– DRAFT –
W3C stories breakout session - TPAC 2017

<boazsender> :wave:

<JakeA_> 👋

MikeSmith: Some background and context for this session.
… The overall project: a while back, our CEO came to me to talk to me about technologies that we have that are exciting.
… One of those that came out was Web Assembly.
… The comparison that came to mind was with AJAX.
… It took some time for XHR to change the Web.
… It changed user expectations in a big way in the end.
… Web Assembly is one of the most esoteric things that we're working on. You need a bunch of prior knowledge to understant the underlying technology.
… At that point, we thought some marketing was in order.
… Mike Smith, W3C Keio, focused a lot of my attention on some of the core stuff we did on the Web.

xueyuan: From W3C/Beihang, part of the marketing and communications team.

Mike: Xueyuan and I talked about ways we could tell stories.
… If you came to TPAC and was wondering about WebRTC, joined their meeting, you'll probably have found them discussing internals, process things, complicated techy stuff.
… In the end, what are the problems that we're trying to solve for the user?
… That's the purpose of this effort, overall.
… Let's take a step back, and think not in terms of a particular specification, but rather in terms of problems that we had some years ago and that we are trying to solve.
… In the limited time that we have to work on this together is to use a collaboration mechanism.
… We plan to deploy a GitHub based mechanism, with pull requests and simple Markdown files.
… For lot of people, this has become a core way to do collaboration, so the idea is that we're going to use that repo, with some detailed instructions on how to contribute.
… Also, we already have a mailing-list setup. And today is a good opportunity to share ideas.

<xueyuan> Mailing list: public-stories@w3.org

Mike: We want to reach out to people that are actually solving problems with Web technologies.

Xueyuan: Some steps to share your stories on the Wiki page, also to form your stories and describe the problem that you want to solve.

Mike: GitHub repo is not yet public. We're targeting Christmas. I'd like to have https://‌www.w3.org/‌stories as a landing page for this.
… Before I start asking people to speak up, let me give you an example.
… We contacted people who have been doing things with Web Assembly.
… Sylvain, a Web developer, says he's been using on educational software based on speech recognition. [reading story]
… Real-time speech recognition has always been challenging in JavaScript.
… Workers and media capture, combined with Emscripten support made it possible to develop a speech recognition engine that ships into browser. Now, with Web Assembly, the performances are fantastic, and this will make my work on educational software better and easier.
… It's important to set goals. Sometimes, you pick up a date. In the wiki description, we selected 2020. What do you want the Web to look like in 2020?
… How do you want things to be different?
… We want to think ahead and think about stories that we want to tell in 2020.
… I would like you to think in those terms.
… Finally, in that context, what are the big problems that you have right now that you want to solve?
… Professional or personal work.
… What big problems do you see? How do you hope to see those problems solved by Web technologies?

tzviya: Almost everything I work on at W3C touches on security. Almost no one understands it. I work in publishing, there is limited guidance for security.
… I feel that we're just creating more hurdles to security when we publish specification.
… I think a lot of education is needed.
… Is there a Security Working Group, I don't even know.

MikeSmith: There is.

Coralie: We're trying to tell a story on security, and tried that for a year now. This is planned.

MikeSmith: If you have one problem, it needs to eventually map to technologies we're working on. It's a one-to-many mapping. For the repo, we want one Markdown file per particular technology.
… Right now, one for Web Assembly. We want another one for Service Workers, security, etc.
… Problem statements are important.

foolip: I love this idea.
… I would like to have a bigger narrative. I mentioned plans for Web Platform Tests in the upcoming years this morning.
… The Web is almost always following. Native platforms are innovating. And the Web is following.
… That kind of works, but I would like to see the Web platform take the lead on a number of topics.
… If we can shorten the time to get stuff done, we can get to the point where we can actually be leading and not following.

MikeSmith: Trying to get feature pairing is something we've been struggling for years. But deep linking is a place where we're leading. Universality.
… We don't give ourselves enough credit.
… Separate runtime and separate applications have been subsumed in the Web.
… The Web platform has the ability to absorb all other platforms.

Meggin: Tech writer at Google.
… Person with 3 small kids. They asked me to come and help organize things for her.
… The Web is very much consumption based, with lot of information overload. That's exactly what she went through.
… To order milk, she ran into dozens of providers and people willing to provide milk.

<tzviya> I recommend the book https://‌abookapart.com/‌products/‌design-for-real-life

alex_deacon: Interesting question. In my world, MPAA, we're trying to figure out what the Web will be in 2020. Clearly, we think it will be more immersive. More interactive.
… We'll pull out streams from everywhere.
… What scale will these interactive experiences have?
… It's an interesting thought process to assess what we need in the future, whether we have the right tools, what tools do we need.
… Not quite a story but some thoughts from my point of view.

MikeSmith: One particular problem from my perspective, with an on-going session right now. Some political events in some countries last year, with the realization that people have been manipulated on social networks.
… My mother is not tech-savvy, she sees things on social networks, and she thinks that it's real.
… Whereas that's wrong, what she sees is targeted at her to influence here.
… I'd like to give her tools to make her assess her own judgment.

wilhelm: Coming here, I go back to core boring things of hypertext. We build banks, etc.
… 6 years ago, I lost some friends in a terrorist attack in my country.
… The attacker thought my government was a traitor and killed 75 persons and kids.
… The manifesto he followed was out there in the Web.
… At the same time, I was pulled on a project to rescue some unmaintained content on the Web. Led by the father of the Nobel Prize community. He thought every country needed a dictionary otherwise it's not a real country.
… He thought that this needed to be done by an independent party
… I felt a sense of great responsibility maintaining this for the future.
… Back to the terrorist, cultural marxism, made up word to describe the goverment's failures
… What should the first search results have been?
… Some well crafted explanation would have been preferrable.

Colin: What I'd like to see is Web experience on any device and any infrastructure.
… Today, I'm working on Cloud browsing. Bring the browser execution to the cloud.

MikeSmith: From a user perspective, what's the advantage to me?

Colin: The focus is on laptop and mobile devices, but there are other types of devices such as set-top boxes, TVs, etc.
… The pitch is that the user won't have to upgrade their devices.

MikeSmith: Making the Web more universal if I can editorialize.
… You can have a small client.

Alex: Service Workers came to mind immediately. For 2020, general users should not even need to know that browsers exist.
… Progressive Web apps story. I can see a point where my mom would have this experience on the web, but the Web would effectivelyl be invisible.

JakeA: The things that we have that other platforms don't have. Linkability, obviously. Screening and visual rendering.
… Downloading is not needed. Native platforms are struggling to catch up with this.
… One of the things that we need to look at for 2020 is redesign the way apps are implemented to avoid step 1 downloading content, step 2 rendering, etc.. Navigation transitions is one of the areas to look at.

[side discussion on navigation transition]

MikeSmith: Some frustration here. We had a solution for offline solutions that did not really work. That's why we have service workers now.

tzviya: We may use navigation transition in the publishing environment to turn pages.

Marcos: Web payments is trying to fix the friction when you try to buy something online.
… Particularly, "68%" of users were abandoning things (I'm making the number up) in carts.
… We tried to fix that.
… Apple showed us the way with Apple Pay in a way.
… We took a lot of the proprietary payment.js API and from that, we managed to standardize.
… We started to add things to the spec, then became a bit more strict about testing, which really improved the quality of the spec.
… To get a spec of that quality in that short amount of time, and implemented, has been incredible.

MikeSmith: Web Payments is an easy one.

Marcos: I have a longer one on Web Manifest ;)

MikeSmith: In Japan, I have to fill forms that are super painful because I have to fill my name in Hiragana and full name to achieve payment, so that's super useful to simplify that.

JakeA: You were talking about testing. Not user oriented, but I wanted to talk about the importance of testing. It took us years to understand how to handle network failures the right way.
… We did not start first with tests.
… But starting from tests make it way faster to implement things.

liisamk: I have had this dream of a contextual based link. You could not explicitly link to something but point out that this other resource needs to be understood.
… In a book, you want to point out other books in a way that makes sense to the context. Local library, online store.
… Some way to say "this is what should be looking at", and let people choose the provider they trust, e.g. wikipedia.

Linda: From the Netherlands. We've been working on a very detailed map. Currently in 2D, but we want to make that a 3D map and we want to publish that on the Web in the end.
… How can you make that available on the Web? How can you let users interact with it?
… Super large asset.
… How can users tell whether it makes sense to put solar panel on their roof?
… Web Assembly could be part of the solution here.

MikeSmith: So, I'd like to thank for the discussion. Some specific feedback on what we should be focusing on. What I'd like to ask to people here is: do you think that it is worth the effort?
… Worth investing the time? Head of Comm is here, she wants to hear whether it's worth it.

[Many people raise hands to show support]

MichaelC: Collecting stories is super useful to capture direction. But then, we want to collect use cases, derive requirements and work on solutions.

MikeSmith: Right. The goal is to increase engagement, have stories to show to people looking at W3C so that they end up coming to W3C and helping us solve these problems.

Coralie: In case people come to us with stories that we do not find anything to match, we should triage these stories. We may not be able to do something with all stories.

MichaelC: In the accessibility area, we come up with lots of stories, and we come up with solutions which are hard to achieve, but then 10 years later they are there.
… It would be useful for people to think about solutions as well.

MikeSmith: Thank you all, appreciate your attendance!