W3C Strategic Highlights
November 2017

Introduction

Our April 2017 report highlighted how the Web continues to transform business and has grown to be the technical infrastructure for Society. In addition, we described how W3C's work enables the Web to scale to meet new challenges and opportunities.

Since April, W3C has chartered new work and made progress in the areas of excellence of the W3C Vision:

• Strengthening the core of the Web
  • Several specifications have made noteworthy progress, including Web Fonts, HTML 5.2, and Web Driver.
  • W3C is coordinating the Web Platform Testing effort to create a comprehensive cross-browser test suite for the majority of the Web platform.
  • Enhancements to the core of the Web and emerging new ideas (see core innovation).
• Building new Web capabilities
  • In the past 6 months W3C has chartered several new groups, including in particular: Web Assembly Working Group and Spatial Data on the Web Interest Group.
  • WebRTC implementations are progressing and the technology's impact increasing.
  • A number of technologies are enhancing display capabilities, including CSS Grid, CSS Flex Box models, new color value types, and HDR.
  • Social Web specifications ActivityPub and WebSub are near completion and will enable greater decentralization of social-networking applications.
• Meeting Industry Needs
  • W3C has solicited input on new work related to WebVR Authoring.
  • The mission of the new Publishing Working Group is to enable all publications —with all their specificities and traditions— to become first-class entities on the Web.
  • Payment Request API is now being implemented in all major browsers. It enables streamlined checkout and facilitates more secure Web payments. In addition, the Web Commerce Interest Group (formerly the Web Payments Interest Group) was rechartered to improve Commerce on the Web for users, merchants, and other stakeholders.
  • W3C published the EME standard to enable seamless playback of video content across many browsers. W3C sought to respond to concerns raised by some in the community about this work.
  • To help connect disparate IoT stacks, W3C published First Public Working Drafts of the Web of Things Architecture, Model and Programming Interface.
  • Automotive and payments groups within W3C have launched an Automotive Web Payments Task Force to see how the Web could support streamlined and secure Web payments from connected vehicles. In addition, a recently updated Vehicle Information Service Specification enables client applications to get, set, subscribe and unsubscribe to vehicle signals and data attributes.
  • W3C staff authored a Paper on Web5G for the IEEE. The paper examines current and envisioned enhancements to the Open Web Platform that the authors believe will be essential to realizing the full potential of 5G.

A strong emphasis in this report is on the core of the Web and how selected technologies and features amount to incredible core innovation once again, while our strategy and organization support such advances, meeting Industry needs, and fostering a Web for all.

New Strategies for Identifying Potential Standards

W3C has a variety of mechanisms for listening to what the community thinks could make for good future Web standards. These include discussions with the Membership, discussions with other standards bodies, and the activities of thousands of engineers in nearly 300 community groups. There are lots of good ideas. The W3C strategy team has been experimenting with ways to identify promising topics while inviting public participation.

The Strategy Funnel documents the staff's exploration of potential new work at various phases: Exploration and Investigation, Incubation and Evaluation, and eventually to the chartering of a new standards group.

A quick word on the Funnel view: it is a GitHub Project view in which each new area is an issue represented by a “card” in the stack. Cards move through the columns, usually from left to right. Most issues (cards) start in Exploration and move forward or move out of the funnel.

Public input is welcome at any stage but particularly once Incubation has begun. This helps W3C identify work that is sufficiently incubated to warrant standardization, to review the ecosystem around the work and indicate interest in participating in its standardization, and then to draft a charter that reflects an appropriate scope. Ongoing feedback can speed up the overall standardization process.

Since the previous highlights document, W3C has chartered a number of groups:

W3C Stories

W3C has started early work on a new communications initiative that we're calling W3C Stories, to complement key W3C technical work — in particular our focus on strengthening the core of the Web — and to increase and sustain the widest possible engagement in that technical work. The W3C Stories plans include doing outreach to collect stories from the W3C membership, the industry, and the wider community about real-world problems and needs of Web users, and the key W3C technologies that are solving those problems and addressing those needs.

The initial W3C Stories work centers around WebAssembly, with the plan that the W3C Stories effort for WebAssembly will help attract interested parties to get together at the W3C to, for example, explore possibilities for new standard technologies build on top of WebAssembly — and with the plan that after modeling W3C Stories for WebAssembly, we'll move on to expanding the effort to other key W3C technologies currently in development — again, with a particular focus on the technologies we've identified for strengthening the core of the Web.

W3C has invited initial collaboration during a W3C Stories breakout session scheduled for the TPAC 2017 Technical Plenary Day.

Core innovation once again

Through grass roots innovation in many areas; and through new use cases (aka W3C Stories) we are undergoing a sea change of enhancement to the core of the Web. We are beginning conversations on how to characterize that change and will be having a conversation about that with the W3C Membership at TPAC 2017.

To strengthen our focus, W3C anticipates a 2 or 3-year cycle to iterate on key strengths of the core of the Web, lower-level foundational technologies and emerging ideas (see below).

Strengthening the Core of the Web

Testing

Browser testing plays a critical role in the growth of the Web by:

• Improving the reliability of Web technology definitions;
• Improving the quality of implementations of these technologies by helping vendors to detect bugs in their products;
• Improving the data available to Web developers on known bugs and deficiencies of Web technologies by publishing results of these tests.

Starting in 2014 W3C began work on a coordinated open-source effort to build a cross-browser test suite for the Web Platform: Web-Platform-Tests. Web-Platform Test has been adopted by W3C, WHATWG, and all major browsers. And this year we integrated automatic generation of test results in the web-platform-tests dashboard. This progress should make it easier to identify and fix interoperability issues. With continuing improvement, it will provide a daily view of the Web interoperability progress.

A key piece of testing automation involves being able to "run the browser" programmatically, without manual interaction. The Browser Testing and Tools Working Group expects to advance the Web Driver specification to Recommendation in the coming weeks. It will allow additional automatic testing of Web browsers to improve interoperability.

HTML

All Documents: Web Platform Working Group

With a Candidate Recommendation last Summer, the HTML 5.2 version which provides better integration with specifications like Referrer Policy, CSP 3 and the Payment Request API, is headed to the final step leading to Recommendation. In parallel, the Web Platform Working Group continues discussions on HTML 5.3, the future release of HTML.

The Web Platform Working Group was recently rechartered to further its mission to expand the HTML language and provide specifications that enable improved client-side application development on the Web, including application programming interfaces (APIs) for client-side development and markup vocabularies for describing and controlling client-side application behavior.

The work on Service Workers and Background synchronization has moved to a dedicated Service Workers Working Group that W3C launched early August to enable Web applications to take advantage of persistent background processing, including hooks to enable bootstrapping of web applications while offline.

There is a healthy engagement and interest in the rest of the group's efforts and other focus and progress includes DOM and Encoding.

CSS

All Documents: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) — The Official (2017) Definition:

• CSS2
• CSS Syntax 3
• CSS Style Attribute
• Media Queries 3
• CSS Conditional Rules 3
• CSS Namespaces
• Selectors 3
• Cascading and Inheritance 3
• Values and Units 3
• Color 3
• Background and Borders 3
• Image Values and Replaced Content 3
• Fonts 3
• Multi-column 1
• User Interface 3
• Compositing and Blending 1
• Writing Modes 3

The Working Group is gathering requirements from two large groups of CSS users: the publishing industry and application developers. Within W3C, those groups are exemplified by the Publishing groups and the Web Platform Working Group. The former requires things like better pagination support and advanced font handling, the latter needs intelligent (and fast!) scrolling and animations.

An interesting recent development is the establishment of the Advanced Publishing Laboratory at Keio University (Tokyo), with which the CSS WG has and hopes to maintain good contacts. Their goal is to study the needs of electronic publishing, especially in Asian languages, something that the CSS WG (with other groups in W3C, in particular I18N), has also worked on for quite some time. The CSS Writing Modes module is one of the outcomes.

In addition to current work, CSS 2018 candidates include:

• Flexible Box Layout: horizontal or vertical stacks
• Custom Properties for Cascading Variables: custom author-defined properties
• Grid Layout: grid concept to lay out content
• calc(): calculated values for length units

Performance

Web of Data

All Standards and Drafts: Data on the Web

One of the challenges for organizations is integration of information systems, both within and across enterprises, given the demand for agility in coping with the inevitability of changing requirements. It is not enough to exchange data, you also need to ensure that providers and consumers agree on the meaning of that data. Using and integrating diverse data sources is challenging due to the lack of data models and common vocabularies. The mission of W3C's Data Activity is to facilitate potentially Web-scale data integration and processing. It does this by providing standard data exchange formats, models, tools, and guidance. This builds upon W3C’s previous work on RDF and Linked Data, and the corresponding suite of W3C Recommendations, e.g. for RDF, OWL, and SPARQL.

Note the relationship to the Web of Things, where W3C is seeking to define standards for an object model as an abstraction layer over existing IoT standards, using programming language independent descriptions of things and their relationships.

Notable progress in this space:

• The Data Exchange Working Group, launched in May this year to focus on catalogs and profiles for accessing data sets on the Web, building upon the Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) Recommendation from 2014, is currently working on gathering and studying use cases and requirements.
• The Permissions and Obligations Working Group is working on expressing permissions and obligations statements for digital content, drawing upon work by the ODRL W3C Community Group.
• The Spatial Data on the Web Working Group is working on best practices for spatial data on the Web, and just recently published OWL time ontology and the Semantic Sensor Network Ontology as W3C Recommendations.
• The RDF Data Shapes Working Group has been working on the means to express structural constraints for RDF graphs. The Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) Recommendation was published in July 2017.

Core Innovation

Through grass roots innovation in many areas; and through new use cases (aka W3C Stories) we are undergoing a sea change of enhancement to the core of the Web, which, given a 2 or 3-year cycle we can iterate on — key strengths of the core of the Web, lower-level foundational technologies and emerging ideas:

Capabilities of innovative technologies and proposed 'wrapper'

Technology	Capabilities	Wrapper
Extensible Web	Allow developers to extend browser features.	Extensible Web	the original focus of post-HTML 5 work.
Service Workers	Adding flexibility for offline support and performance enhancements via background tasks.	Extensible and performant Web	adding the focus on performance.
Web Components	Custom, reusable, encapsulated HTML tags.	Progressive (Web | Web applications)	to capture the theme of instant loading to give app type performance.
Web Assembly	Blazing speed that exploits hardware capabilities.	Flexible platform	to capture the wide variety of usages of the platform.
WebPerf	A framework for performance management.	HTML 6	Because we have always used numbers in the past.
WebAuthn	Step-up in security.	Application Foundations	Each capability (e.g. video, performance, payments) represents a different foundational capability for the platform.
Web Payments	Bring e-commerce into a standard framework.
MSE	A well developed media subsystem and APIs.
WebVR	Bring Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality into the Web.	Immersive Web	to characterize how users will most experience the new set of capabilities.

Meeting Industry Needs

Virtual reality, Augmented reality

Virtual reality is progressing at full speed, with a number of initial products reaching the market. The Web provides a promising preexisting ecosystem for the creation, distribution, and experiencing of VR content, applications, and services. In leveraging the Open Web Platform, we hope to provide an interoperability to avoid fragmentation and duplicated effort.

After an October 2016 Workshop on Web and Virtual Reality (read the report) work continued on a WebVR API specification, developed by the WebVR Community Group. In July 2017 the WebVR Working Group charter brought to Advisory Committee review in July 2017 did not gather sufficient support. While several W3C Members expressed support, some key participants in the WebVR W3C Community Group pointed out that standardization would be improved if the CG further incubated the work in light of possible scope evolutions.

The W3C staff continues to track the work of the WebVR Community Group closely until a clearer path to standardization emerges. In addition, W3C is exploring a broad AR workshop in 2018, and has organized a Workshop on WebVR Authoring that will take place 5-7 December 2017 in Brussels, Belgium. The primary goal of the workshop is to bring together WebVR stakeholders to identify unexploited opportunities as well as technical gaps in WebVR authoring.

Real-Time Communications (WebRTC)

All Standards and Drafts: Web Real Time Communication

The WebRTC API, a critical piece of making the Web a full-fledged communication platform and bringing P2P networking to the Web, is on track to Recommendation with a Candidate Recommendation in the Fall.

Widely deployed across browsers, WebRTC has turned capabilities that required multi-million dollars investments into a feature that can be adopted by anyone for any number of services, most notably being one link away from starting a meeting, without the need to install plugins or native apps.

Admittedly one of the most complex subsystem of the Web platform, the work has benefited from close and productive cooperation between W3C and IETF. A strong focus and lots of attention was brought to security and privacy concerns.

Until WebRTC becomes the standard, the WebRTC Working Group will focus on testing, address remaining issues following implementation feedback and tend to other features needed and WebRTC NV, which the group will discuss at the November W3C Technical Plenary meeting.

Digital Publishing

All Standards and Drafts: Digital Publishing

The Web is the universal publishing platform. W3C taking into account numerous digital publishing priorities across a variety of standards. Topic of particular interest include typography and layout, accessibility, usability, portability, distribution, archiving, offline access, and reliable cross referencing. In May 2017 the Digital Publishing Interest Group published Web Publications Use Cases and Requirements to shed light on Web capabilities needed to support a wide range of use cases.

To further ensure the W3C standardization agenda supports these topics, W3C launched the Publishing Working Group in June 2017. In October the group published an Editor's Draft of Web Publications, which defines a collection of information that describes the structure of Web Publications, so that user agents or developers may create user experiences well-suited to reading publications, such as sequential navigation and offline reading. This information includes the default reading order, a list of resources, and publication-wide metadata.

To continue to build W3C's publishing community and hear trends and requirements, on 9-10 November 2017 W3C holds its first Publishing Summit to discuss how web technologies are shaping publishing. From schools to libraries, from design to production to archiving, from metadata to analytics to AI, from New York to Paris to Buenos Aires to Tokyo, summit speakers will show how web technologies are making publishing more accessible, more global, and more efficient.

Web Payments

All Standards and Drafts: Web Payments

Poor Web checkout experiences —especially on mobile— create user frustration and lead to shopping cart abandonment. To improve the situation, W3C is developing standards that enable a new feature in browsers: a streamlined checkout experience, enabling a consistent user experience across the Web with lower front end development costs for merchants. Rather than retyping shipping addresses, contact information, payment credentials, and other information again and again across the Web, users can store and reuse information and more quickly and accurately complete online transactions.

The main piece of news since the previous highlights report is that all major browser vendors have begun to implement the Payment Request API, which advanced to Candidate Recommendation in September.

In May, the Working Group published a first draft of of Payment App API to enable users to make payments in the new ecosystem from Web-based payment apps. The Working Group is also preparing to publish a Payment Method Manifest specification as a First Public Working Draft. This specification enables payment method owners to authorize software from different domains to fulfill the payment method, an important security consideration in the payment app ecosystem.

Task forces within the WPWG are discussing a variety of payment methods beyond Basic Card Payment: card tokenization and credit transfers.

W3C, Google, Mastercard, and Airbnb demonstration of progress on these standards at Money 20/20 on 23 October.

The Working Group’s charter expires at the end of the year, so the group plans to discuss "new features" for Payment Request API at its November face-to-face meeting.

Media and Entertainment

Media and Entertainment Road-map

HTML5 brought audio and video to the Web. Standardization activities since then have aimed at turning the Web into a professional-grade platform fully suitable for the delivery of media content and associated materials. W3C has recently completed work on adaptive streaming (via Media Source Extensions) and content protection (via Encrypted Media Extensions). All major browser vendors support these specifications.

In June W3C rechartered the Media and Entertainment Interest Group. The scope of the group now covers Web technologies used in the end-to-end pipeline. This includes capture, production, distribution and consumption of continuous media: videos, sound recordings, and their associated technologies. One of the first tasks of the Interest Group has been to identify a path forward for the work that had been started in the TV Control Working Group on a TV Control API. Although the Working Group closed down for lack of industry support, a number of Members are still interested in the topic. Work may resume on the API, though perhaps with a more limited scope.

The Timed Text Working Group develops and maintains formats used for the representation of text synchronized with other timed media. Two of its specifications are expected to advance soon to Candidate Recommendation: Timed Text Markup Language 2 (TTML2) and Web Video Text Tracks format (WebVTT). The group also recently revised the Candidate Recommendation of TTML Profiles for Internet Media Subtitles and Captions 1.0.1 and published a new Group Note: note (Using the ITU BT.2100 PQ EOTF with the PNG Format). That specification defines a mechanism for storing images that use the Reference PQ EOTF specified in BT.2100 in PNG images.

The Second Screen Working Group develops features to close the gap between the Web and existing TV platforms, which is achieved through the Presentation API and the Remote Playback API. The Presentation API is expected to advance shortly to Proposed Recommendation while the Remote Playback API will soon transition to Candidate Recommendation. In parallel, the Second Screen Community Group has made progress recently about an Open Screen Protocol to improve interoperability between screens across implementations.

Finally, the Web Media API Community Group launched a year ago to define a common baseline for HTML5 suitable for Web media applications and corresponding devices (TV sets, set-top boxes, game machines, mobile devices), to help reduce the cost of producing content that works across a variety of devices. The group is incubating the Web Media API Snapshot 2017 and developing Web Media Guidelines to provide guidance to developers of media web applications. The expectation is that after further incubation, this work will advance to a Working Group. The Community Group collaborates with the CTA WAVE Project.

Web of Things

All Standards and Drafts: Web of Things Working Group

Although the Internet of Things creates immense opportunities through connected sensors and actuators, big data, machine learning and integration of services on a Web scale, fragmentation is limiting the IoT's full potential. A rapidly increasing number of IoT platforms and technologies with limited interoperability are hindering some investments, making it hard for IoT to reach "critical mass." W3C's Web of Things work is designed to bridge disparate technology stacks in order to allow devices to work together independent of their underlying technology stack and thus achieve scale. Primarily, it provides mechanisms to formally describe IoT interfaces to allow IoT devices and services to communicate with each other, independent of their underlying implementation, and across multiple networking protocols. Secondarily, it provides a standardized way to define and program IoT behavior.

In January 2017 W3C launched the Web of Things Working Group to develop cross domain standards for thing descriptions, APIs and integration with IoT platforms in collaboration with the corresponding organizations. In September the group published three specifications:

• Web of Things (WoT) Architecture, which describes the abstract architecture for the W3C Web of Things.
• Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description, which describes a formal model and common representation for a Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description. Thing Descriptions make it possible both to integrate diverse devices and to allow diverse applications to interoperate.
• Web of Things (WoT) Scripting API, describes a programming interface representing the WoT Interface that allows scripts run on a Thing to discover and consume (retrieve) other Things and to expose Things characterized by properties, Actions and Events. Scripting is an optional "convenience" building block in WoT and it is typically used in gateways that are able to run a WoT Runtime and script management, providing a convenient way to extend WoT support to new types of endpoints and implement WoT applications like Thing Directory.

Automotive

All Standards and Drafts: Automotive

Browser ubiquity on a wide range of devices, open standards with a large developer base, and powerful capabilities make the Web a valuable platform for in-vehicle systems.

The W3C Automotive Working Group was launched at the end of 2016 to make it easier to build in-vehicle applications through APIs that expose vehicle signals: fuel level, speed, engine temperature, and so on. Both Vehicle Information Service Specification and Vehicle Information API Specification advancement toward CR is under discussion, and are being implemented, and benefit from a supporting test suite. The Working Group's service approach is usable by both QT and HTML5 developers, and supports headless applications running on the vehicle.

In parallel, the Automotive and Web Platform Business Group has launched several task forces to identify new standardization needs:

• One task force is examining the prospect of convergence between the Automotive Working Group's deliverables and the 2016 ViWi Member Submission from Volkswagen. The group has resolved to complete the existing Vehicle Information Service Specification work before rechartering the group for a second version based on Volkswagen submission, specifically RSI.
• The Location Based Services Task Force has a start of a report from Alibaba and PSA that can become future standards work. The task force has a competing solution modeled after VW submission and working with Genivi and to attract other stake holders for this area.
• The Media Tuning Task Force had been collaborating with the TV Controller API Working Group on automotive-centric use cases prior to the ViWi Submission, which includes a service based solution in line with how we are handling vehicle signals (telematics) and other services. It is already seeing use in production vehicles.
• Although the primary use of the signals information from the Working Group's APIs is for applications running on the vehicle itself, many of these vehicles will also connect with "the outside world," prompting the creation of a Privacy and Security Task Force. It is comprised of individuals from both the Working Group and Business Group and can examine concerns raised from work taking place in either. We will be working with Genivi Security Expert Group to review W3C's automotive standards work, building out attack trees and devising means to mitigate concerns raised.
• The Automotive Web Payments Task Force, a joint effort of the Automotive and Web Platform Business Group and the Web Commerce Interest Group, is exploring requirements to enable payments use cases, including tolls, road usage, parking, fuel/charging and other types of transactions on behalf of a vehicle.

Other areas of interest for exploration include standardizing around traffic and weather data but work has not started yet.

Web for All

Security, Privacy, Identity

Security and Strong Authentication

For many Web users, passwords are annoying to use and offer weak protection for their interactions —they're too often forgotten or set to weak, and easily-guessed combinations. Even strong passwords can be lost in data breaches or targeted for replay in phishing attacks. The Web Authentication API provides unphishable authentication, typically using hardware security devices. This can be used to replace or augment username/password-based authentication. The specification is expected to advance to Candidate Recommendation before the end of 2017. In October W3C rechartered the Web Authentication Working Group to develop the next version of the technology.

The Web Application Security WG rechartered for another two years. It continues work on CSP3, Mixed Content, Upgrade Insecure Requests, and Referrer Policy, Credential Management, Permissions API, Clear site data.

Verifiable Claims

From educational records to payment account access, the next generation of Web applications will authorize entities to perform actions based on rich sets of credentials issued by trusted parties. Human- and machine-mediated decisions about job applications, account access, collaboration, and professional development will depend on filtering and analyzing growing amounts of data. It is essential that data be verifiable.

A verifiable claim is a statement such as “I have a driving license and I'm over 18 years old” that might be needed with reliable confirmation from a third party before supplying adult content or before renting a car or authorizing a student loan. The mission of the Verifiable Claims Working Group (VCWG), which was created earlier this year, is to make expressing and exchanging claims that have been verified by a third party easier and more secure on the Web.

In June the Working Group published Verifiable Claims Use Cases for areas such as finance, education, healthcare, and retail. In August, the group published a First Public Working Draft of Verifiable Claims Data Model and Representations, which provides a standard way to express claims on the Web in a way that is cryptographically secure, privacy respecting, and automatically verifiable.

Internationalization (i18n)

All Standards and Drafts: Internationalization

Only around a quarter of current Web users use English online and that proportion will continue to decrease as the Web reaches more and more communities of limited English proficiency. If the Web is to live up to the "World Wide" portion of its name, it must support the needs of world-wide users as they engage with content in the various languages. The growth of epublishing also brings requirements for new features and improved typography on the Web, and it is important to ensure that those changes capture the needs of local communities.

The W3C Internationalization activities pursue this goal by gathering user requirements, supporting developers, and education & outreach. Requirements gathering needs to include both the documenting of requirements for specific scripts and languages, and efforts to analyse the gaps in technologies that exist or are currently in development. '''Developer support''' includes reviews, discussion and advice for WGs (and sometimes for external initiatives at the Unicode Consortium or the IETF, etc), and the preparation of guidelines and checklists that WGs can use to do self-review or self-education, as well as projects that focus on a specific technological problem, as the need arises. For '''education and outreach''' we develop articles to help people such as content authors understand and use the i18n features that are available, we contribute i18n advice to courses, maintain an i18n checker for authors to use with web pages, deliver talks at conferences, etc. For an overview of current projects see the i18n project radar.

W3C's Internationalization efforts progressed on number of fronts recently:

Japanese layout Vivliostyle contributed a member submission Current Status of Japanese Typography Using Web Technologies, which does a high level gap analysis between Requirements for Japanese Text Layout and CSS specifications. We are hoping to see more similar work related to the digital publishing industry coming out of Japan in the near future. There was a seminar in Tokyo to discuss similar topics. The i18n WG staff contact presented a talk Next Steps for Japanese Script Support (also available in Chinese).

Hebrew layout. A Hebrew layout task force has recently been set up to document layout requirements for Hebrew that need to be considered for CSS, digital publications, and other similar technologies if they are to adequately support the needs of Hebrew documents. Other ongoing task forces include Arabic, Chinese, and Indic, and there is also an ED for Ethiopic.

Text layout. A new Text layout issue tracker enables unprecedented tracking of requests for advice from local experts and layout-related issues and bugs for specs and browsers. Pointers to this information have been integrated into the International text layout and typography index, which provides a resource for implementers and spec developers.

The I18N activity supports developers in a variety of ways including through specification reviews. The I18N Working published Requirements for Language and Direction Metadata in Data Formats, which lays out issues and discusses potential solutions for passing information about language and direction with strings in JSON or other data formats. The group also published How to engage with the i18n WG for assistance and reviews. This explains how WGs and the i18n Activity can come together to ensure that internationalization issues are spotted and dealt with in developing technologies. In addition, it's now easier to find useful links from the Internationalization Home Page. It's also now possible to put a copy of our self-review checklist in a github issue and fill it out so that the information can be shared and tracked. The Working Group also published Ready-made Counter Styles as WG Note. This provides CSS templates for numbering lists or chapter headings, etc, in a range of styles representing many different writing systems.

The I18N WG also published the following new articles:

• Time & date: Essential concepts. Explains terminology used when talking about handling time and time zones on the Web.
• Styling vertical Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Mongolian text. How to use the new CSS features for vertical text, and what currently works and what doesn't in major browsers.
• Approaches to full justification. Explains how justification can vary from one writing system to another.
• Strings and bidi. Illustrates problems that can arise when strings are inserted into text and then displayed to users in different directional contexts: left-to-right (LTR) vs. right-to-left (RTL).

Web Accessibility

All Standards and Drafts: Accessibility; see also WAI Resources.

A billion people in the world have disabilities—one out of every seven—according to the World Report on Disabilities. Helping build W3C’s accessibility-supporting specifications, guidelines, evaluation and educational materials can help you ensure that your own organization is improving access to the Web for people with disabilities, and increase accessible technology options for other W3C Members and the public to implement.

Accessibility activities support W3C’s Web for All mission. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) continues to help ensure a cohesive package of coordinated accessibility activities, distributed throughout the functional management areas of W3C.

Horizontal reviews and support for W3C Working Groups

The Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) WG continues reviewing all W3C specifications, and following up with W3C groups as needed on accessibility barriers. The APA WG is developing an accessibility checklist for specification developers to pre-check their specifications for potential accessibility issues early in the development process, before APA review, with more detailed guidance available.

The APA's Research Questions Task Force (RQTF) is investigating several topics identified in the course of APA accessibility reviews, including accessible authentication strategies, virtual and augmented reality, and accessibility use cases for Web of Things.

New accessibility guidelines work

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) has been focusing on the development of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, an update to WCAG 2.0. An important goal for WCAG 2.1 is to maintain compatibility with WCAG 2.0. New success criteria that have been added to the Working Draft will expand coverage for low vision users, users with cognitive and learning disabilities, and mobile users with accessibility requirements. Currently WCAG 2.1 is scheduled for completion by June 2018. AG WG invites feedback on WCAG drafts, and particularly support in the development of implementation techniques and implementation testing in the near future.

Part of AG WG is also the Accessibility Conformance Testing Task Force (ACT TF). After initial incubation in the Auto-WCAG Community Group, ACT TF is developing the ACT Rules Format 1.0 specification as common format for test rules, and collecting ACT Test Rules contributed by Members and the community.

A "Silver" Task Force continues to explore stakeholder requirements for post-WCAG 2.1 work on accessibility guidelines.

International standards harmonization and coordination

WAI staff participates in several activities to support international harmonization and coordination of accessibility standards, and to promote W3C specifications and resources in these context. Some of these activities include:

• Supporting continued adoption of WCAG 2.0 in the United States;
• Ensuring continued alignment between WCAG 2.1 and the European Standard EN 301 549, that is currently being updated to improve accessibility for mobile contexts;
• Continued dialog in China, including on increased adoption of WCAG and authorized translation of ATAG 2.0

The Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) recently updated its List of Web Accessibility Laws and Policies, to help support visibility and awareness on the current support for W3C accessibility standards internationally.

Updated materials supporting uptake and implementation of guidelines

The Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) has been updating resources that explain the why, what and how of accessibility guidelines, to address needs of the diverse audiences for WCAG and other W3C specifications, which includes non-technical as well as technical audiences. Recently updated resources include: the reference list Web Accessibility Laws and Policies, and WAI Tutorials.

ARIA 1.1 Implementations

Accessible Rich Internet Applications 1.0 (WAI-ARIA) provides roles, states, and properties that can be used to improve the accessibility and interoperability of web content and applications for people with disabilities. An updated version, ARIA 1.1 is nearing Candidate Recommendation completion, and expands the capabilities of ARIA 1.0 by adding new features to improve interoperability with assistive technologies to form a more consistent accessibility model for HTML5 and SVG2. Recently updated supporting materials for ARIA include Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Model 1.1; HTML Accessibility API Mappings 1.0; WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices 1.1; and Editors' updates of Core Accessibility API Mappings 1.1 and Notes on using ARIA in HTML.

W3C in the World

Training at a Glance

W3Cx, a partnership between W3C and edX, has launched its first MOOC course in June 2015. Since then, nearly 600K students from all world countries have attended one of W3Cx's #webdev courses.

In April 2017 W3C introduced a "Front-End Web Developer" (FEWD) Certificate program composed of 5 MOOC courses:

• HTML5&CSS Fundamentals - in partnership with Microsoft (before with Intel)
• HTML5 Coding Essentials and Best Practices
• HTML5 Apps and Games
• CSS Basics - in partnership with Microsoft
• JavaScript Introduction - in partnership with University Côte d'Azur

Three courses created in partnership with Microsoft form part of Microsoft's Professional Program Certificate in Front-End Web Development.

In addition to W3Cx, W3C runs its own online training platform, W3DevCampus.

Liaisons at a Glance

W3C is involved through liaisons and coordination with many peer organizations, in order to:

• coordinate our respective agendas;
• avoid duplication of work;
• mitigate different milestones timing, different confidentiality rules, different IPR, different vision of the Web;
• make sure standards are interoperable;
• ensure the global set of Web and Internet standards form a compatible stack of technologies, at the technical and policy level (patent regime, fragmentation, use in policy making);
• promote Standards adoption equally by the industry, the public sector, and the public at large.

Recent liaisons activities include:

• In the past months, we have been active in coordination with the European Commission and the ESOs (European Standardization Organizations, ETSI/CEN/CENElec) to harmonize the parallel development of WCAG 2.1 and the update to the EN 301 549 on Accessibility.
• In August 2017, W3C has sent its request to ISO/IEC JTC 1 to reaffirm its PAS submitter status with ISO/IEC JTC 1 for the next five years.
• W3C participates in the ICANN Technical Experts Group and also in the NewGTLD Auction benefits CWG.
• W3C staff participates in the European Commission Multi-stakeholder Platform for ICT standardization, to improve the EU Rolling Plan with references to our work.

Conclusion

This is once again a time of change for the Web. Elements of the Open Web Platform meet users and Industry needs. W3C is embarking on the next transformation of the Web through grass roots innovation in many areas and studying how the Web can solve arising problems for real people. Our vision of the Web for 2020 and beyond encompasses long-resident Web Applications, extending browser features, offline support, app-like performance, a flexible platform accommodating Digital Publishing, payments, video distribution, games, and immersive experiences.