W3C

To further the growth of market for IoT devices and services, W3C has launched the Web of Things Working Group to develop initial standards for the Web of Things, tasked with the goal to counter the fragmentation of the IoT; reduce the costs of development; lessen the risks to both investors and customers; and encourage exponential growth in the market for IoT devices and services.

In advance of W3C’s presence at Mobile World Congress 2017 next week, where W3C executives will be available on 27-29 February, W3C CEO Dr. Jeff Jaffe commented, “There are huge, transformative opportunities not only for mobile operators but for all businesses if we can overcome the fragmentation of the IoT. As stewards of the Open Web Platform, W3C is in a unique position to create the royalty-free and platform-independent standards needed to achieve this goal.“

Read the Media Advisory to learn about the technical approach the Working Group will take and the broad range of collaboration.

The CSS Working Group has published two First Public Working Drafts today:

• CSS Timing Functions Level 1, a module that describes a way for authors to define a transformation to be applied to the time of an animation. This can be used to produce animations that mimic physical phenomena such as momentum or to cause the animation to move in discrete steps producing robot-like movement.
• CSS Containment Module Level 1, a module which describes the ‘contain’ property, which indicates that the element’s subtree is independent of the rest of the page. This enables heavy optimizations by user agents when used well.

W3C published today the report from the W3C “Smart Descriptions & Smarter Vocabularies (SDSVoc)” workshop, held on 30 November – 1 December 2016 in Amsterdam.

The report contains an executive summary and conclusions, as well as a brief summary and visual report of each session, with links to all presentation slides. The event’s agenda also links to the papers received and the rough notes taken throughout the event. The clear conclusion from the well attended workshop was that a new Working Group is needed to achieve two goals:

1. Revise and expand the Data Catalog Vocabulary, DCAT to cover versioning, data series, APIs and more.
2. Develop the concepts of data profiles (cardinality constraints and enumerated allowed values) and, from that, the mechanisms for content negotiation by those profiles. Following a careful analysis of the current state of the art, presented at the workshop, an Internet Draft is already in preparation on this topic. The WG’s role will be to put this in context and explain how fallback mechanisms can be used.

We’ve shared advance notice today that the W3C team is working on a draft charter for a new Data Exchange Working Group, and encourage public comments and suggestions on the draft charter in the dxwg GitHub issue repository.

We thank our Workshop sponsors: the EU-funded VRE4EIC project and Informatie Vlaanderen, the Flemish government’s digital agency, as well as our host, CWI, for making this event possible.

The Spatial Data on the Web Working Group has published a Group Note of Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices. This document advises on best practices related to the publication and usage of spatial data on the Web; the use of Web technologies as they may be applied to location. The best practices are intended for practitioners, including Web developers and geospatial experts, and are compiled based on evidence of real-world application. These best practices suggest a significant change of emphasis from traditional Spatial Data Infrastructures by adopting a Linked Data approach. As location is often the common factor across multiple datasets, spatial data is an especially useful addition to the Linked Data cloud; the 5 Stars of Linked Data paradigm is promoted where relevant.

The Internationalization Working Group has published a Working Group Note that contains templates for counter styles used by various cultures around the world. It can be used as a reference for those wishing to add user-defined counter styles in their CSS style sheets. The content of this document was originally part of the CSS Lists and Counters specification, but is now published as a standalone document. It is expected that the document will be updated from time to time to include new counter styles.

The Internationalization Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of International text layout and typography index. This document points browser implementers and specification developers to information about how to support typographic features of scripts or writing systems from around the world, and also points to relevant information in specifications, to tests, and to useful articles and papers. It is not exhaustive, and will be added to from time to time.