Seven API Publications Advance Web Applications Stack

The Web Applications Working Group has published updates to seven specifications related to APIs that enhance the open Web platform as a runtime environment for full-featured applications. W3C invites implementation experience for the two newest Candidate Recommendations:

• The Widget Interface defines an application programming interface (API) for widgets that provides functionality for accessing a widget's metadata and persistently storing data. The group's implementation report will be used to track progress.
• Selectors API Level 1 defines methods for retrieving Element nodes from the DOM by matching against a group of selectors (such as those used in Cascading Style Sheets). The group is developing a selectors API test suite.

Comments on these Last Call Working Drafts are welcome until 30 June 2010:

• Web Storage provides APIs for Web applications to store key-value data on the client side.
• Web Workers defines an API for enabling thread-like operations (using message passing) in Web applications, so that certain application tasks can be run in parallel.
• Server-Sent Events defines an API for a Web application to open an HTTP connection for receiving push notifications from a server, in the form of DOM events.

The group also updated these Working Drafts:

• Web Sockets API provides an API for full-duplex communication between a Web application and a remote host.
• Web SQL Database defines an API for Web applications to store data in client-side databases that can be queried using a variant of SQL.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.