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W3C announces the launch of its Incubator Activity, a new initiative to foster development of emerging Web-related technologies. "With the Incubator Activity, W3C Members and Invited Experts can now combine Web technology discovery with the outstanding technical resources of W3C and see what develops," said Steve Bratt, W3C Chief Executive Officer. The first Incubator Group (XG) to be launched addresses the issue of content labels.

© W3C: Steve Bratt

A joint effort of the SVG and Web API Working Groups, the REX Task Force has released the First Public Working Draft of Remote Events for XML (REX) 1.0 and their Requirements. Using the REX grammar, endpoints can interact with DOM Events remotely as if they were at the same location.

© W3C: Robin Berjon

The Internationalization GEO (Guidelines, Education & Outreach) Working Group publishes information to help people understand and use international aspects of W3C technologies. Recently the group published Changing (X)HTML page encoding to UTF-8, xml:lang in XML document schemas and Localization vs. Internationalization, as well as numerous updates and translations.

© W3C

W3C announces the advancement of XHTML-Print to Proposed Recommendation. Comments are welcome through 28 February. XHTML-Print is designed for printing from mobile devices, low-cost printers and in environments without a printer-specific driver. The work is based on XHTML-Print written by the Printer Working Group (PWG), a program of the IEEE-ISTO.

© W3C: Melinda Grant, Jim Bigelow

Mobile industry leaders have reached a preliminary agreement on best practices for mobile Web content. Written to improve user experience, the Last Call Working Draft of Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 describes how to produce Web content and Web sites intended for delivery to mobile and small-screen devices.

© W3C: Jo Rabin, Charles McCathieNevile

The Voice Browser Working Group has released a Last Call Working Draft of Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) Version 1.0. Comments are welcome through 15 March. Designed for ease of use by developers and internationally, PLS allows pronunciation information to be specified for speech recognition and speech synthesis engines in voice browsing applications. Pronunciations grouped together in a PLS document may be referenced from other markup languages such as SRGS and SSML.

© W3C: Paolo Baggia

The Math Interest Group has released Arabic mathematical notation as an Interest Group Note. The Note analyzes the handling of mathematical presentation in Arabic and related languages using the Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) 2.0. Its goals are to clarify implementation details and to uncover genuine specification limitations that may require extensions.

© W3C: Azzeddine Lazrek, Mustapha Eddahibi, Khalid Sami, Bruce R. Miller

The XML Query Working Group has released First Public Working Drafts of the XQuery Update Facility and its Use Cases. XML Query can perform searches, queries and joins over collections of XDM instances such as documents and databases. Today's drafts provide expressions to create, modify and delete nodes within those instances.

© W3C: Don Chamberlin, Daniela Florescu, Jonathan Robie

The RDF Data Access Working Group has released a second Last Call Working Draft of the SPARQL Protocol for RDF. The draft describes RDF data access and transmission of RDF queries from clients to processors. The protocol is compatible with the SPARQL query language and is designed to convey queries from other RDF query languages as well. Comments are welcome through 10 February.

© W3C: Kendall Grant Clark

The RDF Data Access Working Group has released a second Last Call Working Draft of the SPARQL Query Results XML Format. The SPARQL query language offers developers and end users a way to write and to consume search results across a wide range of information such as personal data, social networks and metadata about digital artifacts like music and images. SPARQL also provides a means of integration over disparate sources. Comments are welcome through 10 February.

© W3C: Dave Beckett, Jeen Broekstra