Now and the Future of the Web

Now and the Future of the Web

Philippe Le Hégaret

W3C Project Management Lead

plh@w3.org

IMWebConf 2017, Shenzhen

w3.org

• Created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994
• Consortium administered by MIT, ERCIM, Keio University, Beihang University
• ~460 Members, including ~30 in China
• Adopted a Royalty-Free Patent Policy in 2004
• Produced ~290 W3C Recommendations

w3.org/community

Proposed and run by the community to hold discussions and publish ideas.

• ~290 Community Groups:
  Web Platform Incubator, AR, VR, NFC, GPU, Bluetooth, …
• 4 Business Groups:
  Automotive, Publishing, Broadcasting, Signage

w3.org/Consortium/activities

• 36 Working Groups are currently chartered: CSS, Security, Web Performance, SVG, Fonts, Authentication, …
• ~200 royalty-free specifications currently in progress towards Recommendation

W3C Recommendation track: consensus, technical quality, interoperability

The Web Platform

• Core Platform: HTML, DOM, Encoding, …
• CSS features: Grid, Flex Box, Colors, …
• Graphics and typography: PNG, Canvas, SVG, WOFF, …
• Media: Audio, Captions, Fragments, getUserMedia, …
• Interaction, events, messaging: Pointer, Service Workers, …
• Storage: Web Storage, Indexed DB
• Real-time communications: WebRTC, WebSockets, Push, …
• Optimization and analysis: Workers, Resource Timing, Preload, …
• Security and Privacy: CSP, Upgrade Insecure Requests, Web Crypto, …
• Accessibility: ARIA

w3.org/TR/CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) — The Official (2017) Definition:

• CSS2
• CSS Syntax 3
• CSS Style Attribute
• Media Queries 3
• CSS Conditional Rules 3
• CSS Namespaces
• Selectors 3
• Cascading and Inheritance 3
• Values and Units 3
• Color 3
• Background and Borders 3
• Image Values and Replaced Content 3
• Fonts 3
• Multi-column 1
• User Interface 3
• Compositing and Blending 1
• Writing Modes 3

CSS 2018 candidates?

• Flexible Box Layout: horizontal or vertical stacks
• Custom Properties for Cascading Variables: custom author-defined properties
• Grid Layout: grid concept to lay out content
• calc(): calculated values for length units

Performance

• Navigation, Resource Timings: resource loading measurements
• Resource Hints: fetch and preprocess to improve page performance
• requestAnimationFrame: user agent control of update rate of the animation
• will-change: allow browser rendering optimizations ahead-of-time
• Web Assembly: safe, portable, low-level code format designed for efficient execution

Security

• Content Security Policy: risk management against content injection
• Upgrade Insecure Requests: requests secure transport for resources
• Cryptography: cryptographic operations in web applications
• Referrer Policy: control the Referer header during navigation
• Subresource Integrity: prevent unexpected manipulation of resources

Media

• Web Audio: process and synthesize audio
• Media Source Extensions: media streams for playback
• Media Fragments: URLs for fragmented media resource
• Media Capture: allow access to local media
• Encrypted Media Extensions: delivery of protected media content
• Web RTC: real-time Audio Video Communication to the Web

So, what's next?

Keep improving user security

• Authentication: strong public key credentials for web applications
• Payment: facilitate integration of payment methods
• Secure Contexts: enable features based on minimum secure standards
• Credential Management: request a user’s credentials from a user agent
• Mixed Content: handling of mixed unsecure and secure connections

See also w3.org/security

Better performance

• Web Assembly: access to Web APIs
• Lifecycle for the web: better optimal user experience under constraints
• Device Memory: surface device capability for memory (RAM)
• Long Tasks: detect presence of “long tasks” that monopolize the main thread
• Server Timing: communicate server performance metrics to the Web applications
• Intersection Observer: understand the visibility and position of DOM elements
• Compression: operations for native compression

Better applications:
Progressive Web Applications

• Service Workers: background work (app install, caching)
• Manifest: metadata associated with a web application (icons, display mode, …)
• Push Notification: sending of a push message to a webapp via a push service

More rendering:
drafts.css-houdini.org

• Box Tree: access how content is displayed and positioned
• Layout: layout a box in response to computed style and box tree changes
• Painting: paint a part of a box in response to size / computed style changes
• Properties and Values API: registering new CSS properties
• Worklets: running scripts in stages of the rendering pipeline

More reach

• Automotive: Vehicle information
• Publishing: Web Publications, Packaged Web Applications, EPUB 4
• Media: Ad insertion, Second Screen, Remote Playback, HDR colors, …
• Web Of Things: enable Web integration across IoT platforms and application domains
• Mixed Reality: enhancing the user experience and interactions

How can you help?

• Participate!
• Give us feedback on the specifications: pull requests welcome at github.com/w3c
• Advocate for implementations
• Help with interoperability by providing test cases (web-platform-tests.org)

w3.org

Thank you
and keep improving the Web!

https://www.w3.org/2017/Talks/0916-imweb/