Table of contents: Richer User Experience | Browse With Eyes, Ears, Voice and Touch | Web for Everyone | Web on Everything | Advanced Data Searching and Sharing | Trust and Confidence |
W3C continues to expand the reach of the Web to:
Many developers rely on the Web as a platform-independent application environment. Familiar Web applications include Web mail, reservation systems, online shopping and auction sites, games, and multimedia applications. Recent W3C Recommendations such as XForms will soon begin to influence the usability of such applications. New W3C work in areas such as compound documents targets further improvements in content diversity and overall usability. For more information on developing platform-independent Web applications, please refer to the work of the W3C Compounds Document Formats Activity.
“ W3C is where the future of the Web is made. Our Members work together to design and standardize Web technologies that build on its universality, giving the power to communicate, exchange information, and to write effective, dynamic applications—for anyone, anywhere, anytime, using any device.”
—Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web
W3C is developing standards that support multiple, simultaneous modes of Web interaction: through eyes, ears, voice, and touch. In addition to the familiar keyboard, mouse, stylus, and audio/visual output, new interaction modes are becoming more and more commonplace. Indeed, so common that people may not even realize that they are interacting with a Web application such as a reservation system that is telephone-enabled.
Call center applications are just the beginning. W3C is enabling diversity of interaction so that people can choose the solution that best suits their needs in any given environment. W3C is carrying out this work in the W3C Multimodal Interaction Activity, the Voice Browser Activity, and the Device Independence Activity. These new technologies will improve access to the Web through mobile devices such as telephones and handheld organizers, but also other systems such as automotive telematics, home entertainment systems, and other multimodal applications.
W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) continues to promote implementation of existing accessibility guidelines in advanced authoring tools, together with improved evaluation tools. Increased implementation of accessibility guidelines for authoring tools, browsers, and media players, combined with personalized accessibility profiles, and use of metadata and proxy services to support accessibility, will enable people with disabilities to more readily create and interact with Web content. This progress will enable more automated support for development and repair of accessible Web sites. In this way, accessible Web design will become "business as usual."
W3C's vision of the Web is one of a truly integrated environment that allows for the expression of cultural nuances and language differences across distributed systems and geographies. W3C's Internationalization Activity has started work on guidelines that explain to developers how to ensure that their XML formats support internationalization and efficient localization. Other internationalization work will focus on common locale identifiers and negotiation for the World Wide Web and Web services in particular.
One of W3C's goals is to design technology that will work independent of a particular hardware platform. Increasingly, people are seeking access from a range of devices that extend beyond the familiar desktop computer, including mobile telephones, kiosks in airports, kitchen appliances, and automobiles. Access from these devices (whether by human or machine) should be as simple, easy and convenient as Web access from a home computer. W3C is designing technologies (including those cited in the previous section, but also Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), XForms, Synchronized Multimedia (SMIL), and more) that will lower obstacles to authoring for, and browsing with, devices having a broad range of input and output capabilities. In the handheld device world, as part of the Mobile Web Initiative, W3C is building a database of device descriptions and developing best practices for the creation of mobile-friendly Web sites.
We look forward to the continued creativity of the Web community and to novel ways to add to and read from the Web. W3C has begun discussions about the "Ubiquitous Web," in which new Web applications requiring coordination among multiple devices will enable increasingly sophisticated Web experiences. Scenarios envisioned include connecting a camera phone to a nearby printer, using a cell phone to give a business presentation with a wireless projector, and viewing and listening to your electronic mail at the same time.
As the Web grows into a even richer storehouse of human knowledge, we need ever more powerful tools to search and interpret the tremendous amount of available data; this applies to intranets as well as the global Web. Two models have emerged to help manage this data on a global scale: the Semantic Web and Web services.
The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The Semantic Web is data-centric.
Web services provide a standard means of interoperating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks. Web services are message-centric.
Both models are important to networked and distributed systems, so W3C is working to ensure their proper integration, both together and with the existing Web infrastructure. For instance, Web services benefit from the ability to share common vocabularies, unambiguous names, and a common data model, all of which are readily expressed with Semantic Web technologies.
The Web has transformed the way we communicate with each other. In doing so, it has also modified the nature of our social relationships. People now "meet on the Web" and carry out commercial and personal relationships, in some cases without ever meeting in person. W3C recognizes the importance of designing technologies that foster trust and confidence and thus enable increasingly complex interactions among parties around the globe.
What does it mean for a technology to foster trust? W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) was an important first step in building confidence by enabling people to become more aware about how they choose to share or not share information about themselves over the Web. Based on this experience with P3P, W3C is proceeding to tackle questions raised by service providers about how to implement privacy practices associated with those services. Organizations want to keep their promises. W3C is therefore exploring how privacy metadata can be used to help manage user data in a trustworthy fashion on the server side.
Traditionally, one way of establishing trust is to show some trusted form of identification, such as a driving license or a passport. Analogous authentication protocols are not yet widely available on the Web. Furthermore, today's approaches to online authentication often focus on authenticating the user and neglect the importance of mutual authentication. W3C is exploring ways to provide users and service providers more confidence in their transactions and easier identity management. The traditional public key infrastructure will also need to be augmented to accommodate the richness of different ways of life on the Web.
The Semantic Web will also play a role in trustworthy transactions. Semantic Web technologies enable people to write software that, on our behalf, can find and analyze information that will help build trust.
Copyright © 2004-2008 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use and software licensing rules apply. Your interactions with this site are in accordance with our public and Member privacy statements.