W3C - News

• W3C Workshop Report: Smart Voice Agents

  W3C is pleased to announce the report from the W3C Workshop on Smart Voice Agents, held online in February 2026. The workshop brought together voice platform providers, agent developers, privacy experts, accessibility advocates, and standards professionals to advance interoperability and user empowerment in voice-enabled systems.Workshop participants acknowledged the growing ubiquity of voice agents across devices and platforms, and identified key challenges in achieving seamless, secure, and privacy-respecting interactions across different voice ecosystems. They highlighted the need for standardized protocols for agent-to-agent communication, mechanisms for user consent and delegation, and frameworks for ensuring transparency in multi-agent conversations. Key discussion areas included: Agent discovery and invocation mechanisms that respect user privacy and choiceProtocols for delegating conversation control between agents (conversation handoff)Privacy-preserving authentication and user identification across agentsAccessibility requirements for voice interfaces and multi-modal experiencesTechnical standards for voice agent interoperabilityOn top of individual topics, one of the suggested next steps is to explore the possible creation of a voice agents activity at W3C to coordinate inputs from the voice community, pursue broader discussions on interoperability and privacy, and track progress on needs identified during the workshop. The conversation does not end with the workshop. We encourage continued collaboration through Community Groups, upcoming W3C events, and publication opportunities that can carry these discussions into concrete standards and implementation work. Many thanks to the workshop chairs, Deborah Dahl and Dirk Schnelle-Walka, the program committee, workshop speakers, and all participants for making this event possible and successful.

• First Public Working Draft: Linked Web Storage Protocol 1.0

  The Linked Web Storage Working Group published today a First Public Working Draft of Linked Web Storage Protocol 1.0. This specification aims to provide applications with secure and permissioned access to externally stored data in an interoperable way.

• W3C Invites Implementations of Geolocation

  The Devices and Sensors Working Group and the Web Applications Working Group have republished Geolocation as a W3C Candidate Recommendation Snapshot. Geolocation provides access to geographical location information associated with the hosting device.The document was previously published as a W3C Recommendation and now returns to Candidate Recommendation status to allow the Working Groups to iterate more efficiently on substantive changes and to continue adding new features.The Working Groups welcome comments via the GitHub repository issues by 1 May 2026.

• Group Note: Use of Large Language Models in Standards Work

  The Advisory Board has published Use of Large Language Models in Standards Work as a Group Note. As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly synonymous with “AI”, and are used by people within our community, the Advisory Board wants to highlight considerations around different ways in which LLMs can be useful or problematic when it comes to leveraging them in standards work at W3C. This document summarizes the Advisory Board’s current thinking, as of 24 March 2026.

• Updated W3C Recommendation: Geolocation

  The Devices and Sensors Working Group and the Web Applications Working Group have published Geolocation as an updated W3C Recommendation. Geolocation provides access to geographical location information associated with the hosting device.

• W3C Invites Implementations of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.1

  The Decentralized Identifier Working Group has published Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.1 as a W3C Candidate Recommendation Snapshot. This document specifies the DID syntax, a common data model, core properties, serialized representations, DID operations, and an explanation of the process of resolving DIDs to the resources that they represent.Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) are a new type of identifier that enables verifiable, decentralized digital identity. They may refer to any subject and have been designed so that they may be decoupled from centralized registries, identity providers, and certificate authorities, so as to enable the controller of a DID to prove control over it without requiring permission from any other party.Comments are welcome via Github issues by 5 April 2026.

• First Public Working Draft: YAML-LD 1.0

  The JSON-LD Working Group published today a First Public Working Draft of YAML-LD 1.0. [JSON-LD11] is a JSON-based format to serialize Linked Data. In recent years, [YAML] has emerged as a more concise format to represent information that had previously been serialized as [JSON], including API specifications, data schemas, and Linked Data.This document defines YAML-LD as a set of conventions on top of YAML which specify how to serialize Linked Data [LINKED-DATA] as [YAML] based on JSON-LD syntax, semantics, and APIs.Since YAML is more expressive than JSON, both in the available data types and in the document structure (see [RFC9512]), this document identifies constraints on YAML such that any YAML-LD document can be represented in JSON-LD.

• CSS Snapshot 2026 published as a Group Note

  The CSS Working Group has published CSS Snapshot 2026 today as a W3C Group Note. This document collects together into one definition all the specs that together form the current state of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as of 2026. The primary audience is CSS implementers, not CSS authors, as this definition includes modules by specification stability, not Web browser adoption rate.CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, etc.

• First Public Working Draft and supporting notes: EPUB Annotations 1.0

  The  Publishing Maintenance Working Group has published three specifications today around EPUB Annotations 1.0, which is a specification that will define how to create, manage, export, and import annotations in EPUB publications.A First Public Working Draft of EPUB Annotations 1.0. This document defines a profile of the Web Annotation Data Model by specifying a subset of the terms, and adding terms deemed useful to satisfy the entries in the EPUB Annotations Use Cases and Requirements document.A W3C Group Note Draft of EPUB Annotations Vocabulary 1.0. This document defines the vocabulary for the EPUB Annotations 1.0 specification.A W3C Group Note of EPUB Annotations Use Cases and Requirements. This document defines the use cases and requirements relative to EPUB Annotations.

• First Public Working Draft: Selectors Level 5

  The CSS Working Group published today a First Public Working Draft of Selectors Level 5. Selectors are patterns that match against elements in a tree, and as such form one of several technologies that can be used to select nodes in a document. Selectors have been optimized for use with HTML and XML, and are designed to be usable in performance-critical code. They are a core component of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which uses Selectors to bind style properties to elements in the document. Selectors Level 5 describes the selectors that already exist in Selectors Level 4, and further introduces new selectors for CSS and other languages that may need them.