The Timed Text Working Group has published IMSC Text Profile 1.3 as a W3C Candidate Recommendation Snapshot. IMSC 1.3 defines a text-only profile of [ttml2] intended for subtitle and caption delivery applications worldwide. It improves on IMSC 1.2 Text Profile by adding support for superscript and subscript text, and provides authoring guidelines for the Japanese language. The IMSC 1.2 Image Profile is not reproduced within IMSC 1.3, and the IMSC Hypothetical Render Model [imsc-hrm] is now a separate Recommendation, referenced by IMSC 1.3. 

Comments are welcome via Github issues or email to public-tt@w3.org by 15 January 2026.

The Timed Text Working Group invites implementations of an updated Candidate Recommendation Snapshot of Dubbing and Audio description Profiles of TTML2. This specification defines DAPT, a TTML-based file format for the exchange of timed text content in transcription and translation workflows used in the production of dubbing scripts, audio description, translation subtitles and hard of hearing subtitles (also known as closed captions).

Comments are welcome via Github issues or email to public-tt@w3.org by 15 January 2026.

The CSS Working Group invites implementations of an updated Candidate Recommendation Snapshot of CSS Color Adjustment Module Level 1. This module introduces a model and controls over automatic color adjustment by the user agent to handle user preferences, such as "Dark Mode", contrast adjustment, or specific desired color schemes.

Comments are welcome via the GitHub issues by 16 February 2026.

The RDF & SPARQL Working Group has published the first draft of a Group Note titled RDF 1.2 Interoperability. The goal of this specification is to provide guidance and good practices to achieve interoperability across different versions or profiles of RDF. 

The Data Shapes Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of SHACL 1.2 Rules. This document describes Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) Rules. This document introduces the concept of inference rules for SHACL 1.2, a mechanism for deriving new RDF triples from existing data using declarative rules defined in shapes graphs. This extends SHACL’s capabilities beyond validation, enabling reasoning and data enrichment. 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 Technical Architecture Group has published the first draft of a Group Note titled Web User Agents. Web user agents include both web browsers and other intermediaries between end-users and the web. Each user agent serves its user, not any of the other constituencies. A user agent owes its user various duties, which should be established through collective discussions and embodied in the various standards that user agents implement.

This document is intended for: 

• Technical authors who want to reuse or reference these concepts in their own specifications or documentation.
• User agent developers who want to align implementations with design and privacy principles that prioritize their users.
• Web developers who want to understand why user agents prioritize user privacy and security over other constituencies, including developer convenience.
• Regulators and policymakers who seek to understand the duties, principles, and expectations guiding user agent behavior.

Feedback and comments on this document are welcome. Please file an issue in this document’s GitHub repository.

The CSS Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of CSS Backgrounds Module Level 4. This module contains the features of CSS relating to the backgrounds of boxes on the page.

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

The W3C Advisory Committee has elected the following people to fill four seats on the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) starting 1 February 2026: Matthew Atkinson, Christian Liebel, Jeffrey Yasskin and Sen Yu. The number of nominees being equal to the number of available seats, the nominees were thereby elected. They join continuing TAG participants, Hadley Beeman, Marcos Cáceres, Sarven Capadisli, Xiaocheng Hu and Lola Odelola. Tim Berners-Lee is an emeritus member of the TAG and Yves Lafon continues as staff contact. 

Many thanks to Daniel Appelquist, who stepped down from the TAG in June 2025, to Tristan Nitot, who stepped down in September 2025, and to the departing participants Dapeng (Max) Liu and Martin Thomson, whose terms end at the end of January 2026, for their contributions to the TAG. 

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 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published the Authorized Translation in Simplified Chinese of the Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.0, 可验证凭证数据模型 v2.0. The Lead Translation Organization for this Authorized Translation was the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team /Coordination Center of China.

This translation was developed following the Policy for Authorized W3C Translations. The policy is designed to achieve quality translations through a process that relies on transparency and community accountability, with W3C providing oversight of the process.

Translations enable broader adoption of W3C resources and serve worldwide audience across languages and cultures. Explore more W3C translations and learn how to contribute to translation efforts.

The Pointer Events Working Group invites implementations of an updated Candidate Recommendation Snapshot of Pointer Events Level 3. 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 specification is an update to [PointerEvents2]. This revision includes new features:

• altitudeAngle
• azimuthAngle
• pointerrawupdate event, for high frequency events
• access associated coalesced events , for a more precise handling of pointer movement data
• access built-in predicted events , to reduce perceived latency

This revision also includes clarifications:

• strategies and approaches in how a user agent assign a pointerId
• suppressing a pointer event stream
• boundary events caused by layout changes
• relation with click , auxclick , and contextmenu events
• considerations to avoid fingerprinting with factory calibration information

Comments are welcome via the GitHub issues by 4 December 2025.

The Technical Architecture Group has published the first draft of a Group Note titled Self-Review Questionnaire: Societal Impact. The web should be a platform that helps people and provides a net positive social benefit. As we continue to evolve the web platform, we must consider the consequences of our work. This document sets out questions for specification authors, reviewers, and implementors of new web platform technologies to answer as part of a critical assessment of the impact of their work.

The Web of Things Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of the Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description 2.0. This document describes a formal information model and a common representation for a Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description (TD), Version 2.0. A Thing Description describes the metadata and interfaces of Things, where a Thing is an abstraction of a physical or virtual entity that provides interactions to and participates in the Web of Things. Thing Descriptions provide a set of interactions based on a small vocabulary that makes it possible both to integrate diverse devices and to allow diverse applications to interoperate. Thing Descriptions, by default, are encoded in a JSON format that also allows JSON-LD processing. The latter provides a powerful foundation to represent knowledge about Things in a machine-understandable way. A Thing Description instance can be hosted by the Thing itself or hosted externally when a Thing has resource restrictions (e.g., limited memory space) or when a Web of Things-compatible legacy device is retrofitted with a Thing Description. Furthermore, this document introduces the Thing Model, which allows authors to describe only the model or class of an Internet of Things (IoT) entity. Thing Models can be seen as a template for Thing Description instances, but with reduced constraints such as no or few requirements for specific communication metadata. 

This specification continues the work of WoT Thing Description 1.1 with no guarantees on backwards compatibility. In case of no backwards compatibility, there will be concrete guidelines for implementers to migrate to the new version. 

In other updates, the Working Group has retired the Group Note for the WoT Binding Templates and replaced it with the WoT Binding Registry. Additionally, the Working Group has published an updated Working Draft for the WoT Profiles.

The Verifiable Credentials Working Group has published the following two First Public Working Drafts:

• Confidence Method v1.0: This specification defines a mechanism that can be used with the Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.0 to increase a verifier's confidence about a particular subject identified in a verifiable credential.
• Verifiable Credential Rendering Methods v1.0: This specification describes mechanisms that can be used to represent a Verifiable Credential through a visual, auditory, or haptic medium. It covers rendering a Verifiable Credential to a physical document, digital image, screen reader, or braille output.

W3C announced today a Workshop on Smart Voice Agents, to be held virtually on Zoom from 25 to 27 February 2026.

The goals of this workshop are: 

• To identify stakeholders of Voice Agents standardization to drive the development of Web standards aligned with the real needs of Voice Agents
• To identify and discuss the pain points, technological gaps, and clarify potential impacts on Web standards

And the possible topic areas for the workshop may include:

• Clarification of use-cases for smart voice agents and their requirements (including voice interaction with smart devices, browsers, the Web of Things)
• User & developer needs: accessibility/usability, internationalization, input-to-output coordination, modality integration (voice, typing, handwriting)
• Horizontal platform considerations: resource discovery, trust/privacy/security, business models, and implications for Web standards

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.

This workshop will be a fully virtual event with pre-recorded talks, online discussions, and interactive sessions. With the consent of the speakers, recordings and slides of the talks will be made available after the workshop.

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

Please submit your proposal using the "Submit a talk proposal form" before 27 November 2025. We will work with you in confirming and defining your proposed contribution. You may also contact the Program Committee by email directly at any time if you have any questions. 

The Devices and Sensors Working Group and the Web Applications Working Group have proposed corrections and additions to the W3C Recommendation of Geolocation. Geolocation provides access to geographical location information associated with the hosting device.

Proposed corrections and additions are marked in the document. Comments, including implementation experience, are welcome via GitHub through 28 December 2025.

The CSS Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of CSS Anchor Positioning Module Level 2. This specification defines anchor positioning, where a positioned element can size and position itself relative to one or more anchor elements elsewhere on the page.

This is a delta specification, meaning that it currently contains only the differences from CSS Anchor Positioning Level 1.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 is now an approved International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard: ISO/IEC 40500:2025. It is available free from ISO/IEC 40500:2025 - Information technology — W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. The formal recognition enables more countries to formally adopt the standard. Additional information is in the W3C press release and 'ISO/IEC 40500, EAA, EN 301 549' section of WCAG 2 Overview.

The Sustainable Web Interest Group published  today a first public Draft Note of Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG).

The digital industry is responsible for 2-5% of global emissions, more than the aviation industry. The Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) cover a wide range of recommendations to make web products and services more sustainable.

These guidelines use planetary, people, and prosperity principles (the PPP approach) throughout the decision-making process, allowing users to minimize their environmental impact in various ways. These include user-centered design, performant web development, carbon-free infrastructure, sustainable business strategy, and, supported by measurability data, various combinations thereof.

The guidelines are in line with the Sustainable Web Manifesto and aligned with GRI Standards to help organizations incorporate digital products and services into broader sustainability reporting initiatives. The structure of WSG is inspired by WCAG with 92 guidelines and 254 success criteria. Every guideline is supported by evidence, and additional information sections provide examples, specific benefits, and compliance reporting metrics (based upon GRI). Further testability guidance and techniques for criteria can be found within W3C Editor's Draft Sustainable Tooling and Reporting (STAR).

Since the formal chartering of the W3C Interest Group in October 2024 and after the community group report became an editor's draft, significant progress was made including:

• Editorial improvements for clarity and readability were applied across all areas of work including the addition of new content where applicable to provide greater sustainability coverage.
• The introduction was edited, and contains new material on supplements and relationships to other specifications.
• A new “considerations” section of the document identifies accessibility, security and privacy tangent issues that interlink with sustainability topics.
• Breaking down of the specification into a paginated view to improve readability, with a full document mode available for those who prefer - including the ability to filter guidelines and success criteria by areas of interest, allowing for granular content control.
• Addition of a separate resources supplement, categorized by success criteria, cross-referenced within the specification, that provides over 2,500 regularly maintained sustainability related citations, tools, resources, and materials to help with implementation and adoption.

This W3C Group Draft Note will be further developed to ensure it meets the needs of its expected audience, and the group will continue to work on improving the usefulness of the specification. Notably, the inclusion of an Impact API is under development by the Interest Group’s Measurability Task Force. It aims to provide measurement-based scoring to identify more easily where the priority of effort should begin, but also to provide a sensible approach to deciding conformity levels within the scope of the specification.

The CSS Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of CSS Environment Variables Module Level 1. This specification defines the concept of environment variables and the env() function, which work similarly to custom properties and the var() function, but are defined globally for a document. These can be defined either by the user agent, providing values that can be used on the page based on information the UA has special access to, or provided by the author for "global" variables that are guaranteed to be the same no matter where in the document they’re used.

In accordance with the W3C Patent Policy, W3C has launched a Second Screen Working Group Patent Advisory Group (PAG) in response to disclosures and exclusions related to the Open Screen Application Protocol specification of the Second Screen Working Group; see the PAG charter. W3C launches a PAG to resolve issues in the event a patent has been disclosed that may be essential, but is not available under the W3C Royalty-Free licensing requirements. Public comments regarding these disclosures may be sent to public-secondscreen-pag@w3.org (public archive). Learn more about Patent Advisory Groups.

The Spatio-temporal Data on the Web Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Semantic Sensor Network Ontology - 2023 Edition. The Semantic Sensor Network ontology (SSN) describes actuators and their actuations, sensors and their observations, samplers and their samplings, the procedures implemented, the features of interest and samples changed or studied, and the actuated and observed properties. The core SSN classes and properties are defined using minimal axiomatization in a module called SOSA (Sensor, Observation, Sample, and Actuator) supplemented with additional axiomatization and terms in further modules. These allow SSN to support a wide range of applications and use cases, including satellite imagery, large-scale scientific monitoring, industrial and household infrastructures, social sensing, citizen science, observation-driven ontology engineering, and the Web of Things.

The CSS Working Group has published CSS Snapshot 2025 as a Group Note. This document collects together into one definition all the specs that together form the current state of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as of 2025. The primary audience is CSS implementers, not CSS authors, as this definition includes modules by specification stability, not Web browser adoption rate.

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

The Web Application Security Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of A Well-Known URL for Relying Party Passkey Endpoints. This specification defines a well-known URL which WebAuthn Relying Parties (RPs) can host to make their creation and management endpoints discoverable by WebAuthn clients and authenticators.

The Web Application Security Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Device Bound Session Credentials. Device Bound Sessions Credentials (DBSC) aims to prevent hijacking via cookie theft by building a protocol and infrastructure that allows a user agent to assert possession of a securely-stored private key. DBSC is a Web API and a protocol between user agents and servers to achieve this binding.