W3C Strategic Highlights
April 2021

Increasing impact of the Web

The world has accelerated its movement from physical interaction to virtual over the last 14 months. This is both exciting and troubling that it was a byproduct of a public health nightmare. Statistics abound that speak to the centrality of the Web.

The web has become a key technical infrastructure for global society as it adapted to changes imposed in a world where travel and physical contacts need to be limited. Whether it is e-commerce, remote learning, telehealth, conducting business in new ways, entertainment or staying in touch with family and friends, this acceleration will continue.

The increased dependence on technology also re-energizes our need to assure interoperability of the world's technical infrastructure (including both traditional web and the miniApp infrastructure in China).

These changes are driving organizational renewal at the Web Consortium: including our vision and strategy for the future, increasing our focus on diversity and inclusion, and improving our specification process.

W3C works at the nexus of three axes: core technology, industry needs, and societal needs

Now more than ever, the Web Consortium's work directly supports the move from physical to virtual (e.g., WebRTC recently became a standard) as well as innovations that address the needs of a changing society, following pattern of solving problems critical to society, helping them scale to web level, ensuring interoperability while addressing challenging problems of security, privacy and greater decentralization of the web, web payments, web performance, entertainment and media, web accessibility, and internationalization.

Focus of this report

We are proud that W3C's work has been essential to the ways in which our world has met the challenge of the past year of crisis and in providing solutions for what will come next. This report highlights recent work done to enhance the Web platform, and innovate for its growth and strength so that the web remains a tool that has and will continue to accelerate scientific cooperation and discoveries, a social means to bridge families and friends, a way to learn online and grow skills, an instrument to conduct successful business, and much more.

39 working groups and 10 interest groups enable W3C to pursue its mission through the creation of Web standards, guidelines, and supporting materials.

We track the tremendous work done across the Consortium –287 specifications– through homogeneous work-spaces in Github which enables better monitoring and management.

Identifying promising standardization areas

W3C uses a variety of mechanisms to engage community discussion on future Web standards: conversations with the Membership, liaising with other standards bodies, tracking the activity of thousands of participants in over 350 W3C community groups, and hosting W3C Workshops. There are lots of good ideas. The W3C strategy team works to identifying promising topics for standardization and invites public participation.

Workshops bring communities together around presentations, panels, breakouts, and virtual "hallway" sessions to spur collaboration on new work areas. While switching to virtual entails a change in mode and some re-setting of schedules, we envision that distributed meetings can be even more accessible and globally participatory.

Upcoming W3C Workshop:

• W3C Workshop on Wide Color Gamut and High Dynamic Range for the Web, 16 May - 10 June 2021 (virtual event)
• W3C Workshop on Smart Cities, 25 June 2021 (virtual event)

W3C Workshops recently completed:

• W3C Workshop on Web & Machine Learning, 16-29 September 2020, virtual event (read the report)
• W3C/OGC Joint Workshop Series on Maps for the Web, September-October 2020, virtual event (read the report)

The Strategy incubation pipeline documents the exploration of potential new work in phases of Incubation and Evaluation, and eventually in the chartering stages of new standards groups. The W3C Strategy Team's incubation pipeline is a GitHub Project where new area are issues represented by “cards” which move through the columns, usually from left to right. Most cards start in Exploration and move towards Chartering, or move out of the pipeline.

Public input is welcome at any stage but particularly once Incubation has begun. This helps W3C identify work that is sufficiently incubated to warrant standardization, to review the ecosystem around the work and indicate interest in participating in its standardization, and then to draft a charter that reflects an appropriate scope. Ongoing feedback can speed up the overall standardization process.

Recently chartered & upcoming groups

Since the previous highlights document, W3C has chartered, extended and proposed the following groups:

The newly launched W3C Patent Policy 2020 is being deployed in the various Working Groups. In December 2020, 12 Working Groups volunteered to switch the new Patent Policy.

Web Payments & Web Commerce

W3C's payments standards enable a streamlined checkout process, giving a consistent user experience across the Web with lower front-end development costs for merchants. Users can store and reuse information and more quickly and accurately complete online transactions.

Payment Request API

The Web Payments Working Group plans to advance Payment Request API 1.0 to Proposed Recommendation once discussions with the Privacy Interest Group have completed on whether to maintain a feature related to address collection that has raised privacy concerns.

Secure Payment Confirmation (SPC)

In March, Stripe published the results of their experiment with "Secure Payment Confirmation." The experiment tested the hypothesis that users will prefer Web Authentication to one-time passwords within what is called the "challenge flow" of the EMV 3-D Secure protocol. The experiment showed that, with SPC, users completed 8% more purchases and authentication was three times faster than one time passwords. In addition, there was negligible fraud with SPC (similar to one time passwords). You can read more on this in the Web Payments working group blog.

SPC as it was used in the Stripe pilot offers a "low-friction" authentication flow during a transaction, but the industry is also interested in "zero friction" risk assessment flows. Many of today's approaches involve cookies and browser fingerprinting. In light of changes to the browser, the Working Group (and the Web Payment Security Interest Group) are looking into alternative approaches that are also more privacy-protecting.

Merchant Business Group

The W3C Merchant Business Group –which launched last September as a non-technical forum where participants discuss merchant challenges, how emerging Web technologies could help address them, and what additional Web capabilities may be necessary– is still forming.

Current topics of discussion include the use of bar codes including QR on online commerce, balancing friction and consent, accessibility, and changes in payments due to the pandemic.

Digital Publishing

publication milestones

The Web is the universal publishing platform. Publishing is increasingly impacted by the Web, and the Web increasingly impacts Publishing. Topic of particular focus of Publishing@W3C include typography and layout, accessibility, usability, portability, distribution, archiving, offline access, print on demand, and reliable cross referencing. And the diverse publishing community represented in the groups consist of the traditional "trade" publishers, ebook reading system manufacturers, but also publishers of audiobooks, scholarly journals or educational materials, library scientists or browser developers.

EPUB 3 Working Group

W3C launched the EPUB 3 Working Group in September 2020 to maintain, develop and clarify the EPUB 3 family of specifications, to represent the EPUB community in W3C, and to support EPUB 3 content creators and consumers. An important outcome of the group is to significantly increase the interoperability of EPUB publications and reading systems.

The rigorous W3C process of testing will make a cleaner, clearer, more easily-implemented EPUB 3 specification. That work has begun with more systematic testing and accompanying improvements on the standard in the form of clarifications, better conformance statements.

In order to make EPUB more readable, and to remove duplications and redundancies, the group has made significant editorial improvements without changing any of the technical requirements of EPUB 3.2. You can read more about the EPUB 3.3 and EPUB Accessibility 1.1 first public working drafts published recently.

Publishing Business Group

The Publishing Business Group explores new areas of work and business needs generic to publishing on the web, by observing the community, expanding it, reaching out and communicating as a forum.

The group has been instrumental in the development of EPUBCheck. Please read more on EPUBCheck 4.2.5 and a New EPUBCheck Website.

Media and Entertainment

Roadmap: Overview of Media Technologies for the Web

Reinforce core media support

• Continued progress towards Candidate Recommendation for Media Capabilities, Picture-in-picture and Media Session.
• Upcoming publication as first public working draft of the Open Screen Protocol, which ensures interoperability between devices in second-screen scenarios.
• The Timed Text Working Group, which maintains TTML and WebVTT, is soliciting feedback of possible future directions related to captions.
• The Color on the Web Community Group is where discussions related to enhanced color support (HDR, wide gamut). Related is the W3C Workshop on Wide Color Gamut and High Dynamic Range for the Web.
• Improvement of support for Media timed events (emsg, data cues) takes place notably through the incubation of DataCue in WICG and exchanges with browser vendor representatives within the Media & Entertainment Interest Group.
• New: Reducing needs for memory copies in web-platform APIs (see WICG repo) are now being discussed, since they often are a performance bottleneck when media streams need to be processed.

Reduce fragmentation

• Annual release in December 2020 of Web Media API snapshot, a common and testable baseline for media devices.
• The Media & Entertainment Interest Group maintains the roadmap: Overview of Media Technologies for the Web, which highlights Web technologies that can be used to build media applications and services, as well as known gaps to enable additional use cases. The group also started work on Media Integration Guidelines.

Create the future

• The Immersive Web Working Group continues to stabilize the WebXR Device API and companion specs to enable VR/AR experiences.
• The GPU for the Web Working Group, launched in September 2020, actively develops the WebGPU and WebGPU Shading Language specifications to harness GPUs for graphics and computing purpose.
• The Web Transport Working Group, also launched in September 2020, actively develops the WebTransport API that could become a useful technology for low-latency media streaming scenarios (live streaming, cloud gaming).
• The Media Working Group recently adopted the WebCodecs specification, previously incubated in the WICG. The specification gives applications more control over media encoding/decoding and enables efficient media processing scenarios.
• The Games Community Group organizes bi-monthly calls to explore game technologies and needs. For example, the February 2021 call was on game runtimes (games often need to run embedded in native applications).
• Can the Web be used to manipulate professional media assets stored in the cloud to run media production steps? The Media & Entertainment Interest Group invited experts in video editing tools to share perspectives and needs, with a view to preparing a Requirements for Media Production document.

Network & Communications

The Web is the Open Platform for Mobile. Telecommunication service providers and network equipment providers have long been critical actors in the deployment of Web technologies. As the Web platform matures, it brings richer and richer capabilities to extend existing services to new users and devices, and propose new and innovative services.

Real-Time Communications (WebRTC)

WebRTC became a standard in January 2021, Ten years in the making, the technology transformed the communication landscape by making any connected device a potential communication end-point, thus enabling rich, interactive, live voice and video communications anywhere on the web or any network, boosting global interconnection and vastly expanding the ability of operators to reach their customers. WebRTC serves as the corner-stone of many online communication and collaboration services.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown both how critical WebRTC already is in a world where travel and physical contacts need to be limited, as well as the many improvements that can be brought to the technology to cater to new usages that have emerged.

The WebRTC Working Group continues to document use cases for expanding WebRTC to map out the future of WebRTC, notably:

• End-to-end encryption in server-mediated videoconferencing
• Live processing of audio and video feeds, including via Machine Learning
• Internet of Things (e.g., an IoT sensor maintains a long-term connection and seeks to minimize power consumption)

WebTransport

W3C recently started work on WebTransport and Web Codecs, which promises to bring the benefits of low-latency streaming to the broader media and entertainment ecosystem.

The work happens in collaboration with the IETF's WEBTRANS Working Group, which defines the protocol on which the API builds.

Web & Networks

After successful joint meetings during TPAC in late 2020, the Web & Networks Interest Group's focus continues around:

• the impact of Edge Computing on the Web platform
• how to incorporate network quality monitoring and prediction in Web browsers

Automotive and Transportation

Shared data associated with transportation has great potential for improving the user experience, with opportunities to offer enhanced information, entertainment, efficiency, maintenance, safety, and convenience. Parallel advances in sensors, communications, cloud and data analytics infrastructure, geophysical mapping, machine learning, mobile devices, user interfaces and related areas have created a rich foundation that can offer tremendous opportunity for creating value. The work in automotive and transporation addresses the need for standards in a connected vehicle ecosystem, modes of transportation and related services.

W3C Automotive Working Group

The W3C Automotive Working Group continues learning from real world experiences from the first Vehicle Information Service Specification (VISS), a service in production vehicles and used elsewhere.

The standard provides an access method to a common data model for all the signals information available on vehicles, such as engine temperature, fuel/charge level, range, tire pressure etc. Presently it encapsulates approximately a thousand different data elements and will be growing to accommodate the advances in automotive such as autonomous and driver assist technologies and electrification.

Creating a rich ecosystems for vehicles, applications run on the vehicles themselves on the "head unit" (where the car stereo resides). Some envision using it in the cloud to provide in-direct access to vehicles.

The second version of VISS is now feature-complete, adding HTTP REST in addition to WebSocket. Access control authorization is addressed now, as is a robust authentication model. Data feed subscriptions have been improved as well. A reference implementation is currently exploring supporting MQTT protocol which is used in the automotive industry. Editorial review is underway and a First Public Working Draft is expected in the near future.

W3C Automotive and Web Platform Business Group

The Automotive and Transportation Business Group has a role in fostering and advancing the adoption and continued development of W3C Automotive Working Group's standards including coordinating with the broader transportation information space and acting as an incubator for future standards work. The group also works with the data architects from ISO JTC1 WG11 SmartCities. Recent work includes:

• Coordination with GENIVI on on Common Vehicle Interface Initiative, and advancing the second release of Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS) which refactored the underlying data model
• Development of VSS ontology (VSSo)
• Initial specification development of Remote Procedure Call proposal from Jaguar Land Rover and accompanying service catalog for vehicle interactions
• Development of In-Vehicle application Best Practices to address privacy, business, safety and security concerns
• Development of Policy Guidelines surrounding data usage, in coordination with other groups
• Promotion of VSS, VSSo and W3C Automotive service standards
• Formation of the Transportation Ontology Coordination Committee with W3C, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), ISO Intelligent Transportation Systems, and ISO SmartCities
• Continued incubation for W3C Automotive Working Group

Web of Things

W3C's Web of Things work is designed to bridge disparate technology stacks to allow devices to work together and achieve scale, thus enabling the potential of the Internet of Things by eliminating fragmentation and fostering interoperability. The Web of Things complements existing IoT ecosystems to reduce the cost and risk for suppliers and consumers of applications that create value by combining multiple devices and information services. There are many sectors that will benefit, e.g. smart homes, smart cities, smart industry, smart agriculture, smart healthcare and many more.

The Web of Things (WoT) standardization activities are now illustrated through a new WoT explainer animation. The video shows how a web developer can implement interoperable Internet of Things solutions that are not locked into vendor specific frameworks, and how the W3C WoT can be applied to domains such as agriculture, building or industrial automation, smart homes, and more.

The Web of Things Interest Group explores ideas prior to standardization in collaboration with external standards development organizations and industry alliances. Such liaisons have already progressed in two critical areas:

• semantic interoperability
• end-to-end security across different platforms

The Web of Things Working Group having finished the initial Web of Things standards, has been working on interoperability profiles, discovery, lifecycle/onboarding, and ID management.

New: Smart Cities

Smart Cities are various technologies –Web of Things being only one of them– and processes for intelligent management of our built and inhabited environment. Smart Cities' applications are tightly related to the people who live in cities, and potentially would have negative impacts on their lives. Therefore, it is crucial to begin from inclusive design, account for accessibility, privacy and security as well as internationalization.

W3C announced a W3C Workshop on Smart Cities to be held online on 25 June 2021, aiming to:

• Identify stakeholders of Smart Cities standardization to drive the development of Web standards aligned with the real needs of Smart Cities
• Clarify reasonable applications for Smart Cities technologies we agree to build
• and improve the draft proposed charter for a Smart Cities Interest Group

New: Web advertising

The Improving Web Advertising Business Group formed in December 2017 as a cross-industry forum for business representatives to discuss how online advertising could be made more effective and privacy-preserving.

The group now includes more than 350 participants from more than 100 organizations, discussing and documenting use-cases and proposals for privacy-protective advertising on the Web.

We hear use cases from publishers, marketers, web applications, end-users, and ad-tech and measurement companies; and liaise with other organizations on drafts in development there.

Work discussed in the group is now incubating in WICG and the Privacy Community Group, including proposals around privacy-preserving aggregate measurement, client-side interest-based ad selection, and preparation for a Web without third-party cookies.

Web of Data

Digital Identifiers

Digital Identifiers are fundamental for the deployment of various services on the Web and beyond, both in terms of interactive applications and also as part of the deployment of a Web of Data.

The Decentralized Identifier Working Group aims at defining digital identifiers as specific URI schemes that have an associated DID document: a JSON document containing primarily cryptographic information that allows any agent to check entity integrity, exchange private information, and get services information; and that can be stored on various types of distributed ledgers, Web storage systems like github, or IPFS.

The group continually updates DID Identifiers 1.0 (now a Candidate Recommendation), DID Specification Registries and DID Use Cases and Requirements.

Security, Privacy

Unlinkable and unphishable authentication

Since the publication in the Spring 2019 as a W3C Recommendation of WebAuthn Level 1, adoption of strong cryptographic authentication has continued to steadily grow, with implementation across browser platforms and deployment on major web applications. The WebAuthn Adoption Community Group aims to lift obstacles that might prevent developers from adopting WebAuthn, and help developers and users of the specification to improve adoption of its interoperable security.

The Web Authentication Working Group just published WebAuthn Level 2. The group plans to re-charter to add new features including device-loss recovery to the group's scope.

Privacy and Security reviews

The Privacy Interest Group (PING) does privacy reviews of other groups' specifications. It has been using new tooling to track issues and has had renewed success making groups aware of privacy and fingerprinting issues in their specifications. The group is also writing a Target Privacy Threat Model document.

Security reviews are done by a pool of volunteer reviewers coordinated by the W3C team. We welcome more people in that pool. Issues raised are tracked using the same tooling used by PING.

Privacy incubation

Formed in 2020 to host incubation of new privacy-focused specification and APIs, the Privacy Community Group is seeing vibrant participation; its calls routinely draw 60 participants whose recent work items include:

• A mechanism for private click measurement that may be useful to measure advertising success while also preserving user privacy
• A proposal for isolating sites' data from each other and an API for requesting access to blocked storage
• Two proposals that may help facilitate login state management in a world where third-party cookies and other tracking mechanisms are being rapidly deprecated: one to declare what domain names are connected to each other and an API to tell a browser if a user is logged into a site

Internationalization (i18n)

Educational articles related to Internationalization • spec developers checklist • overview of language enablement work in progress • Internationalization Initiative

Internationalization Initiative

The Internationalization initiative allows sponsors to fund extra resources in i18n beyond what the core membership funding covers. Additional funding increases participants and expertise in this crucial empowering work.

See below what the Web community accomplishes at the Web Consortium in the key areas of Language enablement, Developer support, and Author support (education & outreach).

Language enablement

Documentation of requirements for specific scripts and languages, and of barriers to their use in technologies that exist or are currently in development. The language matrix summarizes current status of language enablement on the web. Read more on language enablement; find repositories & task forces supporting this effort.

Japanese and Chinese layout task forces continue to meet regularly and are actively working on their documents. We need additional participants to drive the work, notably in the Arabic, Southeast Asian, and Indic task forces.

6 first public working drafts of gap-analysis documents were recently published, covering Adlam (Fulah), French, German, Hebrew, N'Ko, and Osage.

Developer support

Reviews, discussion and advice for W3C work groups (and sometimes for external initiatives at the Unicode Consortium or the IETF, etc.) and preparation of guidelines and checklists that groups can use to do self-review or self-education, as well as focus on specific technological problems.

The Internationalization Working Group has been active reviewing specifications and providing advice to other work groups, including CSS, WHATWG, WebXR, Accessibility Guidelines, Web Publishing, MiniApps, GeoLocation, Web Share, among others.

Recent work includes:

• Document Review is now the one goto page for working groups wanting to engage with horizontal groups.
• Upcoming publication as a group note of Strings on the Web: Language and Direction Metadata. Some of this material has been broken out into an article: Use cases for bidi and language metadata on the Web.
• Work as resumed on documenting Language Tags and Locale Identifiers for the World Wide Web, which lays out best practices for identifying or selecting the language of content as well as the locale preferences used to process or display data values and other information on the Web.

Author support (education & outreach)

Articles to help content authors understand and use i18n features. I18N advice for courses, maintenance of an i18n checker for authors of web pages. Talks at conferences, etc.

See HTML & CSS Authoring Techniques, and other educational Internationalization techniques.

Web Accessibility

WAI news • Accessibility fundamentals • Business case for digital accessibility • WAI translations

WAI guidelines

• Anticipated for completion by mid-year 2021, WCAG 2.2 is receiving a second round of wide review. The specification adds more accessibility requirements for people with cognitive and learning disabilities, people with low vision, and mobile accessibility.
• WCAG 3.0 was published for review as a first public working draft in January. WCAG 3 is intended to address different types of web content, apps, and tools. The draft proposes a different name, scope, structure, and draft conformance model.

How is Covid impacting people with disabilities?

• Digital accessibility is more important than ever during a time when it is harder to get together in person. Remote meetings, school, work, health care – web accessibility provides an inclusive foundation across all of these settings, and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2) is where to get started.
• Making Audio and Video Media Accessible has useful information for making videoconferences accessible.
• In Accessibility of Remote Meetings, WAI is highlighting the applicability of current accessibility guidelines and investigating gaps where newer guidance and technical support is needed. Accessibility guidance has also been integrated into Continuity of Operations, the document the W3C Team put together as we halted work-related staff travel and moved to operating completely remotely.

Other progress on the technical side of Web accessibility

• Web accessibility reviews of all W3C specifications under development is done by the Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group. The Framework for Accessible Specification of Technology (FAST) is a tool that allows groups to perform self review.
• Drafts in progress of ARIA 1.2, Personalization Semantics and Pronunciation.
• The Accessibility Conformance Testing Task Force (of AG WG) continues working on ACT Conformance Rules Format
• Emerging technology: the Research Questions Task Force is developing user accessibility requirements for media synchronization, for AR and VR ("XAUR"), and for Accessibility of RTC.
• The Immersive Captions Community Group is developing technical requirements for captions in augmented reality and virtual reality.

Learning more about accessibility

• Tips, tutorials, role-based learning resources.
• Learn Digital Accessibility Foundations from our free online W3Cx course: "Introduction to Web Accessibility".
• Get engaged directly in development of educational resources such as the draft What's New in WCAG 2.2, and other work listed in the new EOWG charter.
• Help translating WAI materials so that more people can learn about web accessibility.
• Learn about accessibility and anti-discrimination against disability also as part of W3C's Positive Work Environment work and Inclusion and Diversity work.