W3C Compliant

Privacy Workshop Participants to Study Data Usage and Handling

W3C Staff — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:21:37 +0000

W3C announces organization of a Workshop on Privacy and Data Usage Control, to take place in Cambridge, MA, UA on 4-5 October 2010. Users trust enormous amounts of personal information to a large variety of online services including social network sites, search engines, photo and video sharing services, and hosted email solutions. As those services become ever more tightly integrated, it becomes increasingly difficult to control the spread of information on the Web. Participants will represent a broad set of stakeholders, including researchers, database manufacturers, CRM-system manufacturers, and Social Networking Providers. Participants will study whether there is interest in further work on policy languages and data handling/data usage work within W3C. Anyone may participate in the Workshop; all participants must submit a short position paper. More information about the Workshop is available in the Call for Participation. Learn more about W3C's Privacy Activity.

First Draft of WOFF File Format 1.0 Published

W3C Staff — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:01:49 +0000

The WebFonts Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of WOFF File Format 1.0. This document specifies the WOFF font format. This format was designed to provide lightweight, easy-to-implement compression of the font data, suitable for use in conjunction with CSS. Any TrueType/OpenType/Open Font Format file can be losslessly converted to WOFF for Web use (subject to licensing of the font data); once decoded by a user agent, the WOFF font will display identically to the original desktop font from which it was created. Learn more about the Fonts Activity.

Last Call: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Snapshot 2007

W3C Staff — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:00:00 +0000

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Snapshot 2007. This document collects together into one definition all the specifications that together form the current state of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as of 2007. The primary audience is CSS implementors, not CSS authors, as this definition includes modules by specification stability, not Web browser adoption rate. Comments are welcome through 15 August. Learn more about the Style Activity.

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing Draft Published

W3C Staff — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:56:43 +0000

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Cross-Origin Resource Sharing. User agents commonly apply same-origin restrictions to network requests. These restrictions prevent a client-side Web application running from one origin from obtaining data retrieved from another origin, and also limit unsafe HTTP requests that can be automatically launched toward destinations that differ from the running application's origin. In user agents that follow this pattern, network requests typically use ambient authentication and session management information, including HTTP authentication and cookie information. This specification extends this model in a number of ways.Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

W3C Releases Unicorn, an All-in-One Validator

W3C Staff — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:46:08 +0000

W3C is pleased to announce the release of Unicorn, a one-stop tool to help people improve the quality of their Web pages. Unicorn combines a number of popular tools in a single, easy interface, including the Markup validator, CSS validator, mobileOk checker, and Feed validator, which remain available as individual services as well. W3C invites developers to enhance the service by creating new modules and testing them in our online developer space (or installing Unicorn locally). W3C looks forward to code contributions from the community as well as suggestions for new features. W3C would like to thank the many people whose work has led up to this first release of Unicorn. This includes developers who started and improved the tool over the past few years, users who have provided feedback, translators who have helped localize the interface with 21 translations so far, and sponsors HP and Mozilla and other individual donors. W3C welcomes feedback and donations so that W3C can continue to expand this free service to the community. Learn more about W3C open source software.

PHP 4 and MySQL 4 End of Life Announcement

Mark Jaquith — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:01:46 +0000

Our approach with WordPress has always been to make it run on common server configurations. We want users to have flexibility when choosing a host for their precious content. Because of this strategy, WordPress runs pretty much anywhere. Web hosting platforms, however, change over time, and we occasionally are able to reevaluate some of the requirements for running WordPress. Now is one of those times. You probably guessed it from the title — we’re finally ready to announce the end of support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4!

First up, the announcement that developers really care about. WordPress 3.1, due in late 2010, will be the last version of WordPress to support PHP 4.

For WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, we will be raising the minimum required PHP version to 5.2. Why 5.2? Because that’s what the vast majority of WordPress users are using, and it offers substantial improvements over earlier PHP 5 releases. It is also the minimum PHP version that the Drupal and Joomla projects will be supporting in their next versions, both due out this year.

The numbers are now, finally, strongly in favor of this move. Only around 11 percent of WordPress installs are running on a PHP version below 5.2. Many of them are on hosts who support PHP 5.2 — users merely need to change a setting in their hosting control panel to activate it. We believe that percentage will only go down over the rest of the year as hosting providers realize that to support the newest versions of WordPress (or Drupal, or Joomla), they’re going to have to pull the trigger.

In less exciting news, we are also going to be dropping support for MySQL 4 after WordPress 3.1. Fewer than 6 percent of WordPress users are running MySQL 4. The new required MySQL version for WordPress 3.2 will be 5.0.15.

WordPress users will not be able to upgrade to WordPress 3.2 if their hosting environment does not meet these requirements (the built-in updater will prevent it). In order to determine which versions your host provides, we’ve created the Health Check plugin. You can download it manually, or use this handy plugin installation tool I whipped up. Right now, Health Check will only tell you if you’re ready for WordPress 3.2. In a future release it will provide all sorts of useful information about your server and your WordPress install, so hang on to it!

In summary: WordPress 3.1, due in late 2010, will be the last version of WordPress to support PHP 4 and MySQL 4. WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, will require PHP 5.2 or higher, and MySQL 5.0.15 or higher. Install the Health Check plugin to see if you’re ready!

The Multilingual Web – Where Are We? Find out at the W3C Workshop

W3C Staff — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 20:45:06 +0000

W3C is organizing a Workshop: The Multilingual Web - Where Are We?, to take place 26-27 October 2010 in Madrid, Spain. Workshop participants will survey and introduce currently available best practices and standards that help content creators, localizers, language technology developers, browser makers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web. The Workshop also provides opportunities for networking that span the various communities involved in enabling the multilingual Web. Participation is free and open to anyone. However, space is limited and participants must send an expression of interest to the program committee. People wishing to speak should also submit a presentation outline as soon as possible.

This is the first of four Workshops being planned by W3C over the next two years as part of the MultilingualWeb European Project. The first Workshop is hosted by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. For more information, see the call for participation. Learn more about W3C's Internationalization Activity.

HTML Media Capture Draft Published

W3C Staff — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:50:47 +0000

The Device APIs and Policy Working Group has published a Working Draft of HTML Media Capture. This specification defines HTML form enhancements that provide access to the audio, image and video capture capabilities of the device. The title of the specification changed in this draft (from "The Capture API"). Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

Last Call: Web Services SOAP Assertions (WS-SOAPAssertions)

W3C Staff — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:55:57 +0000

The Web Services Resource Access Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Web Services SOAP Assertions (WS-SOAPAssertions). This specification defines two WS-Policy assertions that can be used to advertise the requirement to use a certain version of SOAP in message exchanges. Comments are welcome through 27 August. The group also published Web Services Resource Transfer (WS-RT) as a Note today. That specification defines extensions to WS-Transfer primarily to provide fragment-based access to resources. Learn more about the Web Services Activity.

Last Call: Mobile Web Application Best Practices

W3C Staff — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:46:56 +0000

The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Mobile Web Application Best Practices. The goal of this document is to aid the development of rich and dynamic mobile Web applications. It collects the most relevant engineering practices, promoting those that enable a better user experience and warning against those that are considered harmful. The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group does not expect more substantive changes at this point and expects to be able to transition directly to Proposed Recommendation at the end of the Last Call review period. Last call comments welcome before Comments are welcome through 06 August 2010. Learn more about the Mobile Web Initiative Activity.