Thank you Anne for clarifying my confusion between "activities" and "working groups". It was indeed the W3C announcement that caused my confusion when I misinterpreted the following quote:

The Compound Document Formats Working Group chaired
by Kevin Kelly (IBM) moves to this Activity, and continues to develop a
framework for combined documents

as an indication that the CDF WG would be absorbed into either the Web Applications or Web API Working Groups. Ok, I learned something new today...

• Apparently the internet won't be split up anytime soon.
• Via PCWorld. Google Base is now live. Just remember: "All your base are belong to us"...
• Sony is having a real PR nightmare lately
• Via Anne. The W3C is forming new groups that focus on Web APIs (like the existing XMLHttpRequest) and Rich Web Applications. Some interesting points:
  • The Web APIs Working Group will first be documenting things already "in the field": the XMLHttpRequest object, timed events (i.e. EcmaScript's setTimeout()), the Window object (i.e. interaction with the browser). Let's hope they don't deliberately try to break Internet Explorer's implementation of such things as they've done in the past. The more interesting APIs will be delivered later such as APIs for persistent local storage and file uploading...
  • Will W3C use the WHATWG's already-written specifications such as the Web Applications 1.0 spec?
  • The Web Application Formats Working Group will be striving to use an existing application format ("Mozilla's XUL, Microsoft's XAML, Macromedia's MXML or Laszlo Systems' LZX") and combine it with other existing technologies such as XHTML, CSS, SVG, etc. This is a great idea (i.e. we do not need a NEW format), but their tentative milestones seem a bit off: "First draft of requirements during October. First draft of specification during November. Candidate Recommendation 4th quarter of 2006.". It also means that there will be one winner and many losers...
  • The Web Application Formats Working Group seems to have swallowed the Compound Document Format Group.