W3C

The Spatial Data on the Web Interest Group has published a Group Note of The Responsible Use of Spatial Data. This note highlights some of the unique characteristics of spatial data within the broader realm of ethical use of data. A brief analysis of the relationship between law and ethics explains that responsible use is not mandatory. Nevertheless, both legal and ethical frameworks play an important role in shaping what can be considered “responsible”. As do the perspectives of those who interact closely with spatial data: the developers, the users and the regulators. Therefore this note not only provides an insight into the relevant legislation and ethics guidelines, but also considers the principles of ethical data sharing from each of these three perspectives. The principles are made practical by providing concrete communication guidelines and showing examples of good practice.

The CSS Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of CSS Cascading and Inheritance Level 5. This CSS module describes how to collate style rules and assign values to all properties on all elements. By way of cascading and inheritance, values are propagated for all properties on all elements. New in this level is cascade layers.

The Audio Working Group invites implementation of an updated Candidate Recommendation of Web Audio API. This specification describes a high-level Web API for processing and synthesizing audio in web applications. The primary paradigm is of an audio routing graph, where a number of AudioNode objects are connected together to define the overall audio rendering. The actual processing will primarily take place in the underlying implementation (typically optimized Assembly / C / C++ code), but direct script processing and synthesis is also supported.

Comments are welcome by 15 February 2021.

The EPUB 3 Working Group has published four First Public Working Drafts today for EPUB 3.3. This technology defines a distribution and interchange format for digital publications and documents. The EPUB format provides a means of representing, packaging, and encoding structured and semantically enhanced Web content — including HTML, CSS, SVG, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file container.

The specification represents the third major revision and, in particular, a revision of the EPUB 3.2 document published by the EPUB 3 Community Group. This new version of the specification is now on a W3C Recommendation Track.

The four documents published by the Working Group are:

• The EPUB 3.3 specification defines the authoring requirements for EPUB Publications and represents the third major revision of the standard.
• The EPUB 3.3 Reading Systems specification defines the conformance requirements for EPUB 3 Reading Systems — the user agents that render EPUB Publications.
• The EPUB Multiple-Rendition Publications 1.1 specification defines the creation and rendering of EPUB Publications consisting of more than one Rendition. This document is not on recommendation track.
• The EPUB 3 Overview gives a high level overview of the EPUB 3.3 specification aimed primarily at non-technical readers. This document is not on recommendation track.

The Working Group welcomes comments via the GitHub repository issues.

The W3C Advisory Committee has elected the following people to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG): Amy Guy (Digital Bazaar), Sangwhan Moon (W3C Invited Expert), Theresa O’Connor (Apple, Inc.) and Lea Verou (W3C Invited Expert). They join co-Chair Tim Berners-Lee and continuing participants, Daniel Appelquist (Samsung Electronics; co-Chair), Rossen Atanassov (Microsoft Corporation), Hadley Beeman (W3C Invited Expert), Kenneth Rohde Christiansen (Intel Corporation) and Peter Linss (W3C Invited Expert; co-Chair). Yves Lafon continues as staff contact. Many thanks for contributions to the TAG to the departing participants, David Baron (W3C Invited Expert) and Alice Boxhall (Google), whose terms end at the end of this month.

The TAG is a special group within the W3C, chartered under the W3C Process Document, with stewardship of the Web architecture. The mission of the TAG is to build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary, to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG, and to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C. The elected Members of the TAG participate as individual contributors, not as representatives of their organizations. TAG participants use their best judgment to find the best solutions for the Web, not just for any particular network, technology, vendor, or user. Learn more about the TAG.

W3C announced today the W3C Workshop on Wide Color Gamut (WCG) and High Dynamic Range (HDR) for the Web, which is being organized as a virtual event in April-May 2021.

The primary goal of the workshop is to bring together browser vendors, content creators, color scientists, and experts in other relevant areas (e.g. accessibility, scripting, security, web) to converge on technologies for enabling WCG and HDR on the Open Web Platform.

The event will be organized as a combination of pre-recorded talks (expressions of interest are due 30 January, with recorded talks to be submitted by 15 March 2021) followed by online issue raising on GitHub, and culminating in a series of live sessions in April and May, organized around three main themes:

• Wide Color Gamut on the Web
• High Dynamic Range on the Web
• WCG and HDR Standardization Landscape

The event is free and open to anyone with relevant perspectives on the topic to register for the event. For more information on the workshop, please see the workshop details and submission instructions.

Deadline to submit a proposal for a talk is 30 January 2021, and registration will be open from mid January until April.