W3C

An updated Working Draft of Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT) Rules Format was published today by the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG). This draft addresses all comments received on the previous draft. Most importantly, the “Selector” approach was replaced with “Applicability” and “Expectation” pairs, to make ACT Rules less procedural. This draft is accompanied by sample ACT Rules that implement this rules format. Read about the the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The W3C Advisory Committee having nominated three individuals, is invited today to vote until 2 April 2018 for one seat in the 2018 special election to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) per Process Document now granting an additional seat.

The TAG is a special working group within the W3C, chartered under the W3C Process Document, with stewardship of the Web architecture. Some aspects of its mission include

• to document and build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary;
• to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG;
• to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C.

The Web Performance Working Group invites implementations of an updated Candidate Recommendation of High Resolution Time Level 2. This specification defines an API that provides the time origin, and current time in sub-millisecond resolution, such that it is not subject to system clock skew or adjustments.

The Timed Text Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of TTML Profiles for Internet Media Subtitles and Captions 1.0.1 (IMSC1). This document specifies two profiles of [TTML1]: a text-only profile and an image-only profile. These profiles are intended to be used across subtitle and caption delivery applications worldwide, thereby simplifying interoperability, consistent rendering and conversion to other subtitling and captioning formats.

Comments are welcome through 27 March 2018.

The Arabic Layout Task Force, part of the W3C Internationalization Interest Group, has published a First Public Working Draft of Text Layout Requirements for the Arabic Script. This document describes the basic requirements for Arabic script layout and text support on the Web and in eBooks. These requirements provide information for Web technologies such as CSS, HTML and digital publications about how to support users of Arabic scripts. Currently the document focuses on Standard Arabic and Persian. Public comments are welcome, please raise them as github issues.

Read how W3C Internationalization (i18n) is making the World Wide Web worldwide.

The WebAssembly Working Group has published three First Public Working Drafts:

• WebAssembly Core Specification describes version 1.0 of the core WebAssembly standard, a safe, portable, low-level code format designed for efficient execution and compact representation.
• WebAssembly JavaScript Interface provides an explicit JavaScript API for interacting with WebAssembly.
• WebAssembly Web API describes the integration of WebAssembly with the broader web platform.

WebAssembly is a virtual instruction set architecture with many use cases and can be embedded in many different environments, that enables high performance applications on the Web. The design goals of WebAssembly are fast, safe, and portable semantics; efficient and portable representation. WebAssembly code is also intended to be easy to inspect and debug, especially in environments like web browsers.

The Permissions & Obligations Expression Working Group has just published a Recommendation for two documents, namely:

• ODRL Information ModelThe Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) is a policy expression language that provides a flexible and interoperable information model, vocabulary, and encoding mechanisms for representing statements about the usage of content and services. The ODRL Information Model describes the underlying concepts, entities, and relationships that form the foundational basis for the semantics of the ODRL policies.
  Policies are used to represent permitted and prohibited actions over a certain asset, as well as the obligations required to be met by stakeholders. In addition, policies may be limited by constraints (e.g., temporal or spatial constraints) and duties (e.g., payments) may be imposed on permissions.
• ODRL Vocabulary & ExpressionThe ODRL Vocabulary and Expression describes the terms used in ODRL policies and how to encode them.

Please read more in the W3C Blog about ODRL, its story and its future, ODRL: A Path Well Travelled, a post authored by the working group co-chair, Renato Iannella, Monegraph.