W3C

The Web Applications Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Web Share API. This specification defines an API for sharing text, links and other content to an arbitrary destination of the user’s choice. The available share targets are not specified here; they are provided by the user agent. They could, for example, be apps, websites or contacts.

The WebRTC Working Group invites implementation of its updated Candidate Recommendation of WebRTC 1.0: Real-time Communication Between Browsers specification.

The WebRTC API enables browsers to establish real-time audio, video and data transmission between browsers and other peers.

Since its previous publication as a Candidate Recommendation, the Working Group has resolved all its substantive issues, ensuring better alignment between the specification and its implementations, improving and clarifying support for “simulcast” transmission and built better support against possible race conditions when peers set up their connections.

Comments are welcome by January 12 2020.

The Devices and Sensors Working Group invites implementations of four Candidate Recommendations:

• Generic Sensor API defines a framework for exposing sensor data to the Open Web Platform in a consistent way. It does so by defining a blueprint for writing specifications of concrete sensors along with an abstract Sensor interface that can be extended to accommodate different sensor types.
• Accelerometer defines Accelerometer, LinearAccelerationSensor and GravitySensor interfaces for obtaining information about acceleration applied to the X, Y and Z axis of a device that hosts the sensor.
• Gyroscope defines a concrete sensor interface to monitor the rate of rotation around the device’s local three primary axes.
• Orientation Sensor defines a base orientation sensor interface and concrete sensor subclasses to monitor the device’s physical orientation in relation to a stationary three dimensional Cartesian coordinate system.

Comments are welcome by 8 January 2020.

The JSON-LD Working Group invites implementations of three Candidate Recommendations:

• JSON-LD 1.1 defines a JSON-based expression of Linked Data graphs. The syntax is designed to easily integrate into deployed systems that already use JSON, and provides a smooth upgrade path from JSON to JSON-LD. It enables the creation of more easily interoperable Web services, the ability to store Linked Data in JSON-based storage engines, and brings more meaningful data to Web services and APIs.
• JSON-LD 1.1 Processing Algorithms and API defines an Application Programming Interface (API) for developers implementing a set of algorithms for programmatic transformations of JSON-LD documents.
• JSON-LD 1.1 Framing allows developers to query a JSON-LD document’s contained graph, by example, and reshape output into a specific JSON tree layout.

Candidate Recommendation means that the Working Group considers the technical design to be complete and is seeking implementation feedback on the documents. The group is keen to get comments and implementation experiences on these specifications as issues raised in the documents’ respective GitHub repositories (see the document headers for the exact references).

The group expects to satisfy the implementation goals (i.e., at least two, independent implementations for each of the test cases) by 17 February 2020.

The CSS Working Group has published CSS Writing Modes Level 3 as a W3C Recommendation.

This CSS module defines CSS support for various international writing modes and their combinations, including left-to-right and right-to-left text ordering as well as horizontal and vertical orientations. These new CSS features allow a mixture of horizontal and vertical text regions on the same page. The specification also adds support for such things as isolation in bidirectional text, glyph orientation controls, and short, inline horizontal runs in lines of vertical text.

Please, read our press release for additional information and acknowledgements.

The WebAssembly Working Group has published today the three WebAssembly specifications as W3C Recommendations, marking the arrival of a new language for the Web which allows code to run in the browser.

• WebAssembly Core Specification defines a low-level virtual machine which closely mimicks the functionality of many microprocessors upon which it is run. Either through Just-In-Time compilation or interpretation, the WebAssembly engine can perform at nearly the speed of code compiled for a native platform. A .wasm resource is analogous to a Java .class file in that it contains static data and code segments which operate over that static data. Unlike Java, WebAssembly is typically produced as a compilation target from other programming languages like C/C++ and Rust.
• WebAssembly Web API defines a Promise-based interface for requesting and executing a .wasm resource. The structure of a .wasm resource is optimized to allow execution to begin before the entire resource has been retrieved, which further enhances responsiveness of WebAssembly applications.
• WebAssembly JavaScript Interface provides a JavaScript API for invoking and passing parameters to WebAssembly functions. In Web browsers, WebAssembly’s interactions with the host environment are all managed through JavaScript, which means that WebAssembly relies on JavaScript’s highly-engineered security model.

WebAssembly provides a safe, portable, low-level code format designed for efficient execution and compact representation. This technology enables the Web platform to perform more efficient execution of computationally-intensive algorithms, which in turn makes it practical to deliver whole new classes of user experience on the Web and elsewhere. Because WebAssembly is a platform-independent execution environment, it can also be used on any other computer platform. Please, read our press release for additional information and acknowledgements.