W3C - News

• Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) becomes a first public Draft Note

  The Sustainable Web Interest Group published  today a first public Draft Note of Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG).The digital industry is responsible for 2-5% of global emissions, more than the aviation industry. The Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) cover a wide range of recommendations to make web products and services more sustainable.These guidelines use planetary, people, and prosperity principles (the PPP approach) throughout the decision-making process, allowing users to minimize their environmental impact in various ways. These include user-centered design, performant web development, carbon-free infrastructure, sustainable business strategy, and, supported by measurability data, various combinations thereof.The guidelines are in line with the Sustainable Web Manifesto and aligned with GRI Standards to help organizations incorporate digital products and services into broader sustainability reporting initiatives. The structure of WSG is inspired by WCAG with 92 guidelines and 254 success criteria. Every guideline is supported by evidence, and additional information sections provide examples, specific benefits, and compliance reporting metrics (based upon GRI). Further testability guidance and techniques for criteria can be found within W3C Editor's Draft Sustainable Tooling and Reporting (STAR).Since the formal chartering of the W3C Interest Group in October 2024 and after the community group report became an editor's draft, significant progress was made including:Editorial improvements for clarity and readability were applied across all areas of work including the addition of new content where applicable to provide greater sustainability coverage.The introduction was edited, and contains new material on supplements and relationships to other specifications.A new “considerations” section of the document identifies accessibility, security and privacy tangent issues that interlink with sustainability topics.Breaking down of the specification into a paginated view to improve readability, with a full document mode available for those who prefer - including the ability to filter guidelines and success criteria by areas of interest, allowing for granular content control.Addition of a separate resources supplement, categorized by success criteria, cross-referenced within the specification, that provides over 2,500 regularly maintained sustainability related citations, tools, resources, and materials to help with implementation and adoption.This W3C Group Draft Note will be further developed to ensure it meets the needs of its expected audience, and the group will continue to work on improving the usefulness of the specification. Notably, the inclusion of an Impact API is under development by the Interest Group’s Measurability Task Force. It aims to provide measurement-based scoring to identify more easily where the priority of effort should begin, but also to provide a sensible approach to deciding conformity levels within the scope of the specification.

• First Public Working Draft: CSS Environment Variables Module Level 1

  The CSS Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of CSS Environment Variables Module Level 1. This specification defines the concept of environment variables and the env() function, which work similarly to custom properties and the var() function, but are defined globally for a document. These can be defined either by the user agent, providing values that can be used on the page based on information the UA has special access to, or provided by the author for "global" variables that are guaranteed to be the same no matter where in the document they’re used.

• First Public Working Draft: Semantic Sensor Network Ontology - 2023 Edition

  The Spatio-temporal Data on the Web Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Semantic Sensor Network Ontology - 2023 Edition. The Semantic Sensor Network ontology (SSN) describes actuators and their actuations, sensors and their observations, samplers and their samplings, the procedures implemented, the features of interest and samples changed or studied, and the actuated and observed properties. The core SSN classes and properties are defined using minimal axiomatization in a module called SOSA (Sensor, Observation, Sample, and Actuator) supplemented with additional axiomatization and terms in further modules. These allow SSN to support a wide range of applications and use cases, including satellite imagery, large-scale scientific monitoring, industrial and household infrastructures, social sensing, citizen science, observation-driven ontology engineering, and the Web of Things.

• Group Note: CSS Snapshot 2025

  The CSS Working Group has published CSS Snapshot 2025 as a 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 2025. 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: A Well-Known URL for Relying Party Passkey Endpoints

  The Web Application Security Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of A Well-Known URL for Relying Party Passkey Endpoints. This specification defines a well-known URL which WebAuthn Relying Parties (RPs) can host to make their creation and management endpoints discoverable by WebAuthn clients and authenticators.

• First Public Working Draft: Device Bound Session Credentials

  The Web Application Security Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Device Bound Session Credentials. Device Bound Sessions Credentials (DBSC) aims to prevent hijacking via cookie theft by building a protocol and infrastructure that allows a user agent to assert possession of a securely-stored private key. DBSC is a Web API and a protocol between user agents and servers to achieve this binding.

• W3C Invites Implementations of Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT) Rules Format 1.1

  The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has published Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT) Rules Format 1.1 as a W3C Candidate Recommendation Snapshot. Act Rules Format defines a format for writing accessibility test rules that can be used for developing automated testing tools and manual testing methodologies. For an introduction to Accessibility Conformance Testing, see the ACT Overview. Comments are welcome via Github issues or email to public-wcag-act@w3.org by 20 October 2025.

• W3C updates its Process Document

  The W3C Membership approved the 2025 W3C Process Document, which takes effect today, 18 August 2025.Major changes:Removing the Proposed Recommendation phase of the Recommendation track, and applying the Advisory Committee (AC) Review instead directly to the Candidate Recommendation. This maintains the qualifications for Recommendation while reducing administrative steps.Introducing a new Charter Refinement phase to formalize the issue-tracking and decision-making of our currently informal review phase prior to Member Review (AC Review) of a charter. The goals of this new phase are to:Reduce the number of Formal Objections raised during AC Review that could have been avoided by solving small problems earlier and developing consensus on larger ones through dialog.Ensuring that comments get addressed, and not ignored, by those developing the charter.Making the chartering process more understandable, and therefore easier to participate in.Other significant changes:Requiring higher vote thresholds for low-participation AC Appeal votes by adopting the thresholds from the W3C Bylaws.Applying the Bylaws concept of Good Standing to AC votes (AB and TAG elections and AC Appeals only; not AC Reviews, which are technically not votes).Clarifying the differences between major (AC-approved) and minor (Team-approved) amendments to a charter, as requested by the PSIG.Fine-tuning various details of the W3C Council process.Simplifying the Member Submissions section.You can read more about all changes since the 3 November 2023 Process Document, or peruse the diff.This document is developed by the Advisory Board’s Process Task Force working within the W3C Process Community Group (which anyone can join). Comments and feedback on the new Process Document may be sent as issues in the public GitHub Repository.

• W3C invites implementations of Incremental Font Transfer

  The Web Fonts Working Group has published Incremental Font Transfer as a W3C Candidate Recommendation. This specification defines a method to incrementally transfer a font from server to client. The client loads only the portion(s) of the font that they actually need, significantly reducing data transfer. Multiple incremental additions to the same font are possible, such as a user agent updating a font as a user browses multiple pages. Incremental transfer improves on unicode-range by avoiding damage to layout (kerning, ligatures, etc) rules, meaning it can efficiently support fine grained increments to latin and to complex scripts like Indic or Arabic.Comments are welcome via GitHub issues by 31 October 2025.

• Vision for W3C is a W3C Statement

  The W3C Advisory Board has published today as a W3C Statement the document Vision for W3C, which articulates W3C’s core vision for the Web. W3C’s core Vision is:The Web is for all humanity.The Web is designed for the good of all people.The Web must be safe to use.There is one interoperable world-wide Web.The goal of the W3C Vision document is to:Help the world understand what W3C is, what it does, and why it mattersCommunicate shared values and principles of the W3C communityBe opinionated enough to provide guidance and a framework for making decisions, particularly on controversial issuesBe timeless enough to remain relevant without needing frequent revision, while being open to evolving based on the needs of the communityThe World Wide Web Consortium is a community leader in defining technical standards and guidelines for a World Wide Web that connects and empowers humanity. We provide a neutral open forum where diverse voices from around the world work together by consensus. Our community understands that the web has had a tremendous impact on the world, and its impact will continue to grow in the future as it expands reach, knowledge, education, and services even more broadly. Written in the spirit of taking responsibility to address the impact of our work, Vision for W3C defines the values of W3C’s mission and the shared principles that guide our decisions as new technologies enable new actions and new possibilities. Vision for W3C allows us to take deliberate steps to address the many harmful unintended and undesirable consequences that arose from the web’s amazing success, and to continue to provide the consistent architecture that enables a World Wide Web that works, for everyone. W3C Statements provide a stable reference for documents not intended to be formal standards but that have been formally reviewed and are endorsed by W3C. Please read more in the W3C Vision document and our companion blog post.