We are starting this public version of a W3C newsletter that we send to W3C Members and where I share timely and notable highlights and information selected from the busy and prolific work last month at W3C.
This newsletter includes news about the W3C Board, AI work, continued improvements to the W3C Standardization platform, updates on accessibility, ODRL, the Open Source Program, TPAC and more.
W3C Inc. governance
The Consortium Director election to the W3C Board of Directors results saw Koichi Moriyama (NTT Docomo), Chris Needham (BBC), Florian Rivoal (Invited Expert), Léonie Watson (Tetralogical) and Hongru Zhu (Alibaba) re-elected, joined by Theresa O’Connor (Apple) and Avneesh Singh (DAISY Consortium) as newly elected Directors. Many thanks to the other candidates, Jaunita Flessas (Invited Expert), Daniel Glazman (Thales Group), Tobie Langel (OpenJS), Venkata Vemuri (Oracle) and Greg Whitworth (Microsoft), for their engagement and dedication during the campaign.
I also want to reiterate W3C’s gratitude to Chris Wilson (Google) and Eric Siow (Intel) whose terms as Directors ended, for their service to the organization in this role.
AI @ W3C
The W3C/GS1 workshop on E-Commerce for humans and AI Agents on September 8-9 with 90 physical participants and 50 remote attendees. The workshop discussed merchants’ context and views, legal accountability, protocols and data infrastructure, including trust and ownership. Discussions show that, whether mediated by AI Agents, Web browsers, or some combination of both, e-commerce needs product data models and representations, user intent/alignment, identity and authorization, payment. The workshop concluded with a clear recognition of the need to make the Web ready to interactions driven both by humans and AI agents. A workshop report is in preparation.
WebMCP, a proposal in the Machine Learning Community Group, was discussed at the workshop and continues to gather interest and momentum. The Accessible Platforms Architecture Working Group, the Security Interest Group and the Technical Architecture Group provided early reviews of the specification, which is being proposed as part of a potential new Agentic Web Working Group to develop specifications that facilitate how web pages and applications can be leveraged by LLMs and AI agents.
The Web & AI International Standards Seminar on Generative UI and WebSkill hosted by the W3C Representative Office in Shenzhen on September 6 identified additional opportunities for W3C work on bringing agent skills to the browser (WebSkill) and enabling generative UI to enrich interactions between users and their AI agents.
In parallel, the Browser and Testing Tools Working Group is discussing expanding WebDriver’s scope to encompass LLM-driven browsers to support agentic use cases in addition to supporting LLM-assisted testing and debugging of Web applications.
Expect lots of discussions on these topics at TPAC 2026, with already 7 breakouts focused on the Agentic Web.
W3C standardization platform revamp
A part of the proposal to rethink W3C culture, Process, practices and tooling to make it more competitive touched on making the Process more agile: the Process Community Group is now discussing proposals to modularize the process and allow process experiments.
The Team is in parallel preparing several discussions at TPAC around W3C tooling improvements including for assisted scribing, on top of the sessions already planned on the potential role of AI in our horizontal work (security, accessibility, internationalization).
Accessibility
The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group released an updated Working Draft of W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0 with significant progress on the proposed conformance model – Shawn Lawton Henry, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Director, gave more background on the stakes and challenges of that critical work.
ODRL Workshop
The report of the W3C Workshop on the Future of ODRL was published, proposing the creation of a new Working Group, with a Digital Policy Working Group charter now under development.
Open source program pilot
A first pilot to support the exploration of the role of W3C for open source to accelerate adoption and interoperability of web technology was started to support Can I VC? as a compatibility dashboard for the W3C Verifiable Credentials ecosystem, with follow up discussions on the program and new pilots planned at TPAC.
TPAC 2026
TPAC 2026 in Dublin is now just a few weeks away, with on-line registration open until October 16 to join the 499 current registrants.
TPAC 2026 will experiment with 3 mini-workshops, for which proposals for presentations are accepted until October 9:
- AI and Society (submitted proposals)
- Age Assurance (submitted proposals)
- Data Governance & Ownership (submitted proposals)
The plenary All-Community session will include discussions organized by the Exploration Interest Group on emerging ideas based on submitted proposals.
30 years of W3C in Japan
2026 marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of W3C in Japan, initially through the role of Keio University as a W3C Host, and continuing with WCAP as a W3C Partner. The Japanese community celebrated that milestone through several events over the past few months, culminating in a “Web together” event on September 4.
In other news
- Web Platform updates: features from W3C specs that became baseline newly available (i.e., working across the latest browser versions) in September: the CSS alpha(), light-dark(), progress() functions and overflow-anchor property, the ariaNotify() DOM method, and WASM JavaScript promise integration.
- Specifications newly starting their Recommendation track adventure: Web Authentication Level 4 (support for remote desktop), SHACL 1.2 Inference Rules (adding inference capabilities to graph validation), and Verifiable Credentials Bitstring status 1.1.
- The Sustainable Web Interest Group reported its recent progress as part of the September climate weeks, highlighting its work on Web Sustainability Guidelines and their impact ratings.
- The Team is planning the upcoming election to the Technical Architecture Group that will begin in a couple of weeks, with 5 seats to be filled.
- 🎉 Yesterday October 1 marked W3C’s 0b100000th (or 32nd) anniversary.