W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the HTML Speech Incubator Group , whose mission is to determine the feasibility of integrating speech technology in HTML5 in a way that leverages the capabilities of both speech and HTML (e.g., DOM) to provide a high-quality, browser-independent speech/multimodal experience while avoiding unnecessary standards fragmentation or overlap. The following W3C Members have sponsored the charter for this group: Voxeo, Microsoft, Openstream, Google, AT&T, Mozilla. Read more about the Incubator Activity, an initiative to foster development of emerging Web-related technologies. Incubator Activity work is not on the W3C standards track but in many cases serves as a starting point for a future Working Group.

Thanks to Sorin Velescu, the following article has been translated into Romanian.

Alegerea Tag-ului de Limba(Choosing a Language Tag)

[search keys:  qa-choosing-language-tags

The Web Services Resource Access Working Group published seven Second Last Call Working Drafts for Web Services: Enumeration (WS-Enumeration) , Event Descriptions (WS-EventDescriptions) , Eventing (WS-Eventing) , Fragment (WS-Fragment) , Metadata Exchange (WS-MetadataExchange) , SOAP Assertions (WS-SOAPAssertions) , and Transfer (WS-Transfer) . Comments welcome through 17 September 2010. Learn more about the Web Services Activity.

26-27 October 2010, Madrid. Hosted by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

The MultilingualWeb projectis looking at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the Web multilingually. The project aims to raise the visibility of existing best practices and standards and identify gaps. The core vehicle for this is a series of four events which are planned for the coming two years.

As the first of the four events, this workshop will survey currently available best practices and standards aimed at helping content creators, localizers, tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web.

Participation is free. We welcome participation from both speakers and non-speaking attendees. For more information, see the Call for Participation

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.

The Web Services Resource Access Working Group has published the First Public 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. Learn more about the Web Services Activity.

The Web Services Resource Access Working Group published six Last Call Working Drafts for Web Services: Enumeration (WS-Enumeration) , Event Descriptions (WS-EventDescriptions) , Eventing (WS-Eventing) , Fragment (WS-Fragment) , Metadata Exchange (WS-MetadataExchange) , and Transfer (WS-Transfer) . Comments welcome through 11 May 2010. Learn more about the Web Services Activity.

The Unicode Consortium announced today the release of the new version of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository(Unicode CLDR 1.8), providing key building blocks for software to support the world's languages.

CLDR 1.8 contains data for 186 languages and 159 territories: 501 locales in all. Version 1.8 of the repository contains over 22% more locale data than the previous release, with over 42,000 new or modified data items from over 300 different contributors.

For this release, the Unicode Consortium partnered with ANLoc, the African Network for Localization, a project sponsored by Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC), to help extend modern computing on the African continent. ANLoc's vision is to empower Africans to participate in the digital age by enabling their languages in computers. A sub-project of ANLoc, called Afrigen, focuses on creating African locales.

For more information about Unicode CLDR 1.8, see the CLDR 1.8 Release Note.

The Web Services Resource Access Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Web Services Event Descriptions (WS-EventDescriptions) . In the Web Services context, there are many use cases in which it is necessary for an endpoint to advertise the structure and contents of the events that it might generate. For example, a subscriber might wish to know the shape of the events that are generated in order to properly formulate a filter to limit the number of notifications that are transmitted, or to ensure it can successfully process the type of events that are transmitted. This specification describes a mechanism by which an endpoint can advertise the structure and contents of the events it might generate. Learn more about the Web Services Activity.