Introducing UWA

Introduction

The W3C Ubiquitous Web Applications Working Group was launched in March 2007 with the vision of reducing the costs for developing applications involving ubiquitous networked devices, based upon W3C's strengths in declarative representations:

• Developing standards for a new breed of rich web application authoring solutions that will make it easier to assure security, accessibility and end-user experience whilst reducing the development costs for delivery to desktop, mobile and other channels. This is based upon a multi-layered approach to user interfaces that separates out the concerns of application developers from the details of how the user interface is realized on specific devices.

• Supporting Personalization of Web applications whilst giving users control over who gets access to their personal preferences

• Enabling applications using multiple devices that reach out into the physical world, e.g. safety, security, environmental monitoring and control, home entertainment, distributed work groups and anticipatory maintenance, etc.

• Decoupling applications from the transport protocols, thereby allowing applications to run over a mix of different and rapidly evolving networking technologies and addressing schemes.

• Rich descriptions of devices and services, and the means to expose this to Web applications and enable them to dynamically adapt to changes in user preferences, device capabilities and environmental conditions.

• Looking beyond Web browsers to new kinds of applications based upon distributed document object models, where an application running on one device is coupled to a user interface running on another via an exchange of events.

• An approach to resource binding that leverages the Semantic Web for managing trust, identity, privacy and security through rich descriptions of capabilities and policies, and which layer on top of complementary work on device coordination such as Zeroconf, UPnP and DLNA.

• The use of objects in document object models as proxies for local or remote resources, allowing applications to access such resources by setting event handlers or targeting events at these proxies.

• Supporting event interchange across different security domains (e.g. NAT, firewalls and gateways) via bindings to protocols such as HTTP, XMPP and SIP, and making use of mechanisms such as IGD, STUN, STUNT and TURN for traversing such boundaries