Don’t miss it! Register now for the upcoming W3C HTML5 online course that starts next Monday, 30 September 2013. Acclaimed trainer Michel Buffa will cover the techniques developers and designers need to create great Web pages and apps. This new course edition has been significantly enhanced since the June 2013 course. It features additional sections, including a JavaScript crash course, advanced techniques regarding time based animation, 2D geometric transformations, Web Audio API, etc., all illustrated by numerous examples. Learn more about W3DevCampus, the official W3C online training for Web developers.

The Protocols and Formats Working Group today published a First Public Working Draft of Accessible Rich Internet Applications WAI-ARIA 1.1. WAI-ARIA provides an ontology of roles, states, and properties that define accessible user interface elements and it can be used to improve the accessibility and interoperability of web content, particularly web applications. It is introduced in the WAI-ARIA Overview. WAI-ARIA 1.1 is expected to include only a few changes from 1.0. The primary change in this Draft is the addition of aria-describedat. Learn about the current status of WAI-ARIA 1.0 and 1.1, and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Timed Text Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of Timed Text Markup Language 1 (TTML1) (Second Edition). This document specifies Timed Text Markup Language (TTML), Version 1, also known as TTML1, in terms of a vocabulary and semantics thereof. The Timed Text Markup Language is a content type that represents timed text media for the purpose of interchange among authoring systems. Timed text is textual information that is intrinsically or extrinsically associated with timing information. It is intended to be used for the purpose of transcoding or exchanging timed text information among legacy distribution content formats presently in use for subtitling and captioning functions. In addition to being used for interchange among legacy distribution content formats, TTML Content may be used directly as a distribution format, for example, providing a standard content format to reference from a <track> element in an HTML5 document, or a <text> or <textstream> media element in a SMIL 2.1 document. Learn more about the Video in the Web Activity.

The MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 2.0. The technology described in this document “Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0“ enhances the foundation to integrate automated processing of human language into core Web technologies. ITS 2.0 bears many commonalities with its predecessor, ITS 1.0 but provides additional concepts that are designed to foster the automated creation and processing of multilingual Web content. ITS 2.0 focuses on HTML, XML-based formats in general, and can leverage processing based on the XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF), as well as the Natural Language Processing Interchange Format (NIF). Comments are welcome through 22 October. Learn more about the Internationalization Activity.

The Device APIs Working Group has published a Working Draft of Network Service Discovery. This specification defines a mechanism for an HTML document to discover and subsequently communicate with HTTP-based services advertised via common discovery protocols within the current network. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

The Semantic Web Interest Group has published a new Working Draft of vCard Ontology. The document describes a mapping of the vCard specification (RFC6350) to RDF/OWL. The goal is to promote the use of vCard for the description of people and organizations utilizing semantic web techniques and allowing compatibility with traditional vCard implementations. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

The Efficient XML Interchange Working Group has published a Working Draft of the EXI Canonicalization (EXI C14N) specification. It describes a relatively simple method for generating a physical representation, the canonical form, of an EXI document that accounts for the permissible differences between two logically equivalent EXI documents. One application field for the canonical form of an XML-based document or document subset is digital signature. Supporting EXI canonicalization without going through plain-text XML is preferable in constrained environments and device classes where document size and processing overhead are critical. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.