12–13 March 2013in Rome, Italy, hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations.

The W3C announces today the sixth in a series of workshops exploring the mechanisms and processes needed to ensure that the World Wide Web lives up to its potential around the world and across barriers of language and culture.

Anyone may attend at no charge and the W3C welcomes participation by both speakers and non-speaking attendees. Early registration is encouraged due to limited space.

Building on the success of five highly regarded previous workshops in Madrid, Pisa, Limerick, Luxembourg, and Dublin, this workshop will emphasize the application of theory and technology to meet practical needs. The workshop brings together participants interested in the best practices and standards needed to help content creators, localizers, language tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingualWeb. It provides further opportunities for networking across communities that span the various aspects involved. We are particularly interested in speakers who can demonstrate novel solutions for reaching out to a global, multilingual audience. Registration now online.

Hintergrundbilder, die die Lokalisierung eines Dokumentes erleichtern(Background images that support localization)

This article was translated into German thanks to Carolin Winterholler (Copypanthers).

As part of advancing HTML 5.0 to W3C Recommendation by 2014, the HTML Working Group Chairs proposed a plantoday to work in parallel on stabilizing HTML 5.0 and developing the next generation of HTML features. The plan identifies, for the first time, how the Working Group will produce an HTML 5.1 Recommendation by 2016.

The plan, not yet approved by the HTML Working Group, explains how the group anticipates fulfilling the interoperability expectations of the W3C process, including how the group will gather implementation evidence, identify features at risk for Candidate Recommendation, and create a test framework.

Modularity plays an important role in the plan progress. To enable features to evolve independently and rapidly, the group will make use of what it calls "extension specifications." Some extension specifications may end up being published as stand-alone documents that are part of the "HTML family of specifications"; others may be re-integrated into the "baseline" HTML5 specification.

The plan also includes several elements to facilitate development of accessibility solutions for HTML5. In addition to leveraging the extension specification approach, the plan includes a mandate for the HTML Accessibility Task Force to develop accessibility solutions through cooperation and consensus.

We now invite discussion of plan in the HTML Working Group, Accessibility Task Force, and WAI Protocols and Formats Working Group. If adopted, then the HTML Working Group expects to advance HTML 5.0 to Candidate Recommendation in Q4 of this year.

ITS 2.0responds to current and future needs to extend ITS 1.0 by providing metadata (ITS “data categories”) for HTML5 as well as XML, using ITS data categories for RDF, and adding new data categories relevant for localization and language technologies.

In addition to various clarifications and smaller changes from the second version released in July, this third version of the document adds additional data categories that are now ready for review: Disambiguation , Preserve Space , Id Value , Target Pointer , Preserve Space , Localization Quality Issue , and Localization Quality Précis . In addition it adds support for the use of CSS selectors as an alternative to XPath , updates the ruby markup sectionto match the HTML5 ruby model, and simplifies a number of sections for greater usability

Please take a look at the new version, and send any comments to public-multilingualweb-lt-comments@w3.org (subscribe at the archive main page). Use “ITS 2.0 WD Comment” at the beginning of the subject line of your email, and add something descriptive after it.

Send any comments before the beginning of October. We are planning to publish a new working draft in October, and a feature complete “last call” working draft in November.

W3C published CSS Flexible Box Layout Module as a Candidate Recommendation.

Normalizacja w HTML i CSS(Normalization in HTML and CSS)

Ustawianie kodu w narzędziach do tworzenia treści stron(Setting encoding in web authoring applications)

This article was translated into Polish thanks to Biuro tłumaczeń Gdańsk.

The article Background images that support localizationwas updated as follows:

• A note was added at the beginning of the background section, mentioning that CSS now enables you to create the examples in the article, where appropriate, and that the article now contains pointers to live code samples using CSS.
• The first sentence of each section describing a technique was changed to better position and introduce the section.
• A sentence was added to the end of each of the above sections, pointing to an example of how CSS could be used to reproduce that example, for browsers that support it.
• ” Internet Explorer and Opera will split the word and the hyphen will appear at the end of the line” was changed to “recent versions of major browsers will split the word and the hyphen will appear at the end of the line”
• The section “By the way” was removed.

Spanish, Russian and Ukrainian translations need to be updated. Please contact Richard Ishida (ishida@w3.org) for the source text. In the meantime, the note and the link text have been added to those translations in English, but not the other additions.

Looking at it in terms of rebounds, plot twists, nurtured healing and abandonment, love and betrayal, strife, toil, stunning victories, dispersions and last minute rallies the only thing that distinguishes HTML's history from a charts-topping teenage fantasy saga seems to be the lack of vampires. And even then, were vampires around I'm not sure we'd notice them for all the action. I am therefore very excited to join the W3C staff to work on HTML full time as part of the HTML editorial team, in the hope that I may bring my humble contribution to this living monument.

For all that the HTML adventure may be fun to watch with some popcorn though, one of my hopes is that heading forward all parties in the HTML community can move towards more effective debates about focused technical issues while resolving sources of dissent. In other words: less drama, more work.

To take an example, much has been said of the living standard versus snapshot standard approaches. It's a very big Web, and HTML is a very big part of it, so it should come as no surprise that here just as elsewhere different participants may have different requirements, habits, or preferences. Some seek a specification that is continuously improved in a tight feedback loop with the reality of usage and implementation; others look for anchors of stability at regular intervals in that continuous flow. Are those wishes incompatible? I'm not so sure — a process in which stable snapshots are made while a bleeding edge version is also available strikes me as oddly familiar. Yes: it's a vanilla software release strategy. So let's just do that: the many communities of the Web are contributing to the bleeding edge; W3C is also committed to also publish stable snapshots at regular intervals.

As has already been announced , the HTML WG has moved development of its various specifications to a GitHub repository . Over the coming weeks we will be detailing the way in which this repository is organised and used. The current plan revolves around adapting the well-known git flowmodel to specification development. Git's flexible and powerful branching model allows us to maintain multiple branches, some headed for stabilisation in view of a tested and reviewed release, others carrying more future-fetching features; this while remaining able to apply bug fixes across the board.

Additionally, this enables proponents of changes to these documents to put their specification-writing where their mouths are by cultivating their own feature branches and making pull requests when they are ready. Just like other projects, including contributions will require review (in this case from the HTML Working Group). Hopefully, we can keep the overhead of this to a minimum — details will be worked out shortly (and as always we welcome input).

This brings me to the next good practice which we inherit from software development: testing. I believe that technology should not be called standard — or even just stable — without sufficiently strong testing to support it. Over the coming months, the HTML WG will be ramping up its testing work. Testing is a great area in which to contribute, and so long as you enjoy breaking stuff with a devious vengeance it's far from being as tedious as hearsay would have it. So if you want to help break the Web (and then fix it), come test stuff! A great place to start is by attending one of the upcoming Test The Web Forwardevents if there's one in your area (I will be at the Paris one next month). And if no such event is coming to a place near you (yet), we'll be working with the TTWF community to make breaking your favourite browser as easy and playful as possible.

Naturally, those are just two of the high-level upcoming efforts from Team HTML. On a day-to-day basis a lot of what we're going to stay busy with is mostly bugs, bugs, bugs. Just like testing, this might not sound fascinating, but I for one am mightily excited: those are teenage fantasy sagabugs. I'm looking forward to closing them with tiny HTML stakes to the heart.

Three months have already passed since the last update to my overview of Web technologies for mobile applications , and thus I have just released the quaterly update to Standards for Web Applications on Mobile .

The document has the latest information about the status of specifications, their expected evolution, the state of their accompanying test suites. In the past 3 months, the Open Web Platform has seen among other things the arrival of 8 new public working drafts (with Web Intents, multimedia integration and storage quota mangement particular highlights).

Next month (October 15), another sessions of our on-line training course: Mobile Web 2: Applicationswill start, and will cover a number of the technologies described in the document: don’t miss it!