Web Notification Working Group Charter

The mission of the Web Notification Working Group, part of the Rich Web Client Activity, is to produce specifications that define APIs to generate notifications to alert users. A Notification in this context may be displayed asynchronously and may not require user confirmation. Additionally, events are specified for managing user interactions with notifications.

Join the Web Notification Working Group.

End date	31 October 2015
Confidentiality	Proceedings are public
Chair	Jon Lee (Apple)
Team Contact (FTE %: 5)	Michael[tm] Smith
Usual Meeting Schedule	Teleconferences: topic-specific calls may be held Face-to-face: we will meet during the W3C's annual Technical Plenary week; an additional face-to-face meeting may be scheduled by consent of the participants. IRC: active participants, particularly editors, regularly use the #webapps W3C IRC channel

Scope

Web developers are increasingly producing applications users rely on for information and events that are important and time-sensitive. It is essential that these applications have the capability to deliver such information quickly and in a way that is easy for users to consume. Several operating systems provide notification mechanisms that are intended for native applications. This Working Group develops APIs that expose those mechanisms to Web Applications.

The Web Notification Working Group's deliverables include user agent features and APIs to provide notification services to web applications. These deliverables will apply to desktop and mobile browsers and other non-browser environments where appropriate and will be consistent with Web technologies designed in other working groups including HTML, CSS, WebApps, DAP and SVG.

The platform-independent specifications produced by this group should be designed to be implementable using existing native notification mechanisms. Since the common platforms do not provide consistent functionality, this specification will indicate what features are guaranteed to be available across platforms, and what features are not.

The specifications produced by this group will include use cases and requirements as well as security considerations and privacy considerations.

Success Criteria

To advance to Proposed Recommendation, each specification is expected to have two independent implementations of each feature defined in the specification.

Deliverables

The working group will deliver the following:

Web Notification: this specification defines APIs to generate notifications to alert users outside of the web page. The Web Notifications proposal will serve as starting point.

Other Deliverables

Other non-normative documents may be created such as:

Test suite for each specification;
Primer or Best Practice documents to support web developers when designing applications.

Milestones

Milestones
Specification	FPWD	LC	CR	PR	Rec
Note: The group will document significant changes from this initial schedule on the group home page.
Web Notifications	September 2010	March 2013	April 2013	October 2013	November 2013

Dependencies and Liaisons

W3C Groups

Web Applications Working Group: This Working Group develops APIs for client-side development and for markup vocabularies for describing and controlling client-side application behavior. The current proposal depends on DOM Events.
HTML Working Group: This group will maintain and produce incremental revisions to the HTML specification.
Device APIs and Policy Working Group: This group create client-side APIs that enable the development of Web applications and Web widgets that interact with devices services.

Participation

To be successful, the Web Notification Working Group is expected to have 10 or more active participants for its duration. The Chairs and specification Editors are expected to contribute one half-day per week towards the Working Group. There is no minimum requirement for other Participants.

The Web Notification Working Group will also allocate the necessary resources for building Test Suites for each specification.

The group encourages questions and comments on its public mailing lists, as described in Communication.

The group also welcomes non-Members to contribute technical submissions for consideration, with the agreement from each participant to Royalty-Free licensing of those submissions under the W3C Patent Policy.

Communication

Web Notification Working Group Teleconferences will be conducted on an as-needed basis.

This group primarily conducts its work on the public mailing list public-web-notification@w3.org (archive). The public is invited to subscribe to and post messages to that list.

Information about the group (deliverables, participants, teleconferences, etc.) is available from the Web Notification Working Group home page.

The group will use a Member-confidential mailing list for administrative purposes and, at the discretion of the Chairs and members of the group, for member-only discussions in special cases when a participant requests such a discussion.

Information about the group (for example, details about deliverables, issues, actions, status, participants) will be available Web Notification Working Group home page.

Decision Policy

As explained in the W3C Process Document (section 3.3), this group will seek to make decisions when there is consensus and with due process. The expectation is that typically, an editor or other participant makes an initial proposal, which is then refined in discussion with members of the group and other reviewers, and consensus emerges with little formal voting being required. However, if a decision is necessary for timely progress, but consensus is not achieved after careful consideration of the range of views presented, the Chairs should put a question out for voting within the group (allowing for remote asynchronous participation -- using, for example, email and/or web-based survey techniques) and record a decision, along with any objections. The matter should then be considered resolved unless and until new information becomes available.

This charter is written in accordance with Section 3.4, Votes of the W3C Process Document and includes no voting procedures beyond what the Process Document requires.

Patent Policy

This Working Group operates under the W3C Patent Policy (5 February 2004 Version). To promote the widest adoption of Web standards, W3C seeks to issue Recommendations that can be implemented, according to this policy, on a Royalty-Free basis.

For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the W3C Patent Policy Implementation.

About this Charter

This charter for the Web Notification Working Group has been created according to section 6.2 of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.

Philippe Le Hégaret