The W3C TAG is pleased to announce the publication of a new TAG Finding " Identifying Application State."

URIs were originally used primarily to identify documents on the Web, or with the use of fragment identifiers, portions of those documents. As Web content has evolved to include Javascript and similar applications that have extensive client-side logic, a need has arisen to use URIs to identify states of such applications, to provide for bookmarking and linking those states, etc. This finding sets out some of the challenges of using URIs to identify application states, and recommends some best practices. A more formal introduction to the Finding and its scope can be found in its abstract.

The W3C TAG would like to thank Ashok Malhotra, who did much of the analysis and editing for this work, and also former TAG member T.V. Raman, who first brought this issue to the TAG's attention, and who wrote earlier drafts on which this finding is based.

W3C is pleased to announce a third edition of its most popular online training course, “ Introduction to Mobile Web and Application Best Practices“:

• Start date: 30 January 2012
• Duration: 8 weeks
• Early bird price: 165€ (until 9 Jan. 2012)
• Full price: 225€
• Course description and other details
• Registerto this course

During the course, participants will:

• learn about and use the recommended versions of HTML and CSS to use for mobile today;
• understand the constraints of working on mobile and how to overcome them to deliver the best possible experience to the widest range of users;
• practice client side and server side content adaptation techniques;
• learn about and use the exciting new APIs available on modern mobile platforms.

The course will be lead by trainers Frances de Waal and Phil Archer. Read the past students’ feedback and find out more about the course . And do not forget to registerbefore 9 January 2012 to benefit from the early bird rate!

Ukrainian:
Створення Невеличких SVG Сторінок в Арабській мові, Івриті та інших скриптах, які вирівнюються справа наліво(Creating SVG Tiny Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and other Right-to-Left Scripts)

Russian:
Создание небольших SVG Страниц на Арабском языке, Иврите и других скриптах, которые выравниваются справа налево(Creating SVG Tiny Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and other Right-to-Left Scripts)

These articles were translated thanks to Alexandr Shlapak.

The Open Web Platform weekly summary is about love for the open Web, about the work we do together, about the hours we spent every day to create a better Web. I can work in this domain, because others gave an open environment for working. Let’s keep it open.

HTML5

The specification has been modified to allow two syntaxes for the timeelement. You may write time with a T or a single space separatorbetween the date and the time.

<time>2011-12-24T23:59</time>
<time>2011-12-24 23:59</time>

XML documents have a UTF-8default encoding. Kornel Lesiński askedif it would be possible to do that for documents with an HTML5 doctype. Henri Sivonen (Mozilla), who is also developing the HTML5 parser for Firefox, rejected the suggestion. It would introduce more incompatibilities and more specific behaviors than the already existing explicit mechanisms.

HTML Rich Content

Sometimes Web developers need to extend their content with a richer semantics by adding simple data structure to their markup. A first Working Draft for RDFa Lite 1.1has been published. For example to specify that this column is written by a human and not a cow.

<p vocab="http://schema.org/" 
   resource="#karl" 
   typeof="Person">
   This blog post is written by 
   <span property="name">Karl Dubost</span>.</p>

The purpose of this group is to develop a common specification in OWL for structured and unstructured annotations on Web documents, based on prior work developed by the Annotation Ontology (http://code.google.com/p/annotation-ontology/) and Open Annotation Collaboration (http://www.openannotation.org/) efforts.

You are invited to support the creation of this group: http://www.w3.org/community/groups/proposed#annotation

Video Tracks

The WebVTT format (Web Video Text Tracks) is a format intended for marking up external text track resources. WebVTT has escaped HTML5 to be developed by the Web Media Text Tracks Community Group . They also have a twitter account . Anne van Kesteren has created a WebVTT Validator and published the source codeon bitbucket. The syntax is a very simple text file.

WEBVTT

00:11.000 --> 00:13.000
<v Roger Bingham>We are in New York City

00:13.000 --> 00:16.000
<v Roger Bingham>We're actually at the Lucern Hotel, just
down the street

Web Apps

If humanity had an UndoManagerAPI we might have been able to fix a lot of mistakes. Ryosuke Niwa (webkit) is working on such an API for the Web and he is asking feedback. A long list of use caseshas been outlined to better understand what do we need to solve.

Dominique Hazaël-Massieux (W3C) has been giving a summary of the Standards for Web Applications on Mobile. He has published an update for November 2011.

DOM

The new methods for append, prepend, … that we mentioned a few weeks ago have been addred to the DOM 4 specification in the mutation methods section . This triggered a new syntax requirement for WebIDL , which has not yet been completely defined. Anne van Kesteren (Opera) has also started to define Mutation observers.

CSS

An update has been published for CSS Image Values and Replaced Content and a new editordraft for CSS3 Grid Layout . As a kind reminder, these are drafts and then not stable. If the implementations change them or drop these features, you will have to eat your own hat :)

Web Architecture

A tendency in Web development has emerged a little while ago. Web developers started to push hash sign in their URIs not to define an anchor in the document but the state of an application. The W3C Technical Architecture Group has summarized best practices for handling hash signs URIs.

The W3C TAG is working on a few topics in parallel. You could participate constructively to the discussions by subscribing to the www-tag mailing list.

HTTP

You can now buffer this number, RFC 6455, in your memory lane. The WebSocket Protocol is accepted. Though be careful, because there might still be a bit of breakage depending if your browser has released a version of the implementation but disabled by default. Check your preferences.

In the discussion about extending HTTP status code, Roy Fielding (Adobe) gave an interesting rule for knowing how/when to extend the list of codes.

When extending HTTP status codes, the question that needs to be asked is “how will a client process this response differently than any of the existing status codes?”

Elsewhere

• Move The Web Forwardis the new kid in town. It gives a long list of resources to help Web developers stay informed about what’s going on the Open Web platform.
• Redbot , the HTTP validation tool developed by Mark Nottingham, now supports HTTP over SSL and TLS

This column is written by Karl Dubost , working in the Developer Relations team at Opera Software.

15 – 16 March 2012, Luxembourg. Co-located with the European Commission’s Language Technology Showcase Days, and hosted by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission.

The MultilingualWeb projectis looking at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the Web multilingually. The project aims to raise the visibility of existing best practices and standards and identify gaps. The core vehicle for this is a series of four events which are planned over two years.

After three highly successful workshops in Madrid, Pisa, and Limerick, this final workshop in the series will continue to investigate currently available best practices and standards aimed at helping content creators, localizers, tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web.

Participation is free. We welcome participation from both speakers and non-speaking attendees. For more information, see the Call for Participation

Back in February, I announced the start of a series of updates for a standardization roadmap for Web applications on mobile devices , a compilation of the most relevant current and upcoming technologies to develop Web applications well-fitted to mobile devices, which was again updated in May and August 2011.

I have just released a fourth update to that document that takes into account the many changes that have occurred in the past 3 months. Among the highlights:

• the publication of the first draft of the Web Real-Time CommunicationsAPIs, including work on the API to access the camera and microphone;
• progress on device APIs such as the Vibration API (first draft), battery status (last call), touch events (last call), accelerometer/gyroscope support(last call).

The next smaller iteration of this document will be provided end of February, in time for Mobile Word Congress 2012. Stay tuned!

Updated draft of CSS Image Values and Replaced Content Module Level 3

The Open Web Platform weeklysummary is about HTML5 oldies, shadows and intents, and protocols.

HTML5

Yehuda Katz and a few others have started a discussion on Restoring PUT and DELETE in HTML5 forms ( Issue 1067 ). The Ruby on Rails Web framework is currently using a hack for simulating PUT and DELETE.

The Web is an amazing big pile of history. borderattribute on tableelements didn’t have any units. Though people had a tendency to put units such as the wrong <table border="5px">. So browsers repaired automagically to take into account only the beginning of the string and ignore any trailing characters. Sylvain Galineau (Microsoft) raised an issue because he thought it would create issues for microdata values. Ian Hickson mentioned that the incorrect values were not validbut fixed by the browser if wrong.

INSand DELelements which are used to track insertion and deletion of contents in HTML have a very simple model. So simple that according to Daniel Glazman (Disruptive Innovations), it is not easily implementablein any useful way for authoring tools.

A Community Group has been proposed to discuss ideas around the future of HTML and associated features.

Web Apps

Webkit has a proposed patch for the Network Information API . This is an interesting API because it allows to create apps which behave differently depending if the network is 3g, wifi, etc. For example, imagine a responsive Web designwhere images of adequate sizes are sent depending on the type of network which gives a good idea of what could be the bandwidth.

Rich Tibbet (Opera) has proposed a model for the Web intentswork.

Simon Pieters (Opera) wanted an API to queue a task. After discussing about the opportunity of such a need, Glenn Maynard proposed a piece of code that finally Simon extended.

var queueTask = function(task) {
    var mc = new MessageChannel();
    var args = [].slice.call(arguments, 1);
    mc.port1.onmessage = function(){ 
        this.onmessage = null; task.apply(task, args); 
        };
    mc.port2.postMessage(null);
    };
queueTask(function(arg) { console.log(arg, this) }, "test"); 

Dimitri Glazkov (Chromium team) has proposed a high level overview of Web Components for Web Developers.

DOM

The setAttributeNS()is implemented differently in IE, Firefox, Webkit and Opera. The discussion, which started on the mutability of attributes, led to discuss about simplifying the platform for HTML documents by removing the namespacing of attributes. According to Jonas Sicking (Mozilla), that would also improve browser performances. There would still be needed for XMLDocumentinterface.

HTTP

When exchanging data in between client and server, there are a few techniques. One of them is XMLHttpRequest which helps inject a data flow into the page without reloading the full context. People often uses it to transfer JSON packaged data. Anne van Kestern (Opera) has added jsonresponse type to XMLHttpRequest.

When a client and server interact on the Web, the server answer to client requests with 3 number codes. These have very specific meanings. For example, 200means that the server has successfully answered the client request. It is happening quite often that Web developers (specifically those developing Web APIs) lack some HTTP status code to have a richer interactions between the client and the server. Mark Nottingham has been working for a while on new HTTP status code.

HTTP/1.1 allows many types of characters. This has a tendency to create security issues when, for example in CGI/1.1 , translating these characters into UNIX environment variables. Some of them are not valid and/or parseable characters. Yutaka Oiwa broughtthe subject on HTTPbis mailing list.

Elsewhere

• CodeMirroris a JavaScript library that can be used to create a relatively pleasant editor interface for code-like content ― computer programs, HTML markup, and similar.
• Creating Custom Font Stacks with Unicode-Range
• IE10 Preview 4thhas support for CORS.
• Firefox seems likely after Chrome to support SPDY

This week, the theme of Anne Van Kesteren ’s reportabout Encoding woes and WebVTT.

This column is written by Karl Dubost , working in the Developer Relations team at Opera Software.

A new version of Requirements for Japanese Text Layouthas just been published as a Working Draft.

The plan is to replace the current W3C Working Group Notewith the content of this new Working Draft after a period of review.

This document describes requirements for general Japanese layout realized with technologies such as CSS, SVG and XSL-FO. It is also being used by developers of other technologies, such as ebooks. The document builds on and further develops the Japanese standard for text layout, JIS X 4051.

This second version of the document contains a significant amount of additional information related to hanmen design, such as handling headings, placement of illustrations and tables, handling of notes and reference marks, etc.

Please take a look at the new version, which is available in English and Japanese, and send any comments to public-i18n-cjk@w3.org ( subscribe at the archive main page). Use “[JLReq]” in the subject line of your email, followed by a brief subject.

Send any comments before the end of December. We hope to publish the final version of the updated Working Group Note early in the New Year.