Form for AC to vote | TAG home
This is the list of nominees for the 2014 election to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG). Each person has been nominated by at least one W3C Member according to the TAG election process.
The W3C Membership elects the TAG. For this election W3C will fill four seats. W3C will announce the results the second week of January 2015.
Note: The deadline for votes is 23:59 ET, 8 January 2015.
The following statements were sent about the nominees (in alphabetical order by nominee family name):
An asterisk (*) indicates that the nominee is a current participant. All individuals were nominated by the AC Representatives of their organizations unless otherwise indicated below.
Yandex is pleased to nominate Sergey Konstantinov for re-election to the TAG.
Sergey has been an active contributor to the TAG in his time there, both taking the lead in and working as a contributor on several important areas of discussion. As well as his technical ability (his role at Yandex is lead architect on our Maps API) it is important that the TAG continues to have the breadth of perspective that he brings through extensive contact with a world of developers who are often poorly represented, as well as his knowledge of "mainstream" development practices. We, and Sergey, remain committed to the TAG as a group that should be actively working to harmonise the work of W3C both internally, and with the working patterns and goals of developers worldwide.
My name is Travis Leithead. I bring nearly 10 years of experience working at Microsoft on the Internet Explorer engineering team. My perspective of the web ranges from the fast-moving public sector to the business-critical needs of the private Enterprise. As a member of the TAG, I will help guide the design of standards to ensure they are broadly applicable to all customer segments, aligned with current best practices, and provide the building blocks for creating the next generation of web technologies.
A little bit about myself: I’ve been interested in the web platform for a long time. I started my journey many years ago, hacking on HTML and JavaScript before HTML4 was a standard. I built on this hobby in graduate school, where I worked in a security lab researching digital certificate exchange systems using the semantic web stack; from RDF to Ontologies for automated access-control policy sharing. My involvement with the semantic web was short-lived; following graduation I was recruited by Microsoft and joined a small team that would grow much larger and eventually ship Internet Explorer 7 through 11 to consumers and businesses. I've been working on the Internet Explorer engineering team ever since.
At Microsoft, I spec and design features for the web platform with a particular focus in the area of DOM APIs. I've worked on many different projects within that capacity and gained a great deal of experience in web API implementation discrepancies across browsers, the compatibility needs of businesses, and common design patterns for web APIs over time. I was instrumental in bringing a variety of W3C Recommendation-track documents into Internet Explorer, including DOM Events (levels 2 & 3), Web Workers, aspects of DOM4, and parts of HTML5. In an advisory position within Microsoft, I've also helped coordinate the browser's implementation and W3C relations for CORS, Indexed DB, FileAPI, Stream API, SVG, and experiments with Web RTC. I gained a very broad understanding of the web platform and how it all fits together from working with these various W3C specs. I organized a Microsoft internal Web API review board (similar in function to the W3C TAG) to facilitate documenting, sharing and distributing knowledge of the web architecture and common design patterns to internal developers and management. I have great passion for learning and teaching others about the web architecture and how to use it. I believe I would be a great asset to the TAG in their mission to clarify and document web architecture direction for the W3C and larger web developer community.
I started working with the W3C shortly after joining Microsoft, first in the WebAPI WG (later WebApps) to help with Selectors API standardization. That year, Microsoft only sent one person from the Internet Explorer engineering team to TPAC (how times have changed!). Soon after, I worked closely with the WebIDL editor during the early days of that spec’s development to establish the general ECMAScript language bindings to be used for all web APIs. I was also involved in some early Web Components design discussions before it was cool. I now participate (time permitting) in a variety of groups building out Web APIs: WebApps WG, Device API WG, Media Capture TF (jointly with Web RTC WG), HTML WG, and Web App Sec WG. I've stretched my involvement from participating in DOM Level 3 Events teleconferences back when Doug Schepers was editing, to joining the HTML5 editorial team and getting that spec to REC only a few months ago.
Personally, I still consider myself a web developer; after work I write code for an as-yet-unpublished HTML-based app where I get the majority of my practical experience with web technologies: Indexed DB, Promises, touch/pointer, CSS transitions and animations, and good model-driven design. I write my own frameworks (for the experience) and code as close to the native web platform as possible. My friends would say that I'm easy-going, positive, a good mediator, and thoughtful and open-minded; my wife and three kids would probably also agree.
I believe I have the experience and vision to help evolve the current generation of W3C standards in a consistent direction, balancing what works today with changes to ensure the web’s vitality in the future.
I joined the TAG in September, and look forward to continuing to help there. My short-term goals include:
Sam Ruby has been involved in Open Standards and Open Source for over 15 years. Examples include ECMA TC 39, IETF Atom, and W3C HTML, where he has served as co-chair for over five years. He is also co-author of two books, including one on REST.
In addition to his technical skills, Sam has a strong ability to be task oriented (a.k.a., getting items he has volunteered for done on schedule), and a demonstrated ability to collaborate with and build consensus across people with a diverse set of motivations. His work on the URL specification with the WHATWG is a recent example of this. He has sufficient time available to devote to participation on the TAG.
In terms of vision, Sam isn't planning on coming to the TAG with a set agenda, but will seek to find ways to address a disturbing trend he has seen whereby prioritization has been in favor of specifiers (often arguing for theoretical purity!) over implementers over authors over users. He believes that the correct ordering is the opposite: http://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies
For more information about Sam see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Ruby
Alex Russell was previously elected to the TAG on a reform ticket 2 years ago. In that time, the TAG has undertaken engagement with Working Groups under a new model of collaborative review and extensibility-first design thinking. This has resulted in fewer Findings issued but more -- and larger -- changes to in-process efforts. From Web Audio, to Web Crypto, RTC, Packaging, aspects of CSS, and EME, the TAG is now engaged directly with editors and members of working groups in an effort to raise the average.
In addition to his role in collaborative reviews, Alex's work has helped ensure that Promises, Web Components, and Service Workers have been designed in an extensible, layered way: https://extensiblewebmanifesto.org/
Alex has expressed a desire to see that work through, to continue to engage directly with designers and members to improve their specs, and to continue to help bridge the gaps between ECMA TC39 and the W3C.
His website is at https://infrequently.org
Yahoo nominates Yan Zhu to run for the TAG.
Yan is an engineer on the Security team at Yahoo, and a founding member of Yahoo's Privacy Engineering group. She is working on building usable end-to-end encryption into some of the Web's most popular communication tools. Previously Yan was a Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), where she was a lead developer of HTTPS Everywhere, a widely-used browser extension. She has worked on many open source projects include SecureDrop, a document submission platform deployed at over a dozen major news organizations; Privacy Badger, a browser extension that blocks third-party tracking sites; STARTTLS Everywhere, a TLS certificate pinning protocol for SMTP; and the Tor Browser Bundle.
Yahoo nominates Yan for the W3C TAG because Yahoo wishes to invest in a more secure web, one that respects user privacy. We want to help W3C leadership ensure that new web APIs are secure by default, lowering the barriers to ubiquitous authenticated transit encryption, protecting users from being tracked on the Internet without their consent, and championing standards such as HTTP Public Key Pinning that make HTTPS more resistant to active attacks. Yan's passion for a better Web, her experience in the security and privacy space, and her influential role at one of the largest global Web companies on the internet makes her especially qualified for this role.
You can find out more about Yan on the EFF blog (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/why-web-needs-perfect-forward-secrecy), on her personal blog (https://zyan.scripts.mit.edu/blog), and on GitHub (https://github.com/diracdeltas).