The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today announced a premium W3C Validator Suite to help people improve the quality of Web pages. With the Validator Suite, it becomes easier and faster to perform checks on HTML, CSS, and Internationalization (I18n) for an entire public site. The Validator Suite service scans an entire site to produce customizable, integrated reports for easier tracking and prioritization of any Web issues.

W3C will continue to operate and enhance its free validators, as it has done for 15 years. Revenues from the new service will help W3C improve both the free service and the Validator Suite, and provide long-term stability of these services.

Today W3C transitions the service out of beta. While the new service is young, we are already studying enhancements based on feedback we have received and our own goals to help people use W3C’s open standards.

We invite the entire community to try the Validator Suite. Discount rates are available for W3C Members. For more information, contact the Validator Suite Team.

UMBC was ranked #6 on U.S. News and World Report’s Best Colleges Guide’s list of schools with the “Best Undergraduate Teaching,” along with such universities as William and Mary, Berkeley, Princeton, and Brown.

UMBC has also again been named the top national university for “promising and innovative changes.” This is the 5^th consecutive year that UMBC has topped this “Up-and-Coming” list.

“I’m encouraged that our colleagues around the country continue to recognize the quality of our academic program. Our faculty and staff are consistently looking for creative ways to strengthen teaching and learning on our campus, and we are proud that this has made us a leader in redefining excellence in undergraduate education,” says President Freeman Hrabowski. “Each fall, I see the result of our hard work as I welcome yet another outstanding class of undergraduates.”

This continued recognition points to what makes UMBC unique: our community successfully combines a deep commitment to undergraduate education with achievements in graduate education and research. Our investments in undergraduate student success and steady efforts by our faculty and staff to maximize student engagement and success are attracting ever-larger numbers of talented, diverse students. This year, we welcomed a record-breaking incoming class of 1,660 freshmen. These students are planning to study in a wide range of disciplines.

Most important, we continue to assess student outcomes and explore new ways to advance teaching and learning. For example, the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation invests in faculty initiatives that fuel creativity and enterprise, helping more students from all backgrounds to excel. Our iCubed study, funded through the National Science Foundation, is examining the effectiveness of a variety of learning activities for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students. And our STEM Transfer Student Success Initiative, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is building a national model for ensuring more transfer students complete four-year degrees.

Congratulations to our faculty, staff, students, alumni, and supporters who make UMBC a national model for educational excellence.

The latest update of Application Loader now contains a localized UI for Spanish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, making it even easier for you to add In-App Purchases for your apps and to submit your apps for review. To learn more, read the Application Loader User Guide.

iOS 7 will soon be in the hands of hundreds of millions of customers. Download the GM seed of iOS 7 and Xcode 5, test and optimize for iOS 7, and submit your apps to the App Store. Learn more.