W3C News(200808-2)

W3C Takes Steps to Make Video "First-Class" Web Citizen
 

2008-08-15: Web-based video is exploding, for advertising, enterprise collaboration, entertainment, product reviews, and other applications. As prices drop for consumer electronics, amateur and professionals alike are creating increasingly high quality videos. Social networks are sprouting up around Web-delivered media. W3C today launched a new Video in the Web Activity to make video a "first-class citizen" of the Web. The initial scope of work, determined as a result of a successful W3C Workshop on Video will be conducted by three groups:
 

    *  Media Annotations, which will provide an ontology designed to facilitate cross-community data integration of information related to media objects in the Web, such as video, audio and images.
    *  Media Fragments, which will address temporary and spatial links (i.e., into a particular moment of a multimedia track, or location in two visual dimensions) using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).
    *  Timed Text, which will work on a standard for online captioning.

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Last Call: XProc: An XML Pipeline Language
2008-08-14: The XML Processing Model Working Group has published the Last Call Working Draft of XProc: An XML Pipeline Language. This specification describes the syntax and semantics of XProc: An XML Pipeline Language, a language for describing operations to be performed on XML documents. A pipeline consists of steps. Like pipelines, steps take zero or more XML documents as their inputs and produce zero or more XML documents as their outputs. Comments are welcome through 26 September.
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W3C Invites Implementations of Element Traversal Specification (Candidate Recommendation)
2008-08-13: The Web Applications Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Element Traversal Specification. This specification defines the ElementTraversal interface, intended to provide a more convenient alternative to existing Document Object Model (DOM) navigation interfaces, with a low implementation footprint. It does so by allowing script navigation of the elements of a DOM tree, excluding all other nodes in the DOM, such as text nodes. It also provides an attribute to expose the number of child elements of an element. 
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Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0 Requirements
2008-08-08: The Voice Browser Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0 Requirements. VoiceXML 2.0 is
designed for creating audio dialogs that feature synthesized speech,
digitized audio, recognition of spoken and DTMF key input, recording
of spoken input, telephony, and mixed initiative conversations. VoiceXML 3.0 is the next major release of VoiceXML. Its purpose is to provide even more powerful dialog capabilities that can be used to build advanced speech applications and to provide these
capabilities in a form that can be easily and cleanly integrated with other W3C language.
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Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) Working Draft Published
2008-08-06: The Protocols and Formats Working Group published an updated Working Draft of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA). WAI-ARIA defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. It especially helps with dynamic content and advanced user interface controls developed with Ajax, HTML, JavaScript, and related technologies. WAI-ARIA is introduced in the WAI-ARIA Overview and the WAI-ARIA FAQ. Read the updated WAI-ARIA Specification announcement that requests feedback on host language embedding, and about the Web Accessibility Initiative.  
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W3C Invites Implementations of XQuery Update Facility 1.0 (Candidate Recommendation)
2008-08-07: The XML Query Working Group has published the Candidate Recommendation of XQuery Update Facility 1.0. This document defines an update facility that extends the XML Query language, XQuery. The XQuery Update Facility provides expressions that can be used to make persistent changes to instances of the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model. This document incorporates changes made against the Candidate Recommendation of 14 March 2008. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity. 
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W3C Invites Implementations of CSS Mobile Profile 2.0 (Candidate Recommendation)
2008-08-01: The CSS Working Group has published a Candidate Recommendation for CSS Mobile Profile 2.0., which defines a common baseline of CSS support that even constrained mobile devices can provide. This effort is part of W3C's ongoing efforts to make the Web easier to use from a mobile devices (see related news). For the CSS Mobile Profile 2.0, W3C has worked closely together with OMA to remove the differences between W3C's and OMA's previous CSS-mobile profiles. An "alpha" quality test suite is available for the mobile profile. The Working Group will track implementations during the Candidate Recommendation phase. Implementers are invited to send feedback before February 2009.

Link:www.w3.org