W3C

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group and Technical Architecture Group (TAG) have published four Working Drafts:

• CSS Typed OM Level 1: Converting CSSOM value strings into meaningfully typed JavaScript representations and back can incur a significant performance overhead. This specification exposes CSS values as typed JavaScript objects to facilitate their performant manipulation.
• CSS Properties and Values API Level 1: This CSS module defines an API for registering new CSS properties. Properties registered using this API are provided with a parse syntax that defines a type, inheritance behaviour, and an initial value.
• CSS Painting API Level 1: The paint stage of CSS is responsible for painting the background, content and highlight of a box based on that box’s geometry (as generated by the layout stage) and computed style. This specification describes an API which allows developers to paint a part of a box in response to geometry/computed style changes with an additional function.
• Worklets Level 1: This specification defines an API for running scripts in stages of the rendering pipeline independent of the main javascript execution environment.

The Web Performance Working Group has published a Group Note of Reporting API 1. This document defines a generic reporting framework which allows web developers to associate a set of named reporting endpoints with an origin. Various platform features (like Content Security Policy, Network Error Reporting, and others) will use these endpoints to deliver feature-specific reports in a consistent manner.

The W3C Advisory Committee has filled five open seats on the W3C Advisory Board. Created in 1998, the Advisory Board provides guidance to the Team on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution. Beginning 1 July 2016, the nine Advisory Board participants are Tantek Çelik (Mozilla), Michael Champion (Microsoft), Virginie Galindo (Gemalto), Jay (Junichi) Kishigami (NTT), Charles McCathie Nevile (Yandex), David Singer (Apple), Léonie Watson (The Paciello Group), Chris Wilson (Google) and Judy Zhu (Alibaba). Many thanks to Soohong Daniel Park (Samsung Electronics), whose term ends this month. Read more about the Advisory Board.

The Spatial Data on the Web Working Group has published a Working Draft of Semantic Sensor Network Ontology. The Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (commonly known as “SSN” or sometimes “SSNO”) is an OWL-2 DL ontology for describing sensors and the observations they make of the physical world. SSN is published in a modular architecture that supports the judicious use of “just enough” ontology for diverse applications, including satellite imagery, large scale scientific monitoring, industrial and household infrastructure, citizen observers, and Web of Things. SSN is described and examples of its use are given.

The Web Authentication Working Group has published a Working Draft of Web Authentication: A Web API for accessing scoped credentials. This specification defines an API that enables web pages to access WebAuthn compliant strong cryptographic credentials through browser script. Conceptually, one or more credentials are stored on an authenticator, and each credential is scoped to a single Relying Party. Authenticators are responsible for ensuring that no operation is performed without the user’s consent. The user agent mediates access to credentials in order to preserve user privacy. Authenticators use attestation to provide cryptographic proof of their properties to the relying party. This specification also describes a functional model of a WebAuthn compliant authenticator, including its signature and attestation functionality.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of CSS Flexible Box Layout Module Level 1. The specification describes a CSS box model optimized for user interface design. In the flex layout model, the children of a flex container can be laid out in any direction, and can “flex” their sizes, either growing to fill unused space or shrinking to avoid overflowing the parent. Both horizontal and vertical alignment of the children can be easily manipulated. Nesting of these boxes (horizontal inside vertical, or vertical inside horizontal) can be used to build layouts in two dimensions.