New and revised W3C drafts published

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has released two new working drafts and revised a third. The first new working draft, Ambient Light Events, is quite concise and proposes ways in which web applications can respond to information received from a device sensor about changes in ambient light. For example, the proposed ondevicelight event handler could be used to increase the contrast of a web page when the device is exposed to direct sunlight.

The second new working draft describes a "Model-Based User Interfaces" (MBUI) specification, which is intended to simplify the design and development of interactive systems, and describes the logical activities within such a system. UML modelling and an XML schema will be used as the basis for interchanging Task Models between different user interface development tools.

The W3C has also revised the Web Audio API draft for processing and synthesising audio in web applications using JavaScript. The primary concept of the Web Audio API is based on an "audio routing graph" that connects individual AudioNode objects to define the overall audio rendering. While the actual signal processing will likely be handled in an optimised way by the browser engine (in assembly, C or C++ code), processing and signal generation can also be triggered via JavaScript. The API is designed to interact with other APIs and with elements of the web platform such as XMLHttpRequest, the Canvas 2D API and the WebGL 3D graphics API.

(Harald M. Genauck / crve)