROV-DM types and relations. The PROV data model is domain-agnostic, but is equipped with extensibility points allowing domain-specific information to be included.
• PROV-O: The PROV Ontology expresses the PROV Data Model using the OWL2 Web Ontology Language (OWL2). It provides a set of classes, properties, and restrictions that can be used to represent and interchange provenance information generated in different systems and under different contexts. It can also be specialized to create new classes and properties to model provenance information for different applications and domains.
• PROV-N: The Provenance Notation is introduced to provide examples of the PROV data model: aimed at human consumption, PROV-N allows serializations of PROV instances to be created in a compact manner. PROV-N facilitates the mapping of the PROV data model to concrete syntax, and is used as the basis for a formal semantics of PROV. The purpose of this document is to define the PROV-N notation.

Comments on the Last Call Working Drafts are welcome through 18 September. The group also published a Working Draft of PROV Model Primer, which provides an intuitive introduction and guide to the PROV specification for provenance on the Web. The primer is intended as a starting point for those wishing to create or use PROV data. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

The SPARQL Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of SPARQL 1.1 Query Language. RDF is a directed, labeled graph data format for representing information in the Web. This specification 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. SPARQL contains capabilities for querying required and optional graph patterns along with their conjunctions and disjunctions. SPARQL also supports aggregation, subqueries, negation, creating values by expressions, extensible value testing, and constraining queries by source RDF graph. The results of SPARQL queries can be result sets or RDF graphs. Comments are welcome through 21 August. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.