W3C - News

• Draft Note: String Searching

  The Internationalization Working Group has published a first Draft Note of String Searching. This document describes string searching operations on the Web in order to allow greater interoperability. String searching refers to natural language string matching such as the "find" command in a Web browser. This document builds upon the concepts found in Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals and Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: String Matching to provide authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers the information they need to describe and implement search features suitable for global audiences.

• Last Call for Review of Proposed Corrections to EPUB 3.3

  The Publishing Maintenance Working Group has proposed corrections to the W3C Recommendation of EPUB 3.3. EPUB® 3 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. This specification defines the authoring requirements for EPUB publications and represents the third major revision of the standard.Proposed corrections are marked in the document. Comments, including implementation experience, are welcome via GitHub through 10 March 2025.

• W3C Invites Implementations of WebGPU

  The GPU for the Web Working Group invites implementations of the first Candidate Recommendation Snapshots for the following documents:WebGPU: Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs for short, have been essential in enabling rich rendering and computational applications in personal computing. WebGPU is an API that exposes the capabilities of GPU hardware for the Web. The API is designed from the ground up to efficiently map to (post-2014) native GPU APIs.WebGPU Shading Language, also known as WGSL for short: An application using the WebGPU API uses WGSL to express the programs, known as shaders, that run on the GPU. The shading language is tailored for parallel execution and usage on the Web.Comments are welcome via GitHub issues by 28 February 2025.

• First Public Working Draft: CSS Display Module Level 4

  The CSS Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of CSS Display Module Level 4. This module describes how the CSS formatting box tree is generated from the document element tree and defines the display property that controls it.

• First Public Working Draft: CSS Multi-column Layout Module Level 2

  The CSS Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of CSS Multi-column Layout Module Level 2. This specification describes multi-column layouts in CSS, a style sheet language for the web. Using functionality described in the specification, content can be flowed into multiple columns with a gap and a rule between them.

• Five Candidate Recommendation Snapshots Published by the Verifiable Credentials Working Group

  The Verifiable Credentials Working Group invites implementations of the second Candidate Recommendation Snapshots for the following documents:Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.0: Credentials are a part of our daily lives; driver's licenses are used to assert that we are capable of operating a motor vehicle, university degrees can be used to assert our level of education, and government-issued passports enable us to travel between countries. This specification provides a mechanism to express these sorts of credentials on the Web in a way that is cryptographically secure, privacy respecting, and machine-verifiable.Verifiable Credential Data Integrity 1.0: This specification describes mechanisms for ensuring the authenticity and integrity of Verifiable Credentials and similar types of constrained digital documents using cryptography, especially through the use of digital signatures and related mathematical proofs.Data Integrity EdDSA Cryptosuites v1.0: This specification describes a Data Integrity cryptographic suite for use when creating or verifying a digital signature using the twisted Edwards Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA) and Curve25519 (ed25519).Data Integrity ECDSA Cryptosuites v1.0: This specification describes a Data Integrity Cryptosuite for use when generating a digital signature using the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA).Securing Verifiable Credentials using JOSE and COSE: This specification defines how to secure credentials and presentations conforming to the Verifiable Credential data model with JSON Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE), Selective Disclosure for JWTs, and CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (COSE) [RFC9052]. This enables the Verifiable Credential data model to be implemented with standards for signing and encryption that are widely adopted.Comments are welcome via the GitHub issues by 19 January 2025.

• W3C Advisory Committee Elects Technical Architecture Group

  The W3C Advisory Committee has elected the following people to fill four seats on the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) starting 1 February 2025: Hadley Beeman, Marcos Cáceres, Sarven Capadisli and Xiaocheng Hu. They join continuing TAG participants, Daniel Appelquist, Matthew Atkinson, Dapeng (Max) Liu, Tristan Nitot, Martin Thomson and Jeffrey Yasskin. Tim Berners-Lee is an emeritus member of the TAG and Yves Lafon continues as staff contact. Many thanks to the 7 candidates, and thanks for contributions to the TAG to the departing participants, Amy Guy, Peter Linss (who in addition held the role of TAG co-chair for many years), Theresa O'Connor and Lea Verou, whose terms end at the end of January 2025. 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 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 Invites Implementations of WebAssembly - Version 2.0

  The WebAssembly Working Group invites implementations of the following Candidate Recommendation Snapshots:WebAssembly Core Specification: This document describes release 2.0 of the core WebAssembly standard, a safe, portable, low-level code format designed for efficient execution and compact representation.WebAssembly JavaScript Interface: This document provides an explicit JavaScript API for interacting with WebAssembly.WebAssembly Web API: This document describes the integration of WebAssembly with the broader web platform.Comments are welcome via GitHub issues by 15 January 2025.

• First Public Working Draft: CSS Color HDR Module Level 1

  The CSS Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of CSS Color HDR Module Level 1. CSS Color 4 adds Wide Color Gamut (WCG) color spaces to the Open Web Platform. By design, these are all Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) color spaces. This specification defines additions to support High Dynamic Range (HDR).

• First Public Working Draft: CSS Overflow Module Level 5

  The CSS Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of CSS Overflow Module Level 5. This module contains the features of CSS relating to scrollable overflow handling in visual media. It builds on the CSS Overflow Module Level 4, adding the ability to generate and associate various scrolling controls (markers to indicate scroll progress, buttons to trigger scrolling), and adding an appendix containing an experimental exploration of redirecting overflow by fragmentation.