The Nassau County Legislature unanimously approved a $229 million bid by Forest City Ratner to restore and update the Nassau Coliseum on Monday. Naussau County voters turned down a plan to borrow $400 million to build a new arena two years ago and this deal is intended to save taxpayers the expense of the renovation, but critics wonder if the Coliseum can be successful without the New York Islanders, as the team will move to the Barclays Center after the 2014-15 hockey season.

UMBC economics professor Dennis Coates tells The New York Times that he doubts the arena can generate the revenue it needs without the draw of a big sports team. He suggests the arena could be forced to rely on concerts for revenue, competing against Barclays, Madison Square Garden and the Izod Center.

“The bottom line is,” Coates says, “are they going to have to back out of the deal at some point and come back to the county and say we need more money, and the county will be on the hook.”

In Newsday coverage of the deal Coates notes, “There does not seem to be any corporate welfare in this plan. And that makes me wonder — where is the corporate welfare? At what point are they going to say: ‘We need a handout to pull off what we promised but never in a million years could have delivered’?”

Read the full articles in The New York Times and Newsday.

HTML5 apps and games are exploding in popularity, with many developers rushing to take advantage of this new medium, but with every medium comes new procedures. In this article you'll learn how to keep your projects on track.

The Timed Text Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of Timed Text Markup Language 1 (TTML1) (Second Edition). This document specifies Timed Text Markup Language (TTML), Version 1, also known as TTML1, in terms of a vocabulary and semantics thereof. The Timed Text Markup Language is a content type that represents timed text media for the purpose of interchange among authoring systems. Timed text is textual information that is intrinsically or extrinsically associated with timing information. It is intended to be used for the purpose of transcoding or exchanging timed text information among legacy distribution content formats presently in use for subtitling and captioning functions. In addition to being used for interchange among legacy distribution content formats, TTML Content may be used directly as a distribution format, for example, providing a standard content format to reference from a <track> element in an HTML5 document, or a <text> or <textstream> media element in a SMIL 2.1 document. Learn more about the Video in the Web Activity.

The MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 2.0. The technology described in this document “Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0“ enhances the foundation to integrate automated processing of human language into core Web technologies. ITS 2.0 bears many commonalities with its predecessor, ITS 1.0 but provides additional concepts that are designed to foster the automated creation and processing of multilingual Web content. ITS 2.0 focuses on HTML, XML-based formats in general, and can leverage processing based on the XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF), as well as the Natural Language Processing Interchange Format (NIF). Comments are welcome through 22 October. Learn more about the Internationalization Activity.

The Device APIs Working Group has published a Working Draft of Network Service Discovery. This specification defines a mechanism for an HTML document to discover and subsequently communicate with HTTP-based services advertised via common discovery protocols within the current network. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

The Semantic Web Interest Group has published a new Working Draft of vCard Ontology. The document describes a mapping of the vCard specification (RFC6350) to RDF/OWL. The goal is to promote the use of vCard for the description of people and organizations utilizing semantic web techniques and allowing compatibility with traditional vCard implementations. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

The Efficient XML Interchange Working Group has published a Working Draft of the EXI Canonicalization (EXI C14N) specification. It describes a relatively simple method for generating a physical representation, the canonical form, of an EXI document that accounts for the permissible differences between two logically equivalent EXI documents. One application field for the canonical form of an XML-based document or document subset is digital signature. Supporting EXI canonicalization without going through plain-text XML is preferable in constrained environments and device classes where document size and processing overhead are critical. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.