W3C announced today Web and Digital Marketing Convergence, a W3C Workshop, 17-18 September 2015, in Tampa, Florida (USA). The event is hosted by Nielsen.

Digital Marketing and the ecosystem surrounding it are growing at an unprecedented pace as consumers and companies take advantage of new devices, features, and content on the Web. As the Open Web Platform and technologies such as HTML5 continue to expand and offer new functionalities, brands, interactive marketers, content publishers and third party providers are calling W3C’s attention to gaps and challenges, which include a lack of standards on the definition and secure execution of, for example, marketing campaigns, advertising performance, data collection, and marketing signals.

Our goal is to start conversations with technical representatives from the broad digital marketing industry and the open web community to better understand what changes to the Open Web Platform would help improve interoperability, increase efficiencies, enable new innovations, and enhance communications. W3C membership is not required to participate. The event is open to all. All participants are required to submit a position paper by 14 August 2015.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Service Workers. This specification describes a method that enables applications to take advantage of persistent background processing, including hooks to enable bootstrapping of web applications while offline. The core of this system is an event-driven Web Worker, which responds to events dispatched from documents and other sources. A system for managing installation, versions, and upgrades is provided. The service worker is a generic entry point for event-driven background processing in the Web Platform that is extensible by other specifications. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group has published an update to its best practice guide along with first public working drafts of two vocabularies: one covering Data Quality and the other Dataset Usage.

Together, they seek to create a Web-based ecosystem in which data is published intelligently so that it can be discovered and understood. Potential consumers will be able to assess whether or not the data is fit for a specific purpose and, if so, they may choose to describe their usage. This might be by means of feedback, citation, or through discovery metadata of their own.

The working group is keen to receive feedback on all three documents both in terms of the specifics and the overall direction being taken. Learn more about the Data Activity.