W3C

The Web Annotation Working Group has published a Candidate Recommendation for two documents:

• Web Annotation Data Model: This specification describes a structured model and format, in JSON, to enable annotations to be shared and reused across different hardware and software platforms. Common use cases can be modeled in a manner that is simple and convenient, while at the same time enabling more complex requirements, including linking arbitrary content to a particular data point or to segments of timed multimedia resources.
• Web Annotation Vocabulary: This specifies the set of RDF classes, predicates and named entities that are used by the Web Annotation Data Model. It also lists recommended terms from other ontologies that are used in the model, and provides the JSON-LD Context and profile definitions needed to use the Web Annotation JSON serialization in a Linked Data context.

This is a re-publication, without substantial change, of the Candidate Recommendation published on the 6th of September. The only significant change (beyond minor editorial clarifications and editorial changes) is that some features that are not expected to receive enough implementations to fulfill the exit criteria, have been moved into an informative appendix. No new features have been added and no normative features have been changed.

Candidate Recommendation means that the Working Group considers the technical design to be complete, and is seeking implementation feedbacks on the documents. There is a separate document how to use them and report on implementation results. The group is keen to get comments and implementation experiences on these specifications, either as issues on the Group’s GitHub repository or by posting to [email protected].

The group expects to satisfy the implementation goals (i.e., at least two, independent implementation for each of the test cases) by December 30, 2016.

The Web Platform Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Pointer Lock 2.0. This specification defines an API that provides scripted access to raw mouse movement data while locking the target of mouse events to a single element and removing the cursor from view. This is an essential input mode for certain classes of applications, especially first person perspective 3D applications and 3D modeling software. The new version of the specification introduces a few Shadow DOM accommodating changes.

The Web Performance Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Page Visibility Level 2. The Page Visibility API defines a means to programmatically determine the visibility state of a top level browsing context, and to be notified if the visibility state changes. This specification defines a means to programmatically determine the visibility state of a document. This can aid in the development of resource efficient web applications.

The W3C Social Web Working Group is calling for implementations of ActivityPub, which is now a Candidate Recommendation. The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and subscribing to content. The protocol design iterates significantly on the earlier pump.io protocol, and implementors of pump.io clients and servers are particularly encouraged to update.

W3C published today the report of the W3C Workshop on Web & Virtual Reality held on October 19-20 2016 in San Jose, California, USA. During the workshop, 120 participants representing browser vendors, headset and hardware manufacturers, VR content providers, designers and distributors analyzed the opportunities provided by making the Web a full-fledged platform for VR experiences.

They recognized the strong prospects already opened by existing and in-development Web APIs, in particular the WebVR API that was highlighted as an important target for near-term standardization, as well as the high priority of making the Web a primary platform for distributing 360° videos. They also identified new opportunities that would be brought by enabling traditional Web pages to be enhanceable as immersive spaces, and in the longer term, by making 3D content a basic brick available to Web developers and content aggregators.

You may read more in our media advisory.

The Internationalization Working Group has updated the Candidate Recommendation of Encoding. For new protocols and formats, as well as existing formats deployed in new contexts, this specification requires the utf-8 encoding. It also defines a limited set of other legacy encodings so that user agents can convert to and from utf-8 in a standardized and therefore interoperable way.