The CSS Working Group published the CSS Snapshot 2024 as a Group Note. This document collects together into one definition all the specifications that together form the current state of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as of 2024. The primary audience is CSS implementers, not CSS authors, as this definition includes modules by specification stability, not Web browser adoption rate. 

When the first CSS specification was published, all of CSS was contained in one document that defined CSS Level 1. CSS Level 2 was defined also by a single, multi-chapter document. However for CSS beyond Level 2, the CSS Working Group chose to adopt a modular approach, where each module defines a part of CSS, rather than to define a single monolithic specification. This breaks the specification into more manageable chunks and allows more immediate, incremental improvement to CSS. 

Since different CSS modules are at different levels of stability, the CSS Working Group has chosen to publish this profile to define the current scope and state of Cascading Style Sheets as of 2024.

W3C is working on a deconstructed mini-workshop series to review proposals aimed at combating misinformation on the web. Based on discussions at TPAC 2024 (Originator Profile and Content Authenticity) and in the W3C Strategy Team, there is clear interest in investigating how several proposals in this space can contribute and what standardization support they might need. 

The Credible Web Community Group will host this deconstructed mini-workshop series to discuss a project framework for assessing tooling in the authentic web ecosystem. The first session, scheduled for 12 March 2025, will review the framework and discuss how to move proposals to interoperable standards to combat misinformation on the web. 

Attendance is free for all participants and is open to the public, whether or not W3C members.

Visit here for more details.

Following the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG)'s election results, the W3C Team has chosen and the Advisory Board and Technical Architecture Group have ratified the following appointment to the TAG for the 2025-2027 term:
Lola Odelola (unaffiliated W3C Invited Expert)

Among the individuals the W3C Team considered, Lola particularly stands out due to her connections with the developer community and her involvement in making web development available to under-represented parts of the community. Lola also has experience in W3C Working Groups and is an open source contributor.

Per W3C Process Document regarding TAG appointments, this procedure follows a public call for nominations which together with nominations from the W3C Team and Members surfaced a list of several traditional and non-traditional candidates. The Team considered what each on the list would bring to the TAG. In addition to the aspects mentioned in Process, the Team considered cultural diversity and gender diversity.

The Team is confident Lola Odelola brings robust complementary skills to the TAG and thanks her for offering her time to do the important TAG work of stewarding the Web architecture.

About the W3C TAG

The TAG was created in 2001 as a special W3C working group, chartered to steward the Web architecture. To do so, it fulfills 3 missions:

• to document and build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary;
• to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG;
• to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C.

The TAG is part of the Horizontal Review Process and reviews a large number of specifications done at W3C and outside, even during their early stage.

The TAG and the W3C Advisory Board are also part of the W3C Council to help resolve objections on specifications.

The Verifiable Credentials Working Group invites implementations of the following Candidate Recommendation Snapshot: Controlled Identifiers (CIDs) v1.0.

A controlled identifier document contains cryptographic material and lists service endpoints for the purposes of verifying cryptographic proofs from, and interacting with, the controller of an identifier.

Comments are welcome via GitHub issues by 28 February 2025.

The Decentralized Identifier Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.1. This document specifies the DID syntax, a common data model, core properties, serialized representations, DID operations, and an explanation of the process of resolving DIDs to the resources that they represent.

Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) are a new type of identifier that enables verifiable, decentralized digital identity. They may refer to any subject and have been designed so that they may be decoupled from centralized registries, identity providers, and certificate authorities, so as to enable the controller of a DID to prove control over it without requiring permission from any other party.

The Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Research Questions Task Force (RQTF) published Collaboration Tools Accessibility User Requirements as a W3C Group Note. The document covers accessibility user needs, requirements, and scenarios for collaborative content creation and development tools. The solutions identified in this document are intended to influence the evolution of future accessibility guidelines, technical specifications, or features of collaboration tools and assistive technologies. They are also relevant to software developers who contribute to developing the collaborative experience.

The Internationalization Working Group has published a first Draft Note of String Searching. This document describes string searching operations on the Web in order to allow greater interoperability. String searching refers to natural language string matching such as the "find" command in a Web browser. This document builds upon the concepts found in Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals and Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: String Matching to provide authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers the information they need to describe and implement search features suitable for global audiences.

The Publishing Maintenance Working Group has proposed corrections to the W3C Recommendation of EPUB 3.3. EPUB® 3 defines a distribution and interchange format for digital publications and documents. The EPUB format provides a means of representing, packaging, and encoding structured and semantically enhanced web content — including HTML, CSS, SVG, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file container. This specification defines the authoring requirements for EPUB publications and represents the third major revision of the standard.

Proposed corrections are marked in the document. Comments, including implementation experience, are welcome via GitHub through 10 March 2025.

The GPU for the Web Working Group invites implementations of the first Candidate Recommendation Snapshots for the following documents:

• WebGPU: Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs for short, have been essential in enabling rich rendering and computational applications in personal computing. WebGPU is an API that exposes the capabilities of GPU hardware for the Web. The API is designed from the ground up to efficiently map to (post-2014) native GPU APIs.
• WebGPU Shading Language, also known as WGSL for short: An application using the WebGPU API uses WGSL to express the programs, known as shaders, that run on the GPU. The shading language is tailored for parallel execution and usage on the Web.

Comments are welcome via GitHub issues by 28 February 2025.

The CSS Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of CSS Display Module Level 4. This module describes how the CSS formatting box tree is generated from the document element tree and defines the display property that controls it.

The CSS Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of CSS Multi-column Layout Module Level 2. This specification describes multi-column layouts in CSS, a style sheet language for the web. Using functionality described in the specification, content can be flowed into multiple columns with a gap and a rule between them.

The Verifiable Credentials Working Group invites implementations of the second Candidate Recommendation Snapshots for the following documents:

• Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.0: Credentials are a part of our daily lives; driver's licenses are used to assert that we are capable of operating a motor vehicle, university degrees can be used to assert our level of education, and government-issued passports enable us to travel between countries. This specification provides a mechanism to express these sorts of credentials on the Web in a way that is cryptographically secure, privacy respecting, and machine-verifiable.
• Verifiable Credential Data Integrity 1.0: This specification describes mechanisms for ensuring the authenticity and integrity of Verifiable Credentials and similar types of constrained digital documents using cryptography, especially through the use of digital signatures and related mathematical proofs.
• Data Integrity EdDSA Cryptosuites v1.0: This specification describes a Data Integrity cryptographic suite for use when creating or verifying a digital signature using the twisted Edwards Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA) and Curve25519 (ed25519).
• Data Integrity ECDSA Cryptosuites v1.0: This specification describes a Data Integrity Cryptosuite for use when generating a digital signature using the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA).
• Securing Verifiable Credentials using JOSE and COSE: This specification defines how to secure credentials and presentations conforming to the Verifiable Credential data model with JSON Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE), Selective Disclosure for JWTs, and CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (COSE) [RFC9052]. This enables the Verifiable Credential data model to be implemented with standards for signing and encryption that are widely adopted.

Comments are welcome via the GitHub issues by 19 January 2025.

The W3C Advisory Committee has elected the following people to fill four seats on the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) starting 1 February 2025: Hadley Beeman, Marcos Cáceres, Sarven Capadisli and Xiaocheng Hu. They join continuing TAG participants, Daniel Appelquist, Matthew Atkinson, Dapeng (Max) Liu, Tristan Nitot, Martin Thomson and Jeffrey Yasskin. Tim Berners-Lee is an emeritus member of the TAG and Yves Lafon continues as staff contact. Many thanks to the 7 candidates, and thanks for contributions to the TAG to the departing participants, Amy Guy, Peter Linss (who in addition held the role of TAG co-chair for many years), Theresa O'Connor and Lea Verou, whose terms end at the end of January 2025. 

The TAG is a special group within the W3C, chartered under the W3C Process Document, with stewardship of the Web architecture. The mission of the TAG is to build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary, to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG, and to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C. The Members of the TAG participate as individual contributors, not as representatives of their organizations. TAG participants use their best judgment to find the best solutions for the Web, not just for any particular network, technology, vendor, or user. Learn more about the TAG.

The WebAssembly Working Group invites implementations of the following Candidate Recommendation Snapshots:

• WebAssembly Core Specification: This document describes release 2.0 of the core WebAssembly standard, a safe, portable, low-level code format designed for efficient execution and compact representation.
• WebAssembly JavaScript Interface: This document provides an explicit JavaScript API for interacting with WebAssembly.
• WebAssembly Web API: This document describes the integration of WebAssembly with the broader web platform.

Comments are welcome via GitHub issues by 15 January 2025.

The CSS Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of CSS Color HDR Module Level 1. CSS Color 4 adds Wide Color Gamut (WCG) color spaces to the Open Web Platform. By design, these are all Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) color spaces. This specification defines additions to support High Dynamic Range (HDR).

The CSS Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of CSS Overflow Module Level 5. This module contains the features of CSS relating to scrollable overflow handling in visual media. It builds on the CSS Overflow Module Level 4, adding the ability to generate and associate various scrolling controls (markers to indicate scroll progress, buttons to trigger scrolling), and adding an appendix containing an experimental exploration of redirecting overflow by fragmentation.

The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) has published the Ethical Web Principles as a W3C Statement. The Ethical Web Principles are as much a guide in ethical thinking across the web industry as they are a guide for the work of the W3C community by providing a concise set of principles to assist spec developers, authors, and reviewers in their work. In particular, the purpose of this document is to inform the wide review of new charters, new specifications, candidate additions to published recommendations, and the development of actionable technical guidelines such as the Web Platform Design Principles and Privacy Principles. Furthermore, the document outlines how we, as an organization, define the power and purpose of the web, from an ethical standpoint.

This is the first W3C Statement being published since the W3C Process Document introduced them in November 2021. W3C Statements provide a stable reference for documents not intended to be formal standards, but have been formally reviewed and are endorsed by W3C. 

For more information, see the blog post W3C Statement on Ethical Web Principles guides the community to build a better web.

Today, the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group updated the following drafts:

• Explainer for WCAG 3 Draft provides background information and describes the structure of the WCAG 3 Draft. We suggest reading the Explainer before reading WCAG 3. 
• W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0 Working Draft includes potential guidelines and requirements that we are exploring. This document will explain how to make the web more accessible to people with disabilities. WCAG 3 applies to web content, apps, tools, publishing, and emerging technologies on the web.

For a summary of changes, new content for review, how to comment, and up-to-date information, see the WCAG 3 Introduction.

Note that WCAG 3 is years away from being complete. For information on the current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2 standard, see the WCAG 2 Overview.

The Second Screen Working Group has published two First Public Working Drafts: Open Screen Application Protocol and Open Screen Network Protocol. These documents result from splitting the Open Screen Protocol document into two independent parts. The Open Screen Application Protocol allows user agents to implement the Presentation API and the Remote Playback API in an interoperable fashion. The Open Screen Network Protocol is a network protocol that allows two Open Screen agents to establish a secure network transport in an interoperable fashion. 

The Pointer Events Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Pointer Events Level 4. The features in this specification extend or modify those found in Pointer Events, a W3C Recommendation that describes events and related interfaces for handling hardware agnostic pointer input from devices including a mouse, pen, touchscreen, etc. For compatibility with existing mouse based content, this specification also describes a mapping to fire Mouse Events for other pointer device types.

The Decentralized Identifier Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Decentralized Identifier (DID) Resolution and DID URL Dereferencing v1.0. Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) are a new type of identifier for verifiable, "self-sovereign" digital identity. DIDs are fully under the control of the DID controller, independent from any centralized registry, identity provider, or certificate authority. DIDs resolve to DID Documents — simple documents that describe how to use that specific DID.

This document specifies the algorithms and guidelines for resolving DIDs and dereferencing DID URLs.

The Devices and Sensors Working Group has republished Vibration API as a W3C Candidate Recommendation Snapshot. This specification defines an API that provides access to the vibration mechanism of the hosting device. Vibration is a form of tactile feedback. 

Comments are welcome via the GitHub issues by 26 December 2024.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has received US$ 660,037 in core funding from the Ford Foundation via their Technology and Society program, to provide core support through July 2026 to W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) work developing web accessibility standards, guidelines, and implementation resources to support access for people with disabilities.

This funding is significant both as it helps further our work in accessibility, and is the first we receive since we established in January 2023 as a US public-interest non-profit organization.

Learn more in our press release.

The Devices and Sensors Working Group has published Device Posture API as a W3C Candidate Recommendation. This document specifies an API that allows web applications to request and be notified of changes of the posture of a device. 

Comments are welcome via the GitHub issues by 24 December 2024.

Today the Web Applications Working Group published the following two documents as W3C Proposed Recommendations:

• UI Events KeyboardEvent code Values: This specification defines the values for the KeyboardEvent.code attribute, which is defined as part of the UI Events Specification [UIEvents]. The code value contains information about the key event that can be used to identify the physical key being pressed by the user.
• UI Events KeyboardEvent key Values: This specification defines the key attribute values that must be used for KeyboardEvent's key attribute, which is defined as part of the UI Events Specification [UIEvents].