W3C

The Internationalization Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Internationalization Glossary. This document provides definitions for various terms related to W3C internationalization.

The Web Applications Working Group has published the ARIA in HTML as a W3C Candidate Recommendation Snapshot. This specification defines the authoring rules (author conformance requirements) for the use of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.1 and Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.0 attributes on [HTML] elements. This specification’s primary objective is to define requirements for use with conformance checking tools used by authors (i.e., web developers). These requirements will aid authors in their development of web content, including custom interfaces/widgets, that makes use of ARIA to complement or extend the features of the host language [HTML].

W3C announced today that as part of our growing concern for inclusion, all W3C workshops will now include the following standard accessibility accommodations:

• English captions available on all pre recorded presentations, before the live sessions
• Real-time English captions available during the live sessions
• American Sign language and other services will depend on participant requests

W3C organizes Workshops to promote early involvement in the development of W3C activities from Members and the public. The goal of a workshop is usually either to convene experts and other interested parties for an exchange of ideas about a technology or policy, or to address the pressing concerns of W3C Members.

The CSS Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of CSS Fonts Module Level 5. This document extends the ‘font-size-adjust’ property to improve legibility of fallback fonts across a wider range of writing systems, adds font metrics overrides to reduce layout shift while Web fonts load, and adds overrides to improve the synthesis of super- and sub-scripts.

The Web Machine Learning Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Web Neural Network API. This document describes a dedicated low-level API for neural network inference hardware acceleration. Read more in the blog post about context on this work.

The Audio Working Group has published Web Audio API as a W3C Recommendation. This specification describes a high-level Web API for creating, shaping, and processing audio directly in a Web browser or in web applications.

With the API standardized and deployed as a royalty-free feature in Web browsers and other devices and platforms, both on desktop and mobile, creating sound with the Web Audio API has become a dependable, widely available, built-in capability, eliminating the need to install plugins or download separate applications. You may read more in our Press Release.

Today W3C released to the public the April 2021 edition of our W3C Strategic Highlights which documents the tremendous work to enhance, grow and strengthen the Web platform, and how the Web Consortium meets the needs of industry and society as a whole.

At the same time, as we celebrate the anniversary of the release of the World Wide Web into the public domain on 30 April 1993 by CERN, our CEO Jeff Jaffe has published his reflections on the centrality of the Web Consortium as the Web has been accelerating to meet society’s needs, and on the importance of the Web infrastructure in the modern world.

Human civilization is at an extraordinary juncture. The Web Consortium is in an incredible position to host the open forum where diverse voices from different parts of the world come together to incubate and build the global standards for the Web in the 25 years to come.