W3C Member representatives are invited to join a virtual-only Advisory Committee session on Tuesday 28 October for an highlight of Member work as well as governance and corporate updates.

The young are often unprepared for the sorts of things they might find online.

Maturity, education, and the guidance of responsible adults can help children navigate online interactions, but age is often regarded as the best indicator of how able a person is to cope with exposure to content.

Increasing interest is being shown in the implementation of regulation that restricts what content young people can access online. A recurring theme in these efforts is that it is no longer considered sufficient to rely on self-assertions of age. A number of jurisdictions have enacted—or are in the process of enacting—laws that take steps to provide stronger guarantees that children are not exposed to certain content.

This workshop seeks to perform a thorough examination of the technical and architectural choices that are involved in solutions for age-based restrictions on access to content. We do not expect to identify a single candidate solution, even if that might be an ideal outcome. The goal is to build a shared understanding of the properties of various proposed approaches.

In general, access restrictions are achieved by selectively blocking or filtering. RFC 7754 (Technical Considerations for Internet Service Blocking and Filtering) provides a more general framework for how to think about restrictions on communications. This workshop will build on that work. In particular, it will seek to examine the specific technical considerations that apply when content is legally accessed by some people and restricted for others based primarily on their age.

See the workshop homepage for more information.

The WebEvolve 2025 Annual Event spotlights two tech themes:

• Building high-performance, cross-platform "pure web" apps for mobile
• AI agent and open web ecosystem

The event is initiated by the Chinese Web Interest Group and MiniApps Working Group, hosted by Beihang University (W3C Partner). We thank Huawei for sponsoring this event.

When expanding the tech community’s knowledge of authentic lived experiences from the disabled community, you can drive change. Organizations like Teach Access, the Industry Association of Accessibility Professionals, and the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative will demonstrate cross-industry impact.

Note that the tutorial's precise time and date will be confirmed closer to the conference.

The RDF 1.1 and SPARQL 1.1 specifications are foundational to Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web research. More than a decade after their last versions were released as W3C recommendations, they are scheduled to receive an update to version 1.2. For the last 3 years, the RDF-star Working Group has been working on these updates, with as primary focus the ability to make statements about other statements.

The goal of this tutorial is to provide a crash course into RDF 1.2 and SPARQL 1.2, for people that already know RDF 1.1 and SPARQL 1.1. We will discuss the history and motivations for this update, explain the new triple terms and reification concepts, and give an overview of the other changes that were included in the relevant specifications.

As outcomes, participants will understand the motivations for these changes, and they will be able to make use of it in their future work.

See the tutorial's program and materials. 

Simone Onofri (W3C), Heather Flanagan (Spherical Cow Consulting) will present "What would it take for global acceptance of the W3C’s Digital Credentials API?" about how the W3C Digital Credentials API will provide first-class Web browser support to mediate presentation and issuance of digital credentials. This session will encourage discussion about the API, its benefits, and blockers to adoption

W3C is a co-sponsor of GC 2025 on 1-2 July 2025 in Geneva Switzerland where leading organizations from across the globe coming together to shape the future of digital identity, in particular in the realm of secure, interoperable wallets, credentials and trusted infrastructure.

Simone Onofri (W3C), Tara Whalen (W3C), and Amir Sharif (Fondazione Bruno Kessler) will present "Threat Model for Digital Wallets", a practical and collaborative session with a serious game in which the participants will explore the threats and initial principles for addressing user considerations for high-assurance or real-world identity credentials and their use on the Web.

W3C is a co-sponsor of GC 2025 on 1-2 July 2025 in Geneva Switzerland where  leading organizations from across the globe coming together to shape the future of digital identity, in particular in the realm of secure, interoperable wallets, credentials and trusted infrastructure.

Pierre-Antoine Champin, W3C Data Strategist, will discuss: "What's new in W3C Verifiable Credentials?" the recently released a new family of specifications for Verifiable Credentials 2.0, which make expression, exchange, and verification of digital credentials easier and more secure.

W3C is a co-sponsor of GC 2025 on 1-2 July 2025 in Geneva Switzerland where  leading organizations from across the globe coming together to shape the future of digital identity, in particular in the realm of secure, interoperable wallets, credentials and trusted infrastructure.

François Daoust, W3C Media Specialist, will speak at the 2th FOKUS Media Web Symposium on 24 June 2025 in Berlin as part of their AI-Driven Media Technologies workshop. François will speak on "The agentic web, new and old technologies for an artificial/intelligent future", an exploration of the possible impact of AI technologies in web media scenarios.

As more teams — both large and small — begin exploring what it takes to build a new browser engine, we thought it would be nice to create a space where developers can share their “what if” ideas. For example:

• What parts of the platform do you wish had been designed in a more structured way, especially in web standards?
• Are there events or other APIs you think should never have been added?
• If you could start from scratch, which features would you prioritize, remove, or completely redesign?
• What capabilities do you wish existed to better serve end users?

We’d love to hear your perspectives and any lessons learned. Come join the session and share your thoughts!

The aim of this session is bring together contributors from various browser-engine projects to discuss their experiences with running the WPT test suite — in full or in part — under CI. The goal of the session is for the participants to share their experiences: problems and challenges they’ve run into, lessons they’ve learned, and tips and tricks.

The scope includes (but is not limited to):

• regularly running the WPT suite in order to produce data for https://wpt.fyi
• running an (imported) subset of the WPT suite for project-specific regression testing

We’ll follow the “How to facilitate a breakout discussion” guidelines, and aim to make this a very interactive session.

At W3C, we are creating a "Threat Model for the Web". In this context, user agents par excellence—such as browsers—are an important element of the Web Platform.

One of the simplest (but not easiest) ways to create a Threat Model is to use Shostack's “4 Question Frame”:

1. What are we working on?
2. What can go wrong?
3. What are we going to do about it?
4. Did we do a good job?

So the purpose of the session is to first prepare the answer to the first question by collaboratively creating a Data Flow Diagram (DFD) of the Web Platform.

W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) specialist Daniel Montalvo will take part in discussion about the shaping and future of digital accessibility in Africa, as well as best practices on standards development  

Hear W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) specialist Daniel Montalvo and other global experts discuss progress made, ongoing challenges, and key lessons learnt in implementing digital accessibility measures.

Simone Onofri's talk presents a lean threat-modeling approach in W3C for standards developers. After defining core concepts, it outlines system mapping, threat enumeration, and mitigation strategies. Using Decentralized Identities as a running example.  

François Daoust, W3C Entertainment Champion and Media Specialist, has been invited by Huawei (a partner of the 2025 OpenHarmony Developer Conference) to present "The open web platform, the ideal companion for building a successful OS ecosystem" at the Web & W3C Track.

In his presentation, François will address: "Beyond the need to create a feature-rich operating system (OS), there is a chicken and egg issue with the adoption of a new OS: end users tend to favor platforms that come with a large ecosystem of applications, while application developers favor platforms with a large user audience (all the more so if they need to learn new development paradigms and deployment workflows). 

The open web platform provides an ideal, powerful, and royalty-free layer on top of an OS to support millions of applications at once and open the door to as many web developers. Adding a web layer to a new OS is a significant endeavour though as the web has grown in the past 35 years from a platform tailored to the rendering of text and the creation of user interfaces to a full-fledged computing platform, but it now provides more direct opportunities to hook into the OS and hardware, with technologies such as WebRTC, WebNN, WebAssembly, and WebGPU."

This talk will describe W3C’s work on the Web of Things, the relationship to NGSI-LD, work on RDF 1.2, web-based monitoring and orchestration, work on a cognitive framework for low-code real-time control of digital twins in relation to factory automation, the Nephele project perspective on orchestration and what we can expect from expected advances in AI.

Simone Onofri, W3C Security Lead, will give a lightning talk "Threat Modeling Digital Credentials: What Could Go Wrong?" at ThreatModCon Barcelona 2025.

Simone will discuss: "Governments are rolling out digital wallets and decentralized credentials, shifting identity verification online. While promising convenience, this introduces new security risks. This session explores threats in credential presentation for web apps, including data correlation, replay attacks, and phishing risks. In just eight minutes, you’ll discover decentralized identity models and gain actionable insights to build your own."

W3C is a sponsor of Green IO New York, that offers actionable Tech Sustainability hands-on perspectives from scaling Green IT experts, including Tzviya Siegman (W3C Sustainability Lead) and Tim Frick (W3C Sustainable Web Interest Group).

Green IO New York covers responsible AI, green software, sustainable design, green cloud, etc., and will provide a variety of perspectives from practitioners and experts from Hugging Face, W3C, Climate Product Leader, Thoughtworks, and many more.

W3C Members may attend with complimentary tickets.

Simone Onofri, W3C Security Lead, will facilitate a Threat Modeling session with LINDDUN card game at Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) 40, focusing on the Digital Credentials API.

Slides

W3C will host a deconstructed mini-workshop series to discuss a project framework for assessing tooling in the authentic web ecosystem.

We will hold a virtual meeting on 12 March 2025, 10:00-11:00 EDT / 14:00-15:00 UTC, to review the framework and discuss how to move proposals to interoperable standards to combat misinformation on the web.