Media web application developers want to deploy their content on a wide and heterogeneous range of devices and platforms, e.g. televisions, set-top boxes, and mobile devices. To ensure a smooth user experience across devices, these user agents need to support a minimum set of Web technologies that developers can rely on being supported. The Web Media API Community Group plans to specify such a set of Web technologies and additionally plans to provide guidance for developers and implementers e.g. on performance constraints and portability issues.
This Community Group will specify a minimum set of web technologies that developers of media web apps can rely on being supported. The minimum set, comprised of references to existing specifications in W3C and other specification groups, will be suitable for media web applications. The target devices will include televisions, game machines, set-top boxes, mobile devices and personal computers.
This Community Group may also discuss and develop non-normative guidelines for developers, implementers and device manufacturers, typically to note common performance and portability issues, as well as to guide device implementations.
This group will only reference existing specifications. It will not be creating or modifying any new base specifications in particular.
The Web Media API Community Group specification will define a set of web technologies suitable for media web applications, including HTML, DOM and CSS APIs, as well as the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) and Media Source Extensions (MSE) specs.
The goal of this Web Media API Community Group specification is to transition to the W3C Recommendation Track for standards development.
The specification will be suitable for use as a normative reference by the CTA WAVE project. It should also be usable as a normative reference by other organisations and companies, both those that have an existing (but perhaps out of date) specification of this sort and those that have identified a need for a specification of this sort (but may appreciate an alternative to creating their own). The specification will be suitable for use as a reference by organisations that require devices be certified before making video content available.
The specification will be updated periodically to reflect adoption of new specifications in the Web platform. For example, the specification might be updated once a year for media devices being introduced onto the market in the following year. Each version of the specification should announce web specifications expected to become mandatory in the following version.
Non-normative documents may be created, such as:
The group MAY produce test suites to support the Specifications. Please see the GitHub LICENSE file for test suite contribution licensing information.
This CG was proposed by and continues to cooperate with the CTA WAVE Project.
This CG would like to additionally liaise with any television specification groups already referencing HTML5 or planning to reference it, including:
The group operates under the Community and Business Group Process. Terms in this Charter that conflict with those of the Community and Business Group Process are void.
As with other Community Groups, W3C seeks organizational licensing commitments under the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA). When people request to participate without representing their organization's legal interests, W3C will in general approve those requests for this group with the following understanding: W3C will seek and expect an organizational commitment under the CLA starting with the individual's first request to make a contribution to a group Deliverable. The section on Contribution Mechanics describes how W3C expects to monitor these contribution requests.
The group will not publish Specifications on topics other than those listed under Specifications above. See below for how to modify the charter.
Substantive Contributions to Specifications can only be made by Community Group Participants who have agreed to the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA).
Specifications created in the Community Group must use the W3C Software and Document License. All other documents produced by the group should use that License where possible.
Community Group participants agree to make all contributions in the GitHub repo the group is using for the particular document. This may be in the form of a pull request (preferred), by raising an issue, or by adding a comment to an existing issue.
All Github repositories attached to the Community Group must contain a copy of the CONTRIBUTING and LICENSE files.
The group will conduct all of its technical work in public. If the group uses GitHub, all technical work will occur in its GitHub repositories (and not in mailing list discussions). This is to ensure contributions can be tracked through a software tool.
Meetings may be restricted to Community Group participants, but a public summary or minutes must be posted to the group's public mailing list, or to a GitHub issue if the group uses GitHub.
This group will seek to make decisions where there is consensus. Groups are free to decide how to make decisions (e.g. Participants who have earned Committer status for a history of useful contributions assess consensus, or the Chair assesses consensus, or where consensus isn't clear there is a Call for Consensus [CfC] to allow multi-day online feedback for a proposed course of action). It is expected that participants can earn Committer status through a history of valuable contributions as is common in open source projects. After discussion and due consideration of different opinions, a decision should be publicly recorded (where GitHub is used as the resolution of an Issue).
If substantial disagreement remains (e.g. the group is divided) and the group needs to decide an Issue in order to continue to make progress, the Committers will choose an alternative that had substantial support (with a vote of Committers if necessary). Individuals who disagree with the choice are strongly encouraged to take ownership of their objection by taking ownership of an alternative fork. This is explicitly allowed (and preferred to blocking progress) with a goal of letting implementation experience inform which spec is ultimately chosen by the group to move ahead with.
Any decisions reached at any meeting are tentative and should be recorded in a GitHub Issue for groups that use GitHub and otherwise on the group's public mail list. Any group participant may object to a decision reached at an online or in-person meeting within 7 days of publication of the decision provided that they include clear technical reasons for their objection. The Chairs will facilitate discussion to try to resolve the objection according to the decision process.
It is the Chairs' responsibility to ensure that the decision process is fair, respects the consensus of the CG, and does not unreasonably favour or discriminate against any group participant or their employer.
Participants in this group choose their Chair(s) and can replace their Chair(s) at any time using whatever means they prefer. However, if 5 participants, no two from the same organisation, call for an election, the group must use the following process to replace any current Chair(s) with a new Chair, consulting the Community Development Lead on election operations (e.g., voting infrastructure and using RFC 2777).
Participants dissatisfied with the outcome of an election may ask the Community Development Lead to intervene. The Community Development Lead, after evaluating the election, may take any action including no action.
The group can decide to work on a proposed amended charter, editing the text using the Decision Process described above. The decision on whether to adopt the amended charter is made by conducting a 30-day vote on the proposed new charter. The new charter, if approved, takes effect on either the proposed date in the charter itself, or 7 days after the result of the election is announced, whichever is later. A new charter must receive 2/3 of the votes cast in the approval vote to pass. The group may make simple corrections to the charter such as deliverable dates by the simpler group decision process rather than this charter amendment process. The group will use the amendment process for any substantive changes to the goals, scope, deliverables, decision process or rules for amending the charter.