The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. Read about the W3C mission.
The ideas collected so far are only a starting point. Suggestions are more than welcome. If you want to get involved, you can contact the team on IRC (irc://irc.w3.org/#w3c) or by email at public-qa-dev@w3.org. Prefer IRC for live interaction.
If you want to make suggestions, be ready to provide the following informations:
Feel free to add any relevant information and please follow the guidelines carefully.
You can find interesting projects to contribute to on our github page.
Brief explanation: the current design of Validator.nu does not separate the Web service part from the actual validation of HTML5 documents. Making that separation will make HTML5 Validation a first-class citizen in Java and ease HTML5 Validation testing.
Expected results: Developers will be able to pass an HTML document to a single function and get back all the assertions (errors, warnings).
Knowledge Prerequisite: Java programming, Servlet API and HTML5 knowledge will be required. Skill level: medium to high.
Mentor: Michael(tm) Smith <mike@w3.org>, Alexandre Bertails <bertails@w3.org>
Brief explanation: W3C is committed to testing the Open Web Platform and HTML5 is not only for browsers. In this project, we will add a test suite for HTML5 to the Validator.nu project.
Expected results: A entire framework will be developped so that people can add tests for HTML5 that can be run by Validator.nu.
Knowledge Prerequisite: Java programming, testing techniques and HTML5 knowledge will be required. Skill level: high.
Mentor: Michael(tm) Smith <mike@w3.org>, Alexandre Bertails <bertails@w3.org>
Brief explanation: The i18n checker would benefit from a rewriting in Java (or in Scala). We would first focus on the API and the conformance to the existing test-suite. Depending on progress, we will add new checks, eg. for XHTML5.
Expected results: A tool for checking internationalization compliance for Websites, easy to deploy or embed in other applications.
Knowledge Prerequisite: Java/Scala programming and HTML5 knowledge will be required. Skill level: medium to high.
Mentor: Alexandre Bertails <bertails@w3.org>, Thomas Gambet <tgambet@w3.org>
Brief explanation: banana-rdf is a library for RDF, SPARQL and Linked Data technologies in Scala. We have recurrent requests to improve the integration of the two main RDF frameworks for Java, Jena and Sesame.
Expected results: the following additions to the framework would be made:
Knowledge Prerequisite: Scala programming and RDF technologies knowledge will be required. Skill level: high.
Mentor: Alexandre Bertails <bertails@w3.org>
Brief explanation: LDP is a simple approach for a read-write Linked Data architecture, based on HTTP access to web resources that describe their state using the RDF data model. WebID and WebACL are complementary technologies that add identification and authorization on top of LDP. The proposed authentication scheme for this project is WebId-over-TLS. This work has already started under the banana-rdf library.
Expected results: a full-stack LDP server that speaks WebID and WebACL.
Knowledge Prerequisite: Scala programming and RDF technologies knowledge will be required. Skill level: high.
Mentor: Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net>, Alexandre Bertails <bertails@w3.org>
RDFa 1.0 was launched in 2008 with an update to the standard in 2012. We are currently working on integrating RDFa 1.1 into HTML5, and the standardization work is wrapping up on that specification. The work to get Web developers familiar with this new technology is just starting, and we will need somebody that can not only write some great tools for helping Web developers mark up their pages with RDFa, but help launch the RDFa Community Group at the W3C that will be tasked with doing developer outreach. You will be working to make sure that companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Yandex, Drupal, and Web developers have the tools that they need to evangelize RDFa within their organizations.
Useful links: http://rdfa.info/, http://schema.org/http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-primer/, http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/, http://json-ld.org/
Possible mentors: Ivan Herman <ivan@w3>, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>, Stéphane Corlosquet <scorlosquet@gmail>, Gregg Kellogg <gregg@kellogg-assoc>, Niklas Lindström <lindstream@gmail>
JSON-LD is going through the final stages of standardization at W3C and is being more actively developed than RDFa. If you want to see what the final stages of creating a world standard for the Web looks like, JSON-LD is a great place to start. There is a dynamic group of people working on the standard across multiple groups at the W3C. You will be able to join and participate with all of these groups along with ensuring that the testing framework for JSON-LD implementations is solid and operational. There will be an opportunity to learn how to edit world standard-track Web specifications and how to test implementations against the specification. Students will also be expected to write code and tools for working with JSON-LD and ensuring that large organizations like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, WordPress, Wikipedia, Drupal, and others have the tooling they need to integrate JSON-LD into their products.
Useful links: http://json-ld.org/, http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/, http://schema.org/
Possible mentors: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>, Gregg Kellogg <gregg@kellogg-assoc.com>, Niklas Lindström <lindstream@gmail.com>, Markus Lanthaler <markus.lanthaler@gmx.net>
PaySwarm is currently in the pre-standardization phase, incubating in a W3C Community Group. If you want to get in on the early days of creating a standard for the Web, the Web Payments work will offer a great introduction to what it takes to go from an idea to getting a group spun up and going at W3C. The Web Payments work is built on top of the previous two technologies, RDFa and JSON-LD, and there will be plenty of opportunity to learn about both in this group.
The Web Payments work, if successful, will have a huge impact on the way that we deal with money as a society on the Web. It has very far-reaching implications and will lay the groundwork for a fully programmable financial network that will be accessible to everyone on the Web. The goal of the work is the democratization of finance; it will place the financial tools that have typically only been available to large banks and corporations into the hands of everyday people. There is a great need to do a large amount of design, specification writing, code for implementations of the standard, tools to test implementations for the standard, tutorials, and a variety of other demos and examples to show developers how to use the standard.
Useful links: https://payswarm.com/, https://dev.payswarm.com/, http://rdfa.info/, http://json-ld.org/, https://payswarm.com/specs/source/web-keys/
Possible mentors: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
