W3C

With a surprise boost from Microsoft, the promise of rich typography on the Web just got a big step closer to reality.

The software company's involvement emerged Monday with sponsorship of a newer effort at the World Wide Web Consortium to standardize Web-based fonts with technology called the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). It's a fresh indicator of Microsoft's serious engagement with new Web standards--and it's a big boost for designers' attempts to stretch the Web beyond just the few typefaces that today can be expected to be already installed on people's computers.

It's … Read more

Microsoft is putting some meat on the bones of its plan to make information that's stuck in databases reachable with the same standards used to retrieve Web pages.

At its Mix conference this week, Microsoft touted an interface called the Open Data Protocol, or OData. Specifically, the company announced an OData software developer kit to let programmers more easily use it and said it wants to standardize OData.

What fortuitous timing. Microsoft listed the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Constortium (W3C) as groups where it would like to see this standardization, and the latter of … Read more

The World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees development of Hypertext Markup Language and several other standards related to the Web, has a new leader who wants to streamline some of the group's standardization efforts and beef up its ties with outside programmers.

Jeff Jaffe, Novell's chief technology officer until late January and a former executive at IBM and Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, was named W3C's new chief executive officer on Sunday. In his new position, Jaffe will work with W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee, who first proposed the idea of the Web more than 20 years ago.

"… Read more

Unless you speak lawyerese as a second language, a Web site's privacy policy can seem as incomprehensible as the loudspeakers on New York City subways.

The organization behind Firefox, the world's second most popular Web browser, has embarked on an ambitious project to change this. Instead of forcing people concerned about privacy to scroll through pages of "notwithstanding anything to the contrary," the Mozilla Foundation is designing a standard set of colored icons to reveal how data-protective--or how intrusive--Web sites are.

It does seem a bit odd that, in the era of the iPad and cars … Read more

The groups responsible for standardizing the language used to build Web sites have begun tackling technology to provide a direct interface to Webcams.

The World Wide Web Consortium has begun work on the HTML Device addition to the Hypertext Markup Language specification. "The device element represents a device selector, to allow the user to give the page access to a device, for example a video camera," according to a December 11 draft of the specification.

The move marks another step expansion of the scope of the Web standard. Advocates are trying to make it a foundation not just … Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif.--If those chasing Google have anything to say about it, search on the Internet is going to become more about a conversation than an exchange of keywords.

Panelists from the four major search engines--Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com--joined Web search start-ups TrueKnowledge and Hakia at the Semantic Technology Conference to discuss the rise of semantic technology as the engine behind the still nascent Internet search industry. Semantic search, or the idea of divining a user's true intent from how they enter their queries and how Web data is structured, is an unfamiliar concept to the … Read more

Apple believes it has a patent that could potentially throw a wrench into an effort to develop a Web standard for updating widgets.

Last month Apple disclosed the patent (No. 5,764,992) to the W3C Web Applications Working Group, which is trying to come up with a standard entitled "Widgets 1.0: Updates," as spotted by MacNN. Apple's patent is for "A software program running on a computer automatically replaces itself with a newer version in a completely automated fashion, without interruption of its primary function, and in a manner that is completely transparent to … Read more

Web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee says he is making sure the Semantic Web will respect the privacy of online communications and allow people to control who can use their data.

The Semantic Web, an ongoing project overseen by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), seeks to enable the Web to intelligently interpret what people are seeking when they search the Net.

In one example, computers will data-tag photographs and combine those tags with information from a desktop calendar, so people can ask the Web what the people in the photograph were doing on a particular day.

However, researchers have warned that … Read more

On March 5 Apple dropped a small bombshell on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body, excluding one of its patents from the W3C Royalty-Free License commitment of the W3C Patent Policy for Widgets 1.0. The patent in question covers automatic updates to a client computer in a networked operating environment.

The announcement has generated no apparent response, yet could portend serious consequences. The Apple exclusion could mean that a W3C standard on widgets (or, really, any standard in the Web Application Group) at W3C that uses or includes something which touches this patent will either need to … Read more