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!

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!

When the Web started some 20 years ago, it brought a platform for distributing and accessing text, with an added dimension brought by links: hypertext. Because it was free and could be deployed everywhere easily, it was a revolution.

For the past few years, we've seen this additional dimension brought to media content, building hypermedia: SVG and canvas make it possible to build graphics that integrate or link to content from various sources, the addition of the audio and video tags in HTML5 are the starting points for making audio-video content as integrated into the Web as images have been. The Popcorn.js project illustrates for instance how video content can benefit from hyperlinking (much in the same way I had been exploring 2 years ago with my presentation viewer). Because these technologies are, can be deployed everywhere easily, I expect this will increasingly revolutionize our consumption of media.

I believe we're now starting to see a new trend of that sort, with the emergence of what I would call hyperdevices.

As more and more devices ( mobile obviously, but also tablets, TV, cars, lightbulbs and many more) get connected, they more often that not get shipped with Web capabilities.

As the Web gains more and more access to the specific capabilities of these devices ( touch interactions , geolocation , accelerometer , and many more ), not only does it become a platform of choice to develop applications targeted at these devices (as we’re exploring in the MobiWebApp project), but it also creates new form of interactions across these devices that were not possible previously.

To illustrate that point, I've built a couple of very simple demos:

• the remote whiteboard lets you use a touch-screen device to draw on another device screen, via the browser; in other words, it gives touch-capabilities to devices that don't have touch screens (e.g. most desktops or TV sets) — see the video of the demo in action
• the 3D explorer lets you use a device with an accelerometer to rotate a 3D-graphic (in this case, the HTML5 logo ) on a separate screen (see a video of the demo in action); it thus gives the equivalent of a 3D-mouse to any Web-enabled devices; whilst there probably are some 3D mouses out there, it's by far not as ubiquitous as mobile devices that come with an accelerometer

We're still at the very early days on this wave, but there is a growing interest around it. Device and service discovery (see recent discussions on Web Intents ) will play a role there without a doubt, and the work done as part of the webinos project(where I'm involved) will hopefully also inform the technical challenges that are still to be overcome. We will also need plenty of creativity to invent user interactions that match these new capabilities.

But for sure, this is where we are going.

Follow me on Twitter: @dontcallemdom.

I’ve just published on the W3C blogan illustration on another aspect in which mobile Web applications create new opportunities: given how ubiquitous the Web is becoming, it is now offering ways for devices to complete one another, making what I call “hyperdevices” (by analogy to hypertext).

I’ve built two demonstrations that illustrate this, and that you can either run by yourself, or simply watch as a video:

• the remote whiteboard exploits touch-capabilities from a mobile device to draw on a computer ( video);
• the 3D explorer uses a mobile device with an accelerometer as a way to manipulate a 3D object on another screen ( video).

The work happening in the Device APIs Working Group— in particular around device discovery — will be a critical component in making this type of interactions a natural extension of what we think of using the Web.

There is increasing interest in multiscreen applications, and this is featured in the latest webinos video on multiplayer games . In the office, we are used to having to plug our personal computers into the room's projector, but perhaps these days are numbered. It should be easy to have web applications that run across multiple devices so that you can run your presentation from your smart phone or tablet and view it on the wall screen, with no need for video cables at all. One aspect of this is how your mobile device discovers the wall screen. This is now in active development in the W3C Device APIs Working Group.

Large displays in public spaces are often used for Digital Signage , and this was the subject of a break out session in TPAC2011 . One challenge is how to provide personalized content for public displays. This was brought into focus by the film Minority Report , and has made it into reality with road side billboards that recognize car number plates . The long range infrared laser iris scanning technology in Minority Report is a little scary, but another possibility is to use face recognition together with pico cells. This identifies the set of people nearby based upon the mobile phones they are carrying, and by limiting the number of people increases the chances of successful face recognition. Bluetooth and WiFi MAC addresses offer further alternatives. Social networks and photo sharing sites already have our photos and profiles, so this would be a direct extension to their advertising based business model.

A final piece in the jigsaw is enabling the displays to target multiple passersby with personalized content. The emergence of 3D displays is pointing the way to a future where the content you see is based upon your position relative to the display, and determined by the face recognition software acting on the camera feeds for the display. By this point, you are probably getting increasingly concerned over privacy. Luckily, W3C is on the job with the Tracking Protection Working Groupallowing you to opt out of personalized ads, whether on a conventional web page or a public display in the airport.

As announced a few weeks ago , next week a W3C workshop dedicated to offline Web applicationswill take place in Santa Clara, California.

I submitted two position papers based on the input and feedback I’ve gathered through the MobiWebApp project: one on HTTP optimizations for HTML5’s ApplicationCache , and the other on making Web applications first class citizens.

These are only two of the 28 papers that were submitted to the workshop, and which are bound to make a basis for a great discussion next Saturday.

Are you concerned about mobile fragmentation? Do you need to test a Web application on a mobile device? If so, we would like to invite you to the Mobile Web Applications Interoperability eventon 6-7 December 2011, in Sophia-Antipolis, France.

This event, co-organized by W3C through MobiWebApp and MOSQUITO project partners , and hosted by ETSI, will be the occasion:

• to practice and develop test casesfor the W3C testing framework. Web specifications under consideration are those directly relevant for the development of mobile Web applications (candidates include the audio/video elements in HTML5, HTML5 Application Cache, the Contacts API, Device Orientation Event specification, Web Storage, Web Workers).
• to test Web applications on a wide variety of devicesthrough various network configurations

Participation is free and open to everyone. Please register on ETSI’s Web site by mid-November.

Check the Call for Participationfor details.

The MultilingualWeb Workshop in Limerickwas once more a success, thanks to the efforts of the excellent speakers and the local organizers, but also thanks this time to the participants themselves who enthusiastically took part in the Open Space discussion organized by TAUS. This will hopefully lead to some longer term initiatives, and most groups are already planning to continue their discussions in Luxembourg, next Spring. We had around 90 attendees.

The program pagehas now been updated to point to speakers’ slides and to the relevant parts of the IRC logs. Links to video recordings will follow shortly.

There will also be a page pointing to social media reports, such as blog posts, tweets and photos, related to the workshop. If you have any blog posts, photos, etc. online, please let Richard Ishida know (ishida@w3.org) so that we can link to them from this page.

A summary report of the workshop will follow a little later.