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On May 11, 2019, the W3C Chinese Web Interest Group Next Generation Mobile Web Apps Task Force face-to-face meeting was held in Beijing.
W3C gratefully acknowledges Alibaba and Baidu for sponsoring this meeting.
W3C Project Management Lead, Philippe Le Hégaret, as well as nearly 100 participants from W3C member organizations including Alibaba, Baidu, Maxthon, Google, Huawei, 360, Refinitiv, Shenzhen Institute of Information Techonology, Digital Heaven, Tencent, Xiaomi, CAICT, Intel, Moonalpha, Zhejiang University, CNIC, China Mobile - Migu, 21CN, and representatives from other organizations in this area like Duxiaoman, Didi Chuxing, TAL, Meituan, MockingBot, Qutoutiao, vivo, Ctrip, Sina, Bytedance, and W3C/Beihang staff attended the meeting.
The meeting was co-chaired by the Interest Group co-chairs Anqi Li (Alibaba) and Qingqian Tao (Baidu). Experts from the industry shared what problems do Mini Programs and Quick Apps solve and how, problems met when developing and using Mini Programs and Quick Apps, differences between different Mini Programs / Quick Apps APIs, cross-platform development frameworks, standardization roadmap for next-generation mobile web apps, and new Web APIs.
Judy Zhu (Senior Director of Alibaba Standardization Department and W3C AB member) outlined the current status of W3C's existing standards at the beginning of the meeting and introduced the original intention to set up a Chinese Web Interest Group to focus on identifying the standardization needs from China. She also described the two major issues in Mini Programs - fragmentation and high development cost. It is expected that the Chinese companies jointly embrace the standards to open up the market and promote the global standardization process.
W3C Project Management Lead, Philippe Le Hégaret, introduced the overview of W3C's standardization work, process, and participation model, and explained the process from the initial proposal to the final recommendation of a standard. Philippe recommends convening a global workshop on Mini Programs and Quick Apps, bringing as many global stakeholders as possible to discuss related use cases, requirements, technical proposals, and input for Web technologies.
At the meeting, experts from the industry discussed existing technology implementations, further thoughts, and suggestions and expectations for potential standardization on Mini Programs and Quick Apps. Here's the summary of the talks and discussions on various topics:
Kenny Yuan (Intel) explained the similarities and differences between PWA and Mini Programs and how to learn from Mini Programs. PWA is a set of technical standards, and not opposite to native apps. The two are suitable for different scenarios. The DAU/MAU of Mini Programs are relatively high, and user participation and usability are the advantages. However, multiple standards and multiple frameworks developed by multiple vendors of Mini Programs also make it difficult for developers to choose. Both PWA and Mini Programs are based on Web technologies. Mini Programs have fast TTM, multiple entry points, and no installation. Intel expects to promote the convergence of PWA and some of the technologies in Mini Programs through its practical experience and technology in the field of Web standards.
Zhixing Lei (Baidu): some differences between Mini Programs and the Web include programming paradigms, multiple WebViews, native capabilities, AI/AR capabilities, and vendor implementation approximations. They have the advantages of native page transitions, native components and APIs (to allow faster iterations). The disadvantages are slow start-up speed, communication cost, and complicated development and debugging. Mini Programs are not a new thing. It is actually a form of web application. Baidu is constantly thinking about the direction of relevant standards, adhering to the open-source way of thinking, and hopes to explore how to harmonize differences with W3C, embrace and try to establish standards and further promote it internationally.
Wei Wang (Zhejiang University) explained the concept of information accessibility, i.e., anyone should be able to understand, interact with and use information equally and conveniently under any circumstance. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) published by W3C has been adopted by ISO as an international standard and is the basis for many national standards in the world, including Chinese national standards. People with disabilities, especially blind and deaf people, face a lot of prominent issues in accessing Internet resources, such as alternative text for images, control attribute identification, CAPTCHA input, audio and video media playback control, and compatibility of various accessibility tools. We hope developers to refer to accessibility standards and support accessibility features when developing Mini Programs Quick Apps, because it will greatly improve the experience for disabled and elderly people. In addition, the participants also had preliminary discussions on the driving force for accessibility and testing issues.
Guokai Cheng (Alibaba) introduced the UC browser engine: it renders web pages, Mini Programs, Mini Games, and more. From the perspective of the Web, Mini Programs are an app development framework that extends the Web platform. The Web has a widely used application foundation and good compatibility, so many technologies use a Web rendering engine. Mini Programs use data-driven development, so the amount of data passed in the communication layer and how the rendering engine handles them all requires skill. To develop Mini Programs further, good support from the underlying technologies, including performance and security, are required. Mini Programs aim to reduce developer development complexity and help development more efficient. UC has been optimizing the various mechanisms in the development process and hopes to make the improvements in the standards as well.
Yinli Chen (Xiaomi): unlike Mini Programs in "super apps", Quick Apps depend on the operating system itself, so the combination of scenarios and system capabilities is very important. We hope to make the system more organic by integrating various third-party services in various scenarios and system capabilities. We mainly focus on three aspects: 1) Quick Apps and standardization of invocation between various scenarios; 2) Quick Apps being displayed as a card on various scenes; 3) connect the data between the scene and the app to keep the experience consistent. Xiaomi is also the founder of the Quick Apps Alliance. We look forward to helping the standardization process of Mini Programs / Quick Apps on the basis of seeking common ground while reserving differences.
Yi Shen and Huan Li from Baidu jointly introduced Baidu's technical practices and solutions in benchmark and AR/AI. They explained the current AR/AI APIs used in Mini Programs / Mini Games and showed some demo and example code. They shared the problems encountered in Mini Programs, Mini Games, and how to improve the startup, rendering, and JS performance. They also asked everyone to think about Mini Programs / Mini Games in standards about benchmark and AR/AI.
Zhiqiang Yu (Huawei) demonstrated the 3D/AR usage scenarios and the problems and challenges encountered to the participants. The goal is to enable the Web 3D+AR to improve the user experience through a link or a line of code. He also showed the demo of 3D and AR in Quick Apps - 3D HD display, animation, rotation, AR fusion, sharing, etc. On standardization, he aims to make 3D resources and AR capabilities more convenient and widely used by pushing the <x-model> or similar elements into W3C. This will be the first step. Moreover, based on <x-model>, more capabilities can be gradually added, including extending attributes, APIs, etc., and complement WebXR's API. He will further discuss with the interested parties about jointly promoting the corresponding standards.
Chengyu (Alibaba): Mini Programs are the carrier of Alipay's open strategy. The use of Mini Programs covers a lot of everyday services. He presented the abilities such as security, artificial intelligence, customer service support, etc. When showing the Mini Programs development language and technical architecture, Chengyu said that the current rendering mode was not good enough, so they're using hybrid rendering. There is no unified standard practice currently, so he hoped that there would be a common standard in the future.
Zheng Ruiqi (Tencent) introduced the advantages and disadvantages of the Hippy framework. He also mentioned that to solve the multi-platform differences issue, we should move closer to the W3C standards, and integrate better with technologies like Web components and JS modules. Participants also raised questions about whether the WeChat Mini Programs layered rendering was implemented using the X5 rendering engine.
An Wang (Digital Heaven) shared the incompatibilities between the Mini Programs and HTML5, including the inconsistency of elements and JS APIs, the removal of important concepts such as the DOM, and different mechanisms of the engines. These factors will influence the standardization of Mini Programs. Moreover, to develop a unified new specification, we must think about the internal specifications within each vendor, and address the issue of specification name, file extensions, and API prefixes. With regard to whether Mini Programs are suitable for standardization in the W3C, An believes that if the underlying webview is sufficiently powerful, Mini Programs can be relatively simple to standardize and bloom. If W3C can do this, the Internet will be more open.
The IG co-chair Qingqian Tao also added: we don't expect W3C to solve all the issues about Mini Programs standardization, however, given the similarity between Mini Programs and the Web, we would like to expose and discuss the issues in W3C.
Nan Zhang (DiDi Chuxing) compares the componentization, style performance and scope, and event model of each vendor. He recommended that Quick Apps and Mini Programs follow the web components standards, and proposed to develop a component DSL standard in W3C. He also mentioned their experience when developing Chameleon as a unified framework, and suggested that web components to provide explicit declarations of input and output, and Mini Programs / Quick Apps vendors develop W3C-compliant component mechnisms.
W3C and the chairs of the group would like to express their sincere gratitude to all of you for your support! The slides and minutes of the meeting are open to the public. If you have any suggestion, or would like to learn more about getting involved in the W3C Web Chinese Interest Group, feel free to contact us!
The W3C Chinese Web Interest Group was established on September 20, 2018, to provide a forum for W3C members to enhance the participation in Web standards work from the Chinese Web community. The group will focus primarily on identifying unique requirements from China, on helping the Chinese members to get familiar with the process of W3C standards activities, on discussion of technical ideas with the potential to be proposed to W3C, on standards testing and implementation, as well as corresponding standardization opportunities for W3C while assisting the participation and contribution from the Chinese Web community.
Anqi Li (Alibaba), Wanming Lin (Intel), Qingqian Tao (Baidu), and Zhiqiang Yu (Huawei) co-chair the group and coordinate the daily work. The W3C team contacts for the group, Fuqiao Xue and Xueyuan Jia, are responsible for the technical and communications work respectively.
We welcome W3C members and the public to follow and participate the group discussions.