The Internationalization Working Group has published HTML Ruby Markup Extensions as a W3C Candidate Recommendation Snapshot. Ruby, a form of interlinear annotation, are short runs of text alongside the base text. They are typically used in East Asian documents to indicate pronunciation or to provide a short annotation. This specification revises and extends the markup model established by HTML to express ruby.

Comments are welcome via Github issues by 3 July 2026.

W3C announced today the W3C/GS1 Workshop on E-commerce for Humans and AI Agents, 8-9 September 2026, in Zurich, Switzerland, with remote participation. The event is hosted by Google.

Web content has historically been designed for humans, even when pages also expose structured data through APIs or embedded JSON-LD using vocabularies such as schema.org and the extension GS1 Web Vocabulary. LLMs and AI Agents are becoming a new intermediary between that content and end users: they summarize search results, follow links, and may support users in online activity before a person ever visits a page directly. 

This workshop aims to share experiences of creating content with AI Agents in mind. What are the practices that are most effective? What are the pitfalls? What shifts do content creators need to make in order to maximize the return on the investment in time, energy, and skill? 

The impetus for the workshop is from e-commerce, which will be a particular focus of the event. However, the discussion is expected to be informed by broader input related to content creation and publication.

If you wish to participate, please submit either a "Position Statement" or an "Expression of Interest" by June 26, 2026. See submission instructions.

The organizers and the Programme Committee will review submissions and use them to shape the workshop agenda, identify speakers, and ensure a useful range of perspectives across the workshop topics. 

Attendance is free for invited participants and is open to people who can contribute relevant experience, use cases, technical perspectives, implementation experience, research findings, or standardization questions. 

We aim to include diverse participation from relevant communities, including: 

• Content creators and curators of all kinds
• LLM and AI Agents providers, including in-browser AI Agents
• Brands making products to sell, and retailers selling them
• Search Engine Optimization practitioners
• Online data providers 

If you have any questions, please contact the Programme Committee at group-ecommerce-agents-pc@w3.org.

W3C leadership transitionW3C has announced a leadership transition. Dominique Hazaël-Massieux has been appointed Interim CEO with immediate effect.

Please read more in our Press Release.

Today, the W3C Team proposed advancing Pointer Events Level 3 to W3C Recommendation. This specification was published by the Pointer Events Working Group as a Candidate Recommendation Draft on 22 May 2026. 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, or touchscreen. For compatibility with existing mouse-based content, this specification also describes a mapping to fire Mouse Events for other pointer device types.

This revision includes new features: altitudeAngle, azimuthAngle, pointerrawupdate event, associated coalesced events, and built-in predicted events. This revision of Pointer Events is intended to supersede Pointer Events Level 2.

The Web Authentication Working Group invites implementations of an updated Candidate Recommendation Snapshot of Web Authentication: An API for accessing Public Key Credentials Level 3. This specification defines an API enabling the creation and use of strong, attested, scoped, public key-based credentials by web applications, for the purpose of strongly authenticating users. Conceptually, one or more public key credentials, each scoped to a given WebAuthn Relying Party, are created by and bound to authenticators as requested by the web application. The user agent mediates access to authenticators and their public key credentials in order to preserve user privacy. Authenticators are responsible for ensuring that no operation is performed without user consent. Authenticators provide cryptographic proof of their properties to Relying Parties via attestation. This specification also describes the functional model for WebAuthn conformant authenticators, including their signature and attestation functionality.

Comments are welcome via Github issues by 23 June 2026.

The Data Shapes Working Group has published today a First Public Working Draft of SHACL 1.2 User Interfaces. This specification describes Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) User Interfaces. This specification is part of the SHACL 1.2 family of specifications. See the SHACL 1.2 Overview for a more detailed introduction to them.

The Security Interest Group has published the first draft of a Group Note titled Threat Model for the Web. This document describes the Threat Model for the Web and include the Web Security Model and may include the goals that have not yet been achieved across the whole web platform, but which will still be applied in reviews of new and changed specifications.

The Timed Text Working Group is thrilled to announce the publication of IMSC Text Profile 1.3 as a W3C Recommendation. 

IMSC Text Profile 1.3 is the most recent addition to the IMSC family of specifications for the authoring and delivery of subtitles and captions worldwide. The rich styling and structured markup make it an ideal choice for expressive subtitles and AI training sets. 

This maintenance update improves on the IMSC 1.2 Text Profile by adding support for superscript and subscript text, and provides authoring guidelines for the Japanese language. The IMSC Hypothetical Render Model is also factored out as a separate Recommendation to ease future maintenance.

The Verifiable Credentials Working Group has published today a First Public Working Draft of Recognized Entities v1.0. This specification describes a data model with which one or more recognized entities, such as one or more persons and/or organizations, can be described as known to perform specific actions, such as issuing or verifying a verifiable credential. The data model enables the publication or direct sharing of such information, providing a cryptographically-verifiable and privacy-preserving mechanism through which a holder can demonstrate that an entity whose credential they are using is recognized within a particular ecosystem.

The Working Group welcomes comments via the GitHub repository issues, the reference of which is also in the header of the document.

The W3C Advisory Committee has elected the following people to fill four seats on the W3C Advisory Board (AB), starting 1 July 2026: Daniel Appelquist, Wei Ding, Elena Lape, and Andrew Wafaa. They join continuing AB participants, Theresa O'Connor, Hiroshi Ota, Avneesh Singh, Hidde de Vries, Song Xu, and Brent Zundel.

Many thanks to the departing participants for their contributions to the AB, Max Gendler and Tatsuya Igarashi, whose terms end at the end of June 2026.

Created in March 1998, the Advisory Board provides ongoing guidance to the W3C Team on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution. The Advisory Board also serves the W3C Members by tracking issues raised between Advisory Committee meetings, soliciting Member comments on such issues, and proposing actions to resolve these issues. The Advisory Board manages the evolution of the Process Document. As part of a W3C Council, members of the Advisory Board hear and adjudicate on Submission Appeals and Formal Objections. For several years, the AB has conducted its work in a public wiki. 

The elected Members of the Advisory Board participate as individual contributors and not representatives of their organizations. Advisory Board participants use their best judgment to find the best solutions for the Web, not just for any particular network, technology, vendor, or user.

W3C today announced the establishment of a W3C Representative Office in Shenzhen, China. An opening ceremony was held in Shenzhen on 18 April 2026, a few days before the celebration of the 20th anniversary of W3C in China.

The W3C China Representative Office has a primary role in legal compliance, and will operate as a branch of W3C Inc., working with W3C’s existing Partner Beihang University to maintain a global platform for web technology standard innovation and collaboration.

The establishment follows unanimous approval by the W3C Board of Directors and represents a significant milestone in the Consortium’s long-standing collaboration with the Chinese web community, a phase that is built on decades of trust, shared innovation, and a mutual commitment to an open, neutral, secure, accessible and truly World Wide Web. Please read more in our Press Release.

The Web Performance Working Group published today a First Public Working Draft of Long Animation Frames API. This document defines an API that web page authors can use to detect presence of "long animation frames" that monopolize the UI thread for extended periods of time and block other critical tasks from being executed - e.g. reacting to user input.

The JSON-LD Working Group published today a First Public Working Draft of CBOR-LD 1.0. CBOR is a compact binary data serialization and messaging format. This specification defines CBOR-LD 1.0, a CBOR-based format to serialize Linked Data. The encoding is designed to leverage the existing JSON-LD ecosystem, which is deployed on hundreds of millions of systems today, to provide a compact serialization format for those seeking efficient encoding schemes for Linked Data. By utilizing semantic compression schemes, compression ratios in excess of 60% better than generalized compression schemes are possible. This format is primarily intended to be a way to use Linked Data in storage and bandwidth constrained programming environments, to build interoperable semantic wire-level protocols, and to efficiently store Linked Data in CBOR-based storage engines.

W3C announced a Workshop on the Future of ODRL, to be held on 22–23 June 2026 in London, UK, and online.

Since becoming a W3C Recommendation in 2018, ODRL has gained increasing recognition and adoption across: 

• Data space governance frameworks
• Industry consortia and international standards
• Digital media and creative content providers
• Financial sectors

At the same time, important challenges remain:

• Policy interoperability across domains
• Runtime enforcement and compliance verification
• Profile development and extension governance
• Tooling maturity and usability
• Integration with emerging Web standards

This workshop provides a forum to examine these topics collaboratively and define next steps. Possible topic areas for the workshop may include: 

• ODRL Adoption & Industry Experience
• Innovation and Semantics of ODRL
• Interoperability & Architecture
• Roadmap & Community Development

If you agree to work on the goals above and have experience and/or expertise in the topic areas above, please apply to the workshop. Proposals are either position papers of up to 4 pages or scientific papers with up to 10 pages.

The workshop will include: 

• Presentations (10–15 minutes each)
• Moderated discussion sessions
• Thematic breakout discussions
• Consolidated reporting of outcomes

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

Please submit your proposal by sending email to odrl-ws-submission@w3.org before 27 May 2026. The Program Committee will review submissions and shape the final agenda. For any inquiries, you may contact the Chairs directly using the same email address.

The Linked Web Storage Working Group has published the following four First Public Working Drafts: 

• LWS 1.0 Authentication Suite: OpenID Connect - This document defines an OpenID Connect-based authentication suite for the Linked Web Storage (LWS) protocol, enabling LWS applications to integrate with OpenID providers.
• LWS 1.0 Authentication Suite: SAML 2.0 - This document defines a SAML-based authentication suite for the Linked Web Storage (LWS) protocol, enabling LWS applications to integrate with SAML 2.0 identity providers.
• LWS 1.0 Authentication Suite: Self-signed Identity using Controlled Identifiers - This document defines an authentication suite for the Linked Web Storage (LWS) protocol, enabling clients that are able to sign their own identity tokens to integrate with LWS.
• LWS 1.0 Authentication Suite: Self-signed Identity using did:key - This document defines an authentication suite for the Linked Web Storage (LWS) protocol, enabling clients that are able to sign their own identity tokens to integrate with LWS while using agent identifiers with the did:key method.

The Verifiable Credentials Working Group has published five First Public Working Drafts today. These drafts fall into two groups.

1. The first group consists of new minor versions of published Recommendations that are maintained by the Working Group, without any significant change. These are:
   • Verifiable Credential Data Integrity 1.1: 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 v1.1: This specification describes Data Integrity cryptographic suites for use when creating or verifying a digital signature using the Ed25519 instantiation of the Edwards-Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA).
   • Data Integrity ECDSA Cryptosuites v1.1: This specification describes Data Integrity cryptosuites for use when generating a digital signature using the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA).
2. The second group consists of new specifications, listed as new deliverables in the new Working Group Charter. These are:
   • VCALM v1.0: This specification provides data model and HTTP protocols to issue, verify, present, and manage Verifiable credentials used in a credential ecosystem.
   • Verifiable Credential Barcodes v1.0: This specification describes a mechanism to protect optical barcodes, such as those found on driver's licenses (PDF417) and travel documents (MRZ), using Verifiable Credentials. The Verifiable Credential representations are compact enough such that they fit in under 150 bytes and can thus be integrated with traditional two-dimensional barcodes that are printed on physical cards using standard printing processes.

The Working Group welcomes comments via the GitHub repository issues, whose reference is in the header of the respective documents.

The CSS Working Group published today a First Public Working Draft of CSS Image Animation Module Level 1. This CSS module proposes facilities to control the rendering of animated images.

CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, etc.

The Verifiable Credentials Working Group published today a First Public Working Draft of Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.1. A verifiable credential is a specific way to express a set of claims made by an issuer, such as a driver's license or an education certificate. This specification describes the extensible data model for verifiable credentials, how they can be secured from tampering, and a three-party ecosystem for the exchange of these credentials that is composed of issuers, holders, and verifiers. This document also covers a variety of security, privacy, internationalization, and accessibility considerations for ecosystems that use the technologies described in this specification.

Today, the W3C Team proposed advancing the IMSC Text Profile 1.3 to W3C Recommendation. Published by the Timed Text Working Group as a Candidate Recommendation Draft on 3 April 2026, this specification defines a text-only profile of [ttml2] intended for subtitle and caption delivery applications worldwide. It improves over the Text Profile specified at at [ttml-imsc1.2], with the improvements summarized at L. Summary of substantive changes.

The RDF & SPARQL Working Group invites implementations of the following two Candidate Recommendation Snapshots.

RDF 1.2 Concepts and Abstract Data Model

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a framework for representing information on the Web. This document defines an abstract data model which serves to link all RDF-based languages and specifications. The abstract data model has two key data structures:

• RDF graphs are sets of subject-predicate-object triples, where the elements may be IRIs, blank nodes, datatyped literals, or triple terms. They are used to express descriptions of resources.
• RDF datasets are used to organize collections of RDF graphs, and consist of a default graph and zero or more named graphs.

Compared to RDF 1.1, RDF 1.2 introduces the ability to use an RDF triple as a triple term, in the object position of another triple. RDF 1.2 also introduces directional language-tagged strings, which contain a base direction component that allows the initial text direction to be specified for presentation by a user agent. Finally, to ease the transition from RDF 1.1 to RDF 1.2, this specification introduces a mechanism for explicitly conveying the version of RDF that is used by a given piece of data.

This specification introduces key concepts and terminology for RDF 1.2, and subsequently discusses datatyping and the handling of fragment identifiers in IRIs within RDF graphs.

RDF 1.2 Semantics

This document describes a precise semantics for RDF 1.2 Concepts and Abstract Data Model and RDF 1.2 Schema. It defines a number of distinct entailment regimes and corresponding patterns of entailment. It is part of a suite of documents which comprise the full specification of RDF 1.2.

Comments are welcome by 5 May 2026.

The Accessible Rich Internet Applications Working Group has proposed corrections and additions to the W3C Recommendation of ARIA in HTML. This specification defines the authoring rules (author conformance requirements) for the use of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.2 and Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.1 attributes on [HTML] elements. This specification's primary objective is to define requirements for use with conformance checking tools used by authors (i.e., web developers). These requirements will aid authors in their development of web content, including custom interfaces and widgets, which make use of ARIA to complement or extend the features of the host language [HTML].

Proposed corrections and additions are marked in the document. Comments, including implementation experience, are welcome via GitHub through 8 June 2026.

W3C is pleased to announce the report from the W3C Workshop on Smart Voice Agents, held online in February 2026. 

The workshop brought together voice platform providers, agent developers, privacy experts, accessibility advocates, and standards professionals to advance interoperability and user empowerment in voice-enabled systems.

Workshop participants acknowledged the growing ubiquity of voice agents across devices and platforms, and identified key challenges in achieving seamless, secure, and privacy-respecting interactions across different voice ecosystems. They highlighted the need for standardized protocols for agent-to-agent communication, mechanisms for user consent and delegation, and frameworks for ensuring transparency in multi-agent conversations. 

Key discussion areas included: 

• Agent discovery and invocation mechanisms that respect user privacy and choice
• Protocols for delegating conversation control between agents (conversation handoff)
• Privacy-preserving authentication and user identification across agents
• Accessibility requirements for voice interfaces and multi-modal experiences
• Technical standards for voice agent interoperability

On top of individual topics, one of the suggested next steps is to explore the possible creation of a voice agents activity at W3C to coordinate inputs from the voice community, pursue broader discussions on interoperability and privacy, and track progress on needs identified during the workshop. 

The conversation does not end with the workshop. We encourage continued collaboration through Community Groups, upcoming W3C events, and publication opportunities that can carry these discussions into concrete standards and implementation work. 

Many thanks to the workshop chairs, Deborah Dahl and Dirk Schnelle-Walka, the program committee, workshop speakers, and all participants for making this event possible and successful.

The Linked Web Storage Working Group published today a First Public Working Draft of Linked Web Storage Protocol 1.0. This specification aims to provide applications with secure and permissioned access to externally stored data in an interoperable way.

The Devices and Sensors Working Group and the Web Applications Working Group have republished Geolocation as a W3C Candidate Recommendation Snapshot. Geolocation provides access to geographical location information associated with the hosting device.

The document was previously published as a W3C Recommendation and now returns to Candidate Recommendation status to allow the Working Groups to iterate more efficiently on substantive changes and to continue adding new features.

The Working Groups welcome comments via the GitHub repository issues by 1 May 2026.

The Advisory Board has published Use of Large Language Models in Standards Work as a Group Note. As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly synonymous with “AI”, and are used by people within our community, the Advisory Board wants to highlight considerations around different ways in which LLMs can be useful or problematic when it comes to leveraging them in standards work at W3C. This document summarizes the Advisory Board’s current thinking, as of 24 March 2026.