widgetBeat…

W3C announces release of first “Widgets 1.0″ working drafts

April 15th, 2008

by Al Merkrebs, April 15, 2008 @ 10:27 a.m. PDT

A notable step towards widget standardization took place
this morning.

W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, today released four working drafts of standards for widgets. The Consortium, directed by Web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, has already published more than 100 recommendations for Web technology standards.

The Consortium describes the four new documents as:

• The Widget Landscape (Q1 2008): reviews commonalities and fragmentation across widget user agents and explores how fragmentation currently affects, amongst other things, authoring, security, distribution and deployment, internationalization and the device-independence of widgets.

• Packaging and Configuration: defines a Zip-based packaging format and an XML-based configuration document format for widgets.

• Digital Signature: defines a profile of the XML-Signature Syntax and Processing specification to allow a widget resource to be digitally signed.

• Requirements: lists the design goals and requirements that specification would need to address in order to standardize various aspects of widgets

“This document (the Widget Landscape) surveys a group of market-leading widget user agents with the aim to inform the requirements of the [Widgets 1.0: Requirements] document. The survey exposes commonalities and fragmentation across widget user agents, and discusses how fragmentation currently affects, amongst other things, authoring, security, distribution and deployment, internationalisation and the device-independence of widgets,” according to the authors.

Ongoing comments and exchanges on the documents can be followed here on Twitter.

Entry Filed under: widget news