The latest version of the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML Working Group charter includes provisions for ongoing work on restrictive content protection systems – a decision that has angered groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Free Software Foundation.
The World Wide Web Consortium has a roster of proposed enhancements, including better forms, spell checking, and video captioning
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is seeking to invalidate a pair of Apple patents so the underlying technologies can be used as part of a royalty-free HTML5 stack.
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has posted a draft set of application programming interfaces that web applications could one day use to store structured content offline.
The web, ideas on what to do with it and applications to take advantage of it seem to advance at a dizzying pace which some find difficult to cope with. The annual Webstock conference is one forum where people excited or perturbed by this growth can take stock and share their ideas and impressions.
A group formed to promote the Open Document Format (ODF) is abandoning its support of the file format in favour of a document format governed by the W3C, a move that throws a wrench into the already acrimonious business of creating one global file format for office documents.
A group of IT vendors including Microsoft and IBM are backing a specification aimed at making it easier to manage services on a network by creating a common way to define applications, servers and other IT assets.
The vendors have submitted the specification, called the Service Modeling Language (SML), to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). SML defines a consistent way to communicate how computer networks, applications, servers and other IT resources are described, or modeled, in XML, Microsoft says.
Microsoft, IBM, BEA Systems, BMC Software, CA, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, Intel and Sun also submitted a companion specification, called the SML Interchange Format (SML-IF), to define how to exchange SML models between applications.
SML works by enabling IT resource models to be created from reusable building blocks rather than requiring custom descriptions of every service. This should reduce cost and complexity for customers when they try to define network resources to manage services built on top of them, Microsoft says. Currently, different assets are identified on the network in different formats, which can leave some technical details lost in translation and make it hard to manage all of the services, the company says.
All of the vendors contributed intellectual property to the specifications that were submitted to the W3C, according to Microsoft.
Companies often come together to develop specifications that will standardise IT processes and then submit them to standards bodies. However, a quorum of companies must support and use a specification in order for it to be useful to the industry.
More information about SML and SML-IF can be found on the W3C's website.
Seeking to establish an industry standard for website scripting, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 HTML specification as a W3C Recommendation, constituting an endorsement as a W3C standard.