W3C Statements about TAG Nominees for 2015 Election

Form for AC to vote | TAG home

This is the list of nominees for the 2015 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 two seats. W3C will announce the results the third week of January 2016.

Note: The deadline for votes is 23:59 ET, 8 January 2016.

The following statements were sent about the nominees (in alphabetical order by nominee family name):

  1. David Baron (Mozilla)*
  2. Andrew Betts (Financial Times / Nikkei)
  3. Isaac Dasilva (Viacom)
  4. Sergey Konstantinov (Yandex)
  5. Sangwhan Moon (Odd Concepts)

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.

David Baron (Mozilla)*

I am a Distinguished Engineer at Mozilla, where I have worked since it became an independent company in 2003. I have been involved in the CSS community and the development of the Gecko layout engine (used in Firefox and other Mozilla products) since 1998. I have been Mozilla's representative to the W3C Advisory Committee and to the W3C's CSS Working Group since 2004, and a member of the TAG since a special election in May of this year.

In my role at Mozilla, I implemented major CSS features such as media queries, CSS transitions and animations, and the CSS calc() function, designed and implemented the reftest regression test format for layout tests, and have been involved in the development of many aspects of Gecko from design and implementation of architectural changes to security bug fixing.

As a participant at the W3C, I edited the CSS Color Module, CSS Conditional Rules, CSS Transitions, CSS Animations, and the CSS Overflow Module, and I have been deeply involved in much other work in the CSS working group, and involved in the work of other groups as well.

I hope to see the TAG move the Web in a direction that makes it better for both its end users and for developers. A big part of this is the path in the Extensible Web Manifesto, which promotes exposing lower-level APIs that allow building higher-level APIs without first freezing them into browsers. This lets developers build new technology more quickly, and at the same time gives us a better way to manage the increasing complexity of Web technology. As we do this, we should keep the Web's technology deserving of the trust of users, so that users can stay secure and in control even when using Web sites that they don't fully trust.

I'd like to continue to be part of a TAG that moves the Web in this direction. The TAG should continue being biased towards starting rather than stopping work, and balance keeping the Web platform consistent with itself with allowing innovation from a broad group of contributors.

Andrew Betts (Financial Times / Nikkei)

Microsoft is pleased to nominate Andrew Betts for this TAG election. We encourage diverse participation in this important group guiding the development of web standards and Andrew brings an important perspective from a leading edge content publisher.

Andrew is director of FT Labs and head of front end standards at the Financial Times, a London-based international business newspaper recently acquired by Nikkei of Japan. He is a former startup founder, leading organiser in the developer community, and represents the interests of the many non-technology companies for whom the web is critical to their business.

FT has been well regarded for making practical and innovative use of web technology in products such as the FT (app.ft.com) and the Economist (app.economist.com) web apps, and for making significant contributions to open source via projects such as Fastclick (https://github.com/ftlabs/fastclick).

Andrew has participated in the program committee for O'Reilly's Velocity conference (http://conferences.oreilly.com/velocity), recently published a draft spec proposal for paid content passes (https://trib.tv/2015/11/08/content-passes/), has organised many developer events through his London Web Performance and Edge conf (https://edgeconf.com) brands, and is also a prolific conference speaker on web technologies (lanyrd.com/profile/triblondon).

In July, the FT was acquired by Nikkei, a Japanese financial publishing company, allowing Andrew to represent the views of Japanese news publishers as well as those in the UK.

On the TAG, Andrew wants to help broaden participation in web standards development, increasing the representation of those not in technology companies or academia, to produce better standards though improving communication and documentation practices, and evolving events that engage a broader developer community, which he works in every day. He has specific technology interests in installable and discoverable web apps, paid and premium content, web payments, and exposing native-equivalent APIs such as Bluetooth, notifications and geofencing to the web platform.

Isaac Dasilva (Viacom)

Isaac da Silva is a software architect at Viacom, where he is currently responsible for the definition of tools, technical standards, integration patterns, governance models and best practices for web architecture and development across the company. Previously, he was responsible for the design and development of the company's new generation mobile web and native platforms.

Isaac has worked on the web platform since its early beginnings, back in 1994. Most recently, at Viacom, he was involved in a variety of semantic web projects and conducted extensive research on several related W3C specifications, such as RDF, OWL and JSON-LD. In addition, he has helped architect and build several Viacom business-critical javascript libraries, such as the video player and social media widgets. Because of his extensive experience with frontend web development, he has been very excited with the advent of the W3C Web Components specification.

Finally, Isaac is also very passionate about real-time Internet protocols. He has done comprehensive work on top of AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol), XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) and BOSH (Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP) protocols. Most recently, he has used W3C WebRTC APIs and strongly believes that the specification and technology have a great potential to be disruptive in the field of real-time Internet communications, enabling a better and richer user experience.

Prior to joining Viacom, Isaac founded a product development studio that designed and built educational ebooks and games for a wide variety of platforms. He has also worked for large companies and startups, where he lead the development of websites, APIs, tools and backend systems.

Isaac's research goals are centered around the critical understanding of how distributed networks, ubiquitous computing, technical standards and protocols might shape social relations similarly to the way legal systems shape social behavior. He believes that technology and its technical standards represent a new paradigm of management in the contemporary society. According to him, technology is not a mere context of social relations, but a producer - in its own right - of social and political realities. Because of that, topics such as security and privacy are of fundamental importance and should be seen as a first-class citizens in the upcoming web protocols.

Isaac holds a Master's degree in Management and Systems from the New York University (2012). His thesis was entitled "From The Research Labs to the City: An Actor-Network Theory Approach to Ubiquitous Computing".

Sergey Konstantinov (Yandex)

When I nominated for TAG first time, a year and a half ago, I was a pure ‘practitioner’ seeking a way to bring practical experience into the Standards development process. After 18 months of pretty turbulent work I’m still a pure practitioner, and now I’m firmly convinced to continue being one.

My initial intent was to fulfill TAG’s charter, i.e. to provide some sort of guidance to other WGs, which in my case resulted in doing spec reviews (Push API, Web Animations, EME, to name a few) and helping TAG in some other themes I’m familiar with, like copyright. But the longer I work — the deeper I understand that right now it’s a very crucial moment for the Web, and that Internet never needed more guidance than now.

After years of relatively steady ecosystem which primarily comprised of IE on Windows we entered en epoch of diversity. Smartphones, tablets, and upcoming IoT have blown this monotony up: we now have several non-interoperable ecosystems, more to emerge.

In this situation the Web should gain a second wind as an interoperable platform to link all these unlinkable things. So the platform at present moment faces three urgent challenges simultaneously: to catch native platforms up by implementing comparable low-level functionality; to seamlessly integrate all those new types of devices into a common URL space; and to maintain the highest possible degree of interoperability and consistency all over these new features and devices.

In my opinion, it’s impossible to solve any of these tasks without some sort of cross-architectural coordination and guidance — i.e. without TAG being directly involved. Web ecosystem is at present moment so large and scattered that individual WGs could simply overlook all these large and distant Internet problems, and I honestly can’t blame them.

So my program is, in fact, quite simple: continue to do what I’m doing (on larger scale, if possible): to review specs, to raise concerns, to foresee problems.

Sangwhan Moon (Odd Concepts)

My name is Sangwhan Moon, and I have worked at Opera Software for 8 years and am currently employed as a engineering director at a startup called Odd Concepts.At Opera, I delivered customized browser ports targetting various embedded targets such as commonly imaginable devices such as mobile phones, TVs, STBs, and Blu-ray recorders and players for various top-tier OEMs around the world, but also for printers and scanners. I currently work in Tokyo and am originally from Korea, and believe can be a useful resource bridging the gap between the Asian member community by helping with language, culture and connecting the Asian community members with the TAG.

During my work at Opera Software, I implemented most of the accessibility support for Opera's current TV product line, and have also been doing activities related to accessibility support with the community in Korea - such as writing and reviewing tests for accessibility on the web platform, and helping out with features for testing tools used outside of the W3C. (I will honestly admit growing up in a family where dinner conversations included state of the art research on myoelectric prosthetics probably had some effect, but I unfortunately do not have a twin brother from a different background to confirm this theory!)

My short term goals as a TAG member include, but are not limited to the following list:


Coralie Mercier
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