"I’m trying to wrap my head around embedding, given the on-going attempts to make the DRM font format “Embedded OpenType” a W3C web standard..."

If Creative Commons (CC) has any say in the matter, the Web will soon have a standard machine-readable notation for licenses. Named the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL), the notation has been under development for the last few years, partly with the cooperation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3).

"W3C announced today the publication of SPARQL, the key standard for opening up data on the Semantic Web. With SPARQL query technology, pronounced "sparkle," people can focus on what they want to know rather than on the database technology or data format used behind the scenes to store the data. Because SPARQL queries express high-level goals, it is easier to extend them to unanticipated data sources, or even to port them to new applications. «Trying to use the Semantic Web without SPARQL is like trying to use a relational database without SQL» explained Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. «SPARQL makes it possible to query information from databases and other diverse sources in the wild, across the Web» ..." via http://www.w3.org/News/2008#item6

There’s a movement afoot in the web development community that says it’s time to move beyond standards and take the web to a new levels. Unhappy with the pace of innovation at the W3C, many developers are calling on browser manufacturers to go beyond supporting official W3C specifications and develop tools to support new features.

"...Firefox and Opera will support a new HTML tag specifically for embedding video in Web pages. [...] If video encoded in Ogg Theora plays directly in the browser..."