W3C

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published two First Public Working Drafts today:

• CSS Transforms. CSS transforms allows elements styled with CSS to be transformed in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space. This specification is the convergence of the CSS 2D transforms, CSS 3D transforms and SVG transforms specifications.
• CSS Fragmentation Module Level 3. This module describes the fragmentation model that partitions a flow into pages. It builds on the Page model module and introduces and defines the fragmentation model. It adds functionality for pagination, breaking variable fragment size and orientation, widows and orphans.

Learn more about the Style Activity.

Today the White House announces a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights and support for W3C's Do Not Track technology. The announcement includes: "In response to calls from the Administration and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), leading Internet companies and online advertising networks are committing to use Do Not Track technology from the World Wide Web Consortium in most major web browsers to make it easier for users to control online tracking."

W3C is building consensus around global Web technology that will allow users to express a preference regarding being tracked online, and what is necessary to comply with the user's preference. W3C welcomes support from the US Government for the steps that industry and civil society are taking within W3C to give users meaningful privacy choices and options for consent.

“Personal privacy on the Web is one of the most important policy and technical issues of the decade,” said Dr. Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO. “Standards for online consumer privacy should be developed in a global forum, led by industry, with multistakeholder participation. W3C is well-positioned as the forum to address complex online privacy issues.”

Read the full W3C press release and learn more about W3C's Privacy Activity.

The RDB2RDF Working Group has published two Candidate Recommendation documents that help to bring relational database information to the Semantic Web: R2RML: RDB to RDF Mapping Language and A Direct Mapping of Relational Data to RDF. The former describes R2RML, a language for expressing customized mappings from relational databases to RDF datasets. Such mappings provide the ability to view existing relational data in the RDF data model, expressed in a structure and target vocabulary of the mapping author's choice. The latter document defines a direct mapping from relational data to RDF. Implementations are invited. Test Cases are available at: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/rdb2rdf/test-cases/. Directions on how to submit implementation reports and test case results are at: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/rdb2rdf/wiki/Submitting_Implementation_Reports. Comments and implementation experience reports are welcome through 30 April 2012. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Clipboard API and events. This specification defines the common clipboard operations of cutting, copying and pasting, in such a way that they are exposed to Web Applications and can be adapted to provide advanced functionalities. Its goal is to provide for compatibility where possible with existing implementations. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.