The impact of COVID-19 has seen a substantial increase in usage of remote meeting platforms. Before 2020, software-based remote meeting applications were available, but not necessarily viewed as critical. The shift to remote meetings from a complementary tool to a replacement for face-to-face contact, has driven significant innovation in this space, including improvements in the provision of accessibility for people with disabilities. More recently, hybrid meetings, combining in-person attendance with remote participation, have become more common.

Yet despite the rapid growth of remote meeting platforms and innovation, there has been little formalized guidance to date on how to ensure remote meetings are accessible. Part of the issue lies with determining who is ultimately responsible for ensuring accessibility. To take the provision of captions as an example, it is necessary for a remote meeting platform to support captions, a process to be put in place to create them, and for the meeting host and participants to know not only that captions are available, but also how to ensure the they are included. This demonstrates the shared responsibility, across different audiences, for remote meetings to be accessible. It is with this in mind, that this guidance has been created to gather important accessibility considerations in the one publication.

This W3C Group Note is sectioned into different audience groups and includes, guidance on vendor procurement planning. It is critical for organizations to make informed decisions about the accessibility of remote meeting platforms they choose to use. The document covers the need for remote meeting platforms to adhere to accessibility standards in their development, and the need to ensure content used in a remote meeting is accessible to all participants. There is also guidance for hosts and participants regarding how to make all accessibility features of the platform available during an online or hybrid meeting.

The Research Questions Task Force (RQTF) of the Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group considered how best to support these different audiences, while also linking guidance back to relevant W3C standards where applicable. Accessibility of Remote Meetings captures knowledge and experience gained in the last several years on how to support the diverse needs of people with disabilities in the software, organizations and activities through which remote and hybrid meetings take place. Thus, by encompassing the entire process of delivering accessible meetings (not just the technical aspects of Web standards and software implementation), this work builds on and complements the earlier RTC Accessibility User Requirements.

Accessibility of Remote Meetings is expected to be of broad interest to a variety of audiences, including meeting platform developers, meeting organizers, and participants with disabilities. In addition, it has the potential to influence subsequent work of W3C Web Accessibility Initiative including future formal accessibility guidance.

Over a several year period we have substantially improved our geographic and gender diversity in these groups. But we still have much more to go. More broadly in the consortium we still have many under-represented groups.

As you can see in the graphs, since last year (and yearly since 2018) we continue to make incremental improvements.

The W3C Diversity bar charts and figures for 2022 are also available in a standalone public document.

Diversity data for W3C

Notes on the graphs and information collection: Because we do not collect participants’ data, to preserve privacy, it is difficult to gather data for different characterizations of diversity. We are able to focus on gender identity and geography for several of our representative bodies: W3C Advisory Board (AB), W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG), W3C Management (W3M).

W3C Advisory Board

The W3C Advisory Board provides ongoing guidance to W3C on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution. Created in March 1998, the AB has now for several years conducted its work in a public wiki. The elected Members of the Advisory Board participate as individual contributors and not as representatives of their organizations; the AB use their best judgment to find the best solutions for the Web, not just for any particular network, technology, vendor, or user.

The 11 Advisory Board positions are member-elected. The gender diversity of the AB has not changed this year. After the last election last month, the board has 4 women and 7 men for the fourth consecutive year.

Tabular version of AB by gender identity.

Looking at the Advisory Board by geography, we see that the geographical diversity which was heavily tilted toward North America between 1998 and 2009 steadily improved and reached in 2018 an equal number of participants in each region. The Asian representation has expanded without regressing since 2016 and this year it reached its highest number, surpassing the North American representation. The European representation which was more or less consistently about 1/5^th since 2004 and peaked around 1/3^rd in 2017 and 2018, has continued to shrink after this and has been at its lowest for the third year in a row.

Tabular version of AB by geography.

W3C Technical Architecture Group

The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) is a special working group within W3C, chartered to steward web architecture, document and build consensus around principles of web architecture, resolve issues involving general web architecture brought to the TAG, and to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C.

The 9 Technical Architecture Group positions are a mix of member election and appointment by the W3C Director. The group was composed only of men during its first nine years until 2011 when the TAG counted a woman during the next eight years except in 2015 where there were 2 of them. In 2019 and 2020, a third of the TAG were women. After the last election earlier this year, the composition of the TAG remained the same: a non-binary member, 3 women and 5 men.

Tabular version of TAG by gender identity.

Looking at the TAG by geography, we returned to the same representation as in 2020: the North America contingent is the most represented again, followed by Europe, and Asia/Pacific.

Tabular version of TAG by geography.

W3C Management

The W3C management team is responsible for the day to day coordination of and decisions for the team, resource allocation, and strategic planning.

Note: The diagrams use percentages because the number of persons on W3M has changed over the years.

Gender diversity of W3C management continues to be heavily tilted toward male representation. The trend toward an increase in female representation has started in 2012. It has been rather stable between 2016 and 2021. In 2022 we have reached for the first time 1/3^rd of women in W3C management. There are 12 men and 6 women in W3C management today.

Tabular version of W3M by gender identity.

The geographical distribution in W3M is relatively good and has been trending steadily toward more balance since 2012. The Northern America contingent is still the most represented, but it is at its lowest and for the second year in a row. Asian representation which surpassed the European’s in 2021 has increased a bit. For the 5^th year in a row, the European and Asian representatives amount to slightly over 50% of the W3C management.

Tabular version of W3M by geography.

Providing an accessible multimedia experience requires that distinct media resources be presented concurrently. However, an absolutely simultaneous presentation of different media tracks is often not possible. The timing and presentation of each resource must support comprehension. Put differently, the distinct media resources must not be allowed to drift too far out of synchronization.

In preparing this document, we reviewed the research literature to clarify the ranges of acceptable tolerances. This is important, as slips outside these ranges can cause loss in comprehension for the user. Research shows that people will not understand media when its components fall outside specific synchronization tolerances. For comprehension of media across multiple formats, accessible multimedia requires that its component parts remain within research validated synchronization limits. These components may be audio, video, captions, sign language interpretation, and descriptions of video content.

The Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group decided to publish Synchronization Accessibility User Requirements as a W3C Group Note following a detailed investigation of synchronization tolerances based on the available research literature and input from wide public review of earlier drafts of the document. The document seeks to answer such questions as the following. How much delay can occur between any related audio and video tracks? What are acceptable tolerances between speech and captions before comprehension is adversely affected? To find out, the Research Questions Task Force examined what timing tolerances are appropriate in different circumstances and for different components of accessible multimedia.

The findings are summarized in Synchronization Accessibility User Requirements, now published as a W3C Group Note. Ultimately, the results are expected to be considered in the development of web technologies for multimedia. They are also of interest for purposes of future development of W3C WAI accessibility guidelines. In addition, this work is relevant to multimedia systems, including real-time communication applications. It broadly benefits all users of multimedia content, for whom lip reading, descriptions of video, and captions are useful features in specific contexts such as noisy environments or situations in which visual attention is occupied elsewhere. There are particular benefits to some people with disabilities, for whom these features of multimedia are a necessity in all situations.

EPUB 3.3

EPUB 3.3 is completely backwards compatible with previous versions of EPUB 3, meaning that current EPUB 3 files in your systems likely already meet EPUB 3.3 requirements. The working group has made some changes to the specifications to introduce more clarity to the documents as well as introduce some new content types and recommendations around areas previously underspecified.

New Media Types

EPUB 3.3 introduces two new media types:

• WebP, a modern image format for the web, which allows for smaller file sizes with the same quality as JPEG or PNG
• OPUS, an open source audio codec also designed for the web, with streaming, storage, and a wide range of support for different bitrates and sampling rates

The addition of these media types brings EPUB closer to modern web standards, especially as digital publishing becomes more mature. We look forward to seeing implementations taking advantage of these additions.

Changes to the Package File

We have added additional control in the package file to allow for the proper rendering of bidirectional texts in fields like title.

New Document Structure

EPUB 3.3 features a major revision to how the EPUB specification is structured. Previously, EPUB 3.2 was structured into 5 different documents, which contained requirements for both content authors and reading systems:

• EPUB 3.2
• EPUB Packages 3.2
• EPUB Content Documents 3.2
• EPUB Open Container Format 3.2
• EPUB Media Overlays 3.2

In EPUB 3.3, we have organized the content of those 5 documents into 2, dividing them by their audience:

• EPUB 3.3 Core
• EPUB 3.3 Reading Systems

Core covers all of the requirements for content authors, while reading systems are contained in the second document. While understanding both documents is helpful, it is now much easier to find information depending on your use case, as each document holds all of the pertinent requirements for its audience.

In addition to revising the document structure, we have also gone through both documents thoroughly to address any editorial issues. Many requirements or informative sections have been revised to focus on real-world implementation practice, or just to clarify any confusing language. A number of notes have been added to both documents to ensure key points are clarified as well.

We have also removed some features from the core specifications that are mentioned in the satellite specifications. Mentions of multiple renditions have been move to the Multiple Renditions document, as well as text-to-speech requirements. This is to align the specifications better with real-world implementations of EPUB and reading systems.

Privacy and Security

While EPUB 3 is over 10 years old, this is the first time the specification has been through the W3C Process. Previous versions of the specification have not been through wide review, which was an interesting and enlightening process for the EPUB 3 WG. While EPUB has had a strong focus on internationalization and accessibility, both of which are core to the format, we never reviewed the specifications for privacy and security.

With the help of W3C Privacy Interest Group, EPUB 3.3 and EPUB 3.3 Reading Systems now both have sections focusing on the unique privacy and security concerns in EPUB 3.3. EPUB relies strongly on the security model of the web, but there were also unique circumstances we needed to consider as a transmission and presentation format. Building a threat model for EPUB was an interesting thought exercise, and we strongly recommend implementors review both when reviewing the new version of the specification.

For people new to the concept of a threat model, here are some examples of threats we saw in the EPUB ecosystem:

• Scripting
• Compromised or malicious remote resources
• Phishing/spoofing
• Collection of user data
• User-generated content

It’s important to point out that some of the privacy and security issues in EPUB are not just from the file format, but also from the ecosystem it resides in. Reading systems or other user agents for EPUB should be conscious of privacy and security issues they may introduce in how they build their software.

Testing

As part of CR, we are building a test suite for EPUB 3.3. Reading system implementers are encouraged to run the tests on their systems and report the results back to us. You can find information on EPUB testing on our testing repository.

We look forward to seeing the results of the testing, particularly because we hope to see increased interoperability in the EPUB ecosystem with some of the updates made to the EPUB specification. While very few features have changed, we hope providing clarification might make it easier to understand areas that are under implemented.

Members of the EPUB community are also encouraged to contribute tests of the specifications, but please be sure to follow our contribution guidelines and process.

Under Implemented Features

As part of CR, we have identified some areas of the EPUB specification we believe to be at-risk. At-risk is defined as not meeting the 2-implementation threshold. In EPUB, this means the feature does not appear in more than two different reading system platforms.

Due to the requirements around backwards compatibility, we will not be deprecating any features deemed at-risk. However, if any features tested do not meet the required 2-implementation threshold, we will be labelling them as “under-implemented”.

This is a new classification that we have added to two other classifications already in the EPUB specification:

• Deprecated features – features the working group no longer recommends be used, as they have limited to no support in the market (ex. EPUB switch)
• Legacy features – features we have retained for backwards compatibility with previous versions of EPUB, but may not be supported by reading systems (ex. the NCX file)

In the limited testing we have done so far, we have discovered two features we consider to be potentially under-implemented:

• rendition:flow
• manifest fallbacks

EPUB Accessibility 1.1

The EPUB Accessibility specification has been updated to meet the need of publishers and content creators as they prepare for the European Accessibility Act (EAA). Some of these changes include:

• Allowing EPUB creators to conform to the latest version of WCAG
• New recommendations for page list and page numbering
• refines attributes for accessibility metadata fields

In addition to these changes, editorial changes have also been made to improve the document in alignment with the rest of the specification. We have also added expanded privacy and security sections to the Accessibility specification, which was reviewed alongside EPUB 3.3 and Reading Systems.

What can the community do to help?

First and foremost, review the specification! While in CR we are still able to make some changes, and we appreciate feedback that will help us achieve our goals of improved interoperability and readability of the specification.

Review the test suite, try the tests out, and please report any errors or issues the tests might have. We also would appreciate help with writing new tests, as the specification is still expansive and many areas still require testing.

Lastly, if you are a reading system implementer, run the tests and provide an implementation report. The more results we have, the better. While we need 2 implementations to prove the viability of features, because the digital publishing ecosystem is so big, the more information we have about support for EPUB the better it is for us to make decisions on what features to focus on or improve over time. For potentially under-implemented features, if you happen to be an implementer your feedback is essential.

The TAG consensus is that privacy is one of the ethical values that underpin the web. The Privacy Principles document sets out a framework for thinking about privacy in the context of the web and incorporating it into API, browser, and site design. Its primary audience is intended to be those developing specifications for the web.

Currently the document does not yet reflect full consensus of the task force, as there are many open issues and questions. However, we feel this document is a good starting place to begin to bring in the wider community to help resolve these issues and move towards greater consensus. We see this as the starting point for community engagement. We welcome your input on our issues. This document is intended for the newly-created W3C Statement track. The goal is to publish in concentric circles of consensus starting with the consensus of the task force itself (as a draft Note/Finding and draft Statement), then moving on to the consensus of the full TAG (as a Note/Finding and draft Statement) and finally the consensus of the W3C community (as a W3C Statement).

As described in the task force’s charter, the purpose of this task force has been to bring together a small group of people from across the w3c community to draft a set of privacy principles for the web. This task force has been working in weekly meetings since last Summer. Members of the task force have been: 

• Daniel Appelquist (Samsung, TAG)
• Robin Berjon (The New York Times, TAG alum)
• Nick Doty (Center for Democracy & Technology, PING)
• Amy Guy (Digital Bazaar, TAG)
• Don Marti (CafeMedia, PING)
• Jonathan Kingston (DuckDuckGo)
• Theresa O’Connor (Apple, TAG, PrivacyCG)
• Christine Runnegar (W3C Invited Expert, PING)
• Wendy Seltzer (W3C)
• Pete Snyder (Brave, PING)
• Sam Weiler (W3C)
• Jeffrey Yasskin (Google, PING)

I want to personally thank all of them for their ongoing work on this effort.

This post is by one of the TTWG Chairs. It’s about this work and why it is important, and why now is a good time to be doing it.

As a Chair not only of the W3C’s Audio Description Community Group (open to all) and the Timed Text Working Group, but also of the EBU’s Timed Text group, I’ve been privileged to see that there’s a growing interest in both audio description and dubbing. As well as the more established vendors, there is a growing cottage industry of small, you might almost say hand-made, web based authoring tools, that each seem to use its own bespoke proprietary format for saving and loading work.

From a client perspective, this means that these tools do not interoperate with each other, and it can be hard to move from one to another. This is a classic case where an open standard exchange format would solve real needs. From conversations I have had, I believe implementers would welcome an open standard format.

From a user perspective, anything that makes it more likely to get an accessible experience, especially for users who are watching videos without necessarily seeing the images, must be a good thing. Audio Description and Dubbing are both important in this area.

Audio Description helps explain what is happening in the video image directly, in case the video content does not describe it adequately in the audio.

Dubbing is an alternative to translation subtitles: traditionally it has seemed that some countries culturally prefer one or the other, but perhaps we can make it easier for content providers to offer both and allow the user to choose.

Finally, if we can provide the script data as text content to the player, this opens up alternative renderings that are neither visible nor audible, for example using Braille displays.

The W3C Timed Text Working Group has agreed to work on creating an open standard exchange format that supports both dubbing and audio description, and has just published a first public draft Note describing the requirements that such a format needs to support.

The DAPT Requirements Note first published earlier this week, on 2022-05-10, will be used to define the Recommendation track specification, which will be a profile of TTML2.

We have published this as a draft Note because getting the requirements right at the beginning is really important, and we want everyone who is interested to review it and tell us how they can be improved.

The way we derived the requirements was to consider firstly the production workflow, then the needs of each step in that workflow, and finally break that down into a granular set of requirements, against which we can check the resulting specification.

Please do review the requirements document and feed back – the header material at the beginning of the document says how to get in touch.

Judy Brewer has been recognized by the ACM for service to the computing community through her leadership at W3C of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) work. This work includes development of multiple web accessibility standards which have been adopted globally and have improved accessibility for millions worldwide.

The ACM noted: “In the late 1990s, although web design was flourishing, accessibility was not. Millions of new users uploaded image maps, frames, and other features that proved problematic at best and prohibitive at worst for users with auditory, cognitive, motor, neurological, physical, speech and visual disabilities. Under Brewer’s direction, WAI develops the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which provide developers with a set of criteria to judge the accessibility of the sites they are building. WCAG has also inspired the development of numerous evaluation tools capable of reviewing web pages to identify potential barriers such as non-navigable menu structures and images without alternative textual descriptions. The WCAG specifications and these tools provide a baseline for accessible web design, and for accessibility of web-based technologies such as real-time communications and virtual reality.”

Judy stated: “I am deeply honored to receive this ACM Award for service to the Computing Community. This award recognizes the importance of digital accessibility to the lives of over a billion people with disabilities worldwide, and the impact of years of dedicated collaborative work by W3C’s large international community of accessibility experts in developing standards and guidelines that help make the web work for everyone, including in technologies that are newly emerging onto the web. I want to thank the ACM for recognizing the progress in digital accessibility, and its place among other areas of computer science.”

Learn about freely available resources for accessibility of web technologies from the great WAI Team and community on W3C’s WAI website; including translations of WAI resources; what WAI is working on currently;  different WAI News options; and opportunities to get involved in WAI work.

WAI’s work is made possible in part by support from the National Institute on Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research at the US Department of Health and Human Services; by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Programme, the Ford Foundation, IBM, HP, and W3C Members.

Read more about the ACM award.

Marking two years since the start of the pandemic, W3C CEO Jeff Jaffe reflects on how the web became the ultimate tool of resilience for the world.

The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world

It’s hard to draw a thread between Wordle, vaccine appointments, and the trillions of dollars exchanging hands each year via e-commerce. But there’s not just a thread, there’s a web.

The World Wide Web

Last week marked two years since a COVID-19-imposed lockdown manifestly changed our lives in most of the world. It not only brought the magnitude of the pandemic’s threat into clearer focus, but offered a forecast of the ensuing challenges society would navigate. It was a period of fear and uncertainty, as we pivoted to life at home and did our best to adjust our roles as parents, teachers, students, workers, and caregivers within reality forced upon us.

Last week coincided with the birthday of the World Wide Web, invented by W3C’s founder and Director, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Within the new reality, the web became not just a convenience, it became our lifeline.

As we reflect on the past two years of altered life amid the pandemic, the importance of the web and all it enables has been on high display. These past two years have brought profound hardships – illness, death, isolation, layoffs. I shudder to think, however, what pandemic life would have looked like if it had transpired prior to the advent of the web.

It’s difficult to think of an industry that hasn’t been substantially aided by the web during the age of Covid. Video-conferencing service is a conspicuous example. Zoom, for one, saw a jump to more than 200 million daily meeting participants in March, 2020, up from approximately 10 million in December, 2019. The Web makes all that possible for workers across industries to interact if not perfectly, at least in a manner that allowed most to remain productive. Web access kept millions employed, no doubt preventing a full-on economic depression. Businesses quickly saw that success and progress could take place with a remote workforce, delivering a viable long-term option to reduce costs and contribute to better work-life balance. The web makes all that possible.

As we yearned for normalcy amid the pandemic, home entertainment is another web-enabled sector that saw dramatic gains in the Covid era. Streaming services made long days and nights of confinement more bearable, delivering content to our devices with video streaming services reaching 1.1 billion global subscribers in 2020. Netflix alone added 36 million subscribers.

The web connecting us

Perhaps the most crucial role the web played during the pandemic was allowing families and friends to remain connected. In June, 2020, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the web’s inventor and our Director, said that “the web has been the critical unifying force, enabling work, school, social activity and mutual support. Always intended as a platform for creativity and collaboration at a distance, it is great to see it also being used more than ever for compassion at a distance too.” Being able to see and communicate with loved ones brought comfort amidst the chaos, allowing us to share birthdays, holidays – even funerals – from the depths of isolation. Literally and figuratively, the web allowed us to endure.

The web has been essential in enabling remote learning; it has facilitated the delivery of everything from groceries to home décor; it has helped countless small businesses stay afloat; and it has allowed hundreds of millions of people to schedule Covid tests and vaccines.

Coincidentally, this week marks another anniversary– the invention of the web itself. It was this week in 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee wrote a memo: “Information Management: A Proposal.” It did nothing less than invent the web. While 33^rd anniversaries are typically not celebrated with fanfare, as we reflect on the last two years, I am in awe of what that memo enabled – how many lives it saved, how it enabled communication, and how it became all that Tim anticipated.

Shepherding the future of the web

Yet we must not take the web for granted. It can do more. It can be more. And it will take a collaborative effort to ensure the web becomes more accessible to people around the world, more secure, and can function as the engine to fuel growth in key parts of economy and society.

The cultural, economic, and societal shifts of the past two years underscore the importance of web-based technology and services. They have cast light on the need for universally accepted technical specifications, guidelines, and web standards. This means acknowledging that the web enables both the dissemination of vital information and that it creates channels to spread misinformation. It means recognizing that while the web is the ultimate accelerator of business and commerce, its ubiquity also facilitates significant misdeeds. All of this compels us to a sustained, heightened state of vigilance to ensure one of humanity’s greatest achievements does not fall victim to those who would misuse its enormous power for ill purpose.

A web for everyone

Finally, the past two years also has compounded the digital divide, which prevented too many people from accessing the capabilities of the web during the pandemic or otherwise. While some of us take the web for granted, an estimated 37 percent of the world’s population lacks web access. Of those, the UN estimates that 96 percent live in developing countries.

One of the W3C’s primary goals is to ensure the web and its basic functions be available to everyone on Earth, delivering on the promise delivered by Sir Tim Berners-Lee that the web is accessible, internationalized, secure, and works for all. As Tim has said in succinct terms: “This is for everyone.”

To put that figure in perspective, the global usage share of iOS Safari is around 11%. Can a Web content strategy ignore that kind of usage?

I live and breathe Web every day, and I am responsible for ensuring W3C technologies are positioned as well as possible for widespread adoption by developers. Yet I had not realized until a few months ago that the cumulative usage of WebViews – since that’s what I’m referring to here as a source of that usage – had become such a key mechanism to use content on the Web.

What are WebViews and why are they used?

The reach of the Web Platform via Web browsers is humbling: using technologies standardized in W3C and elsewhere, Web developers can reach more than 4 billions of end-users through a single click or tap on a link.

These technologies have proven to be such a useful lingua franca for digital services that Web technologies are also extensively used outside of browsers, and in particular, through software components that can be used to render Web technology-based content, referred to as WebViews.

WebViews are used pervasively, both on mobile and desktop platforms, for a variety of reasons, among which sit prominently re-using part of the Web infrastructure in a native ecosystem (e.g. for advertising, authentication, payment), providing a platform to integrate apps or contents from third-party providers (e.g. MiniApps, embedded games on various platforms), or rendering traditional Web content directly within a native app (so called in-app browsers).

More Web, more , right?

At first glance, that additional reach of Web technologies is a great opportunity for these open standards, designed for all.

But when I started looking more into it, the picture quickly became less rosy: Web technologies used in a browser come with a set of explicit and implicit expectations about how they will be interpreted. Once you move out of that framework, some assumptions no longer hold, bringing uncertainty about how Web content gets rendered and executed. For instance, WebViews don’t typically implement the same set of features as the default browser on the said platform, and any Web API that prompts users for permissions will fail in a WebView if the native app developer doesn’t specifically handle these situations.

The name WebView encompasses a wide variety of components that all come with their own specificities and restrictions, well beyond the usual cross-browser interoperability issues Web developers already know they need to mitigate. Android WebView, iOS’ UIWebView and WKWebView, Windows’ WebView2 combine and contrast with other ways of rendering Web content in native apps on these platforms (Android Custom Tab and Trusted Web Activity, iOS SFView and ASWebAuth), and their behavior depend on how the developer of their embedding app chooses to use them.

Upon exploring this landscape, it felt to me that not only most Web developers don’t really have a working knowledge of that complex landscape, but that most of us developing standards targeting Web browsers do not really account for these rapidly growing consumers of our technologies.

Can we fix it?

Working with André Bandarra, from Google, I organized and ran a couple of unconference sessions during TPAC 2021, W3C’s Annual Conference held last October – you can find the records of these sessions (October 19, October 20), and you may in particular find useful the slides I presented to introduce the problem space.

Overall, it was clear that this topic was a blind spot in our current approach to bringing value to developers and end-users through our standards, and would benefit from more direct attention.

Working with Qing An from Alibaba (co-chair of the MiniApps Working Group) and Peter Beverloo  who is the Technical Lead of the relevant work in this space at Google, I am happy to announce that we have just launched a WebView Community Group which aims, as set in its proposed charter, to identify, understand and reduce the issues arising from the use of WebViews.

Given the complexity of the landscape, the group will initially focus on collecting WebView usage scenarios and the challenges they pose, to get a better sense of the right mechanisms to address these challenges – which would be developed in a second phase of work.

If you are interested in bringing insights on the topic, this WebView Community Group, as all W3C Community Groups, is free and open to all to join and will likely need all the constructive contributions it can get to achieve its goals!

An annual conference to advance standards development

W3C’s annual conference is the Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee meeting, or TPAC. This event brings together a global community of more than a thousand software engineers, architects, web developers, and product teams to advance standards development on emerging web technologies.

W3C group participants share their enthusiasm in video

TPAC 2021 is over but our Events Team has produced, with support from W3C Member Legible Media Inc., a highlights video with compelling comments from our members and invited experts about the importance of the meeting and the power of coming together to make the web work, for everyone.

Memorable impressions from long-time and first-time attendees

Ryuichi Matsukura of Fujitsu shared that: “It was very impressive to see the top of the W3C listening to members’ opinion and answering their questions.”

Tetsuhiko Hirata of Hitachi noted that: “W3C is not just creating a technology standard, it is creating the internet culture.”

Alex Lakatos, of the Interledger Foundation shared: “Just the idea that I’ve kind of joined the people that make standards on the internet is amazing for me. It’s my first TPAC and it feels like I’ve evolved as a human. And then at the same time getting to help everyone that builds on the internet, that’s just extremely rewarding for me.”

Henrik Edstrom of Autodesk noted: “We can kind of get an idea of what might be on the horizon and what might be interesting for our company to engage in, in the future.”

Shannon Janus of Hearst Magazines said: “We’re not alone in trying to solve for everything, there is a community out there.”