W3C Strategic Highlights
October 2021

Vitality of the work of W3C

Usage of the Web and W3C standards intensifies as the global pandemic continues to weigh on society. The Web has become a key technical infrastructure in a world where travel and physical contacts need to be limited. People use it for e-commerce, home learning, telehealth, conducting business in new ways, entertainment or staying in touch with family and friends.

Many organizations joined the World Wide Web Consortium with greater need for web technologies. This includes both technologies that directly support the move to virtual, as well as technologies that address the needs of a changing society, such as issues in privacy and greater decentralization of the web.

Focus of this report

We are proud that W3C's work continues to be essential to the ways in which our world is meeting the challenge of the health crisis while working on the solutions for the web of the future.

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.

42 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 –299 specifications– through homogeneous work-spaces in Github which enables better monitoring and management. W3C Recommendations as well as all other types of documents published at W3C are available from all Standards and Drafts.

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 360 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.

W3C Workshops

W3C Workshops bring communities together around presentations, panels, breakouts, and virtual "hallway" sessions to spur collaboration on new work areas. While switching to virtual entailed a change in mode and some re-setting of schedules, we committed to making distributed meetings even more accessible and globally participatory. We announced last July that all W3C Workshops are to include standard accessibility accommodations such as English captions on pre-recorded presentations, real-time captioning during live sessions, and ASL or other sign language where possible upon request.

Upcoming W3C Workshop:

• W3C/SMPTE Workshop on Professional Media Production on the Web, 9-18 November 2021 (virtual event)

W3C Workshops recently completed:

• W3C Workshop on Wide Color Gamut and High Dynamic Range for the Web, 13-24 September 2021 (virtual event)
• W3C Workshop on Smart Cities (report), 25 June 2021 (virtual event)

W3C Strategy funnel

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.

🎥 Watch Open UI - A year in review (October 2021, 4 minutes), where Daniel Clark, Mason Freed, and Dave Rupert report on current work from the Open UI Community Group to improve the developer and user experience of creating web UI. The video gives a glimpse into this future going over <select> dropdowns, a new <popup> element and research into potentially a standardized tab UI solution.

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.

Secure Payment Confirmation (SPC)

Secure Payment Confirmation remains the focus of the Web Payments Working Group and Web Payment Security Interest Group. Spurred by the encouraging results of the Stripe experiment in March which showed that users completed 8% more purchases, that authentication was three times faster than one time passwords, and with negligible fraud:

• The working group prioritized development of use cases, requirements, and an API for SPC.
• The interest group has been discussing related compliance topics, resulting in the draft using SPC to fulfill PSD2 requirements for SCA and dynamic linking. This work aims to establish SPC as a valuable tool (in conjunction with other protocols) for payment service providers and banks to fulfill regulatory requirements.

W3C Members Airbnb and Adyen decided to experiment with SPC too, and Stripe will conduct a second experiment.

In October, EMVCo announced support for SPC in version 2.3 of the EMV® 3-D Secure protocol, which will help improve end-to-end interoperability and security of card payments on the Web.

Payment Request API

Payment Request API 1.0 was published as a Proposed Recommendation further to the removal of several features following privacy and Internationalization reviews. This specification and Payment Method Identifiers are still expected to reach Recommendation status in 2021.

Merchant Community Group

The W3C Merchant Community Group –formerly a Business Group- is a non-technical forum where participants discuss on a quarterly basis merchant challenges, how emerging Web technologies could help address them, and what additional Web capabilities may be necessary.

Digital Publishing

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 (publication milestones) 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

The EPUB 3 Working Group aims 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.

Without changing the technical requirements, the group is actively improving the work to streamline and make the specifications more readeable: EPUB 3.3 (the authoring requirements for EPUB Publications), EPUB 3.3 Reading Systems and EPUB Accessibility 1.1 (both defining conformance requirements).

Among the several working group notes, EPUB Accessibility EU Accessibility Act Mapping is particularly important for Digital Book Publishers: per European Union directive European Accessibility Act (EAA), binding accessibility targets must be met. Member states have until the end of June 2022 to implement the EAA which will become applicable by the end of June 2025.

Audiobooks Working Group

The Audiobooks Working Group (formerly Publishing Working Group) has successfully completed its work and rechartered to maintain the audiobook specification (Publications Manifest, Audiobook profile for a Web Publication, and Lightweight Packaging Format.)

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, reaching out and communicating as a forum.

The group is instrumental in the development of EPUBCheck.

Media and Entertainment

Reinforce core media support

• Continued progress towards Candidate Recommendation for Media Capabilities, Picture-in-picture and Media Session.
• Update of the Media Source Extensions (MSE) standard with a new codec switching feature for ad-insertion scenarios, and to make it usable from workers and avoid jank.
• First public working draft of the Open Screen Protocol, which ensures interoperability between devices in second-screen scenarios.
• Enhancement of color support is discussed in the Color on the Web Community Group. The W3C Workshop on Wide Color Gamut and High Dynamic Range for the Web just ended in September 2021.
• The Timed Text Working Group, which maintains TTML and WebVTT, is looking for feedback on the Hypothetical Render Model (HRM) of IMSC to evaluate subtitles complexity (see keeping the complexity of IMSC documents under control)
• 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 and organizes monthly calls on Web technologies related to media to gather pain points from media industries.

Create the future

• Joint W3C/SMPTE Workshop on Professional Media Production planned in November 2021, to evaluate how the Web platform may be used to manipulate professional media assets stored in the cloud to run media production steps.
• The Media Working Group makes fast progress on the WebCodecs specification, which gives applications more control over media encoding/decoding and enables efficient media processing scenarios (in realtime and non-realtime scenarios).
• The GPU for the Web Working Group actively develops the WebGPU and WebGPU Shading Language specifications to harness GPUs for graphics and computing purpose.
• The Web Transport Working Group actively develops the WebTransport API that could become a useful technology for low-latency media streaming scenarios (live streaming, cloud gaming).
• The Games Community Group organizes monthly calls to explore game technologies and needs, alternating calls with speakers and workshop-like calls for discussion. For example, the August 2021 workshop was on game virality on the Web.
• The Immersive Web Working Group is stabilizing the WebXR Device API and companion specs to enable VR/AR experiences.
  🎥 Watch a short demo of WebXR (October 2021, 2 minutes), where Ada Rose Cannon introduces new features of WebXR: hit-testing, lighting estimation, depth sensing API, XR anchors and WebXR Navigation.

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, recognizing the wide availability of interoperable primitives in Web browsers to enable real-time audio/video communications, of particular impact during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The WebRTC Working Group has shifted its efforts towards bringing its companion specifications Media Capture and Streams and Screen Capture to Recommendation, and in parallel, the group is reviewing technical proposals that enable the new use cases for WebRTC: WebRTC Encoded Transform, which among other things will open the way for fully end-to-end encrypted teleconferences in Web browsers.

WebTransport

Chartered in September 2020 and operating in collaboration with the IETF's WEBTRANS Working Group, the WebTransport Working Group exposes low-level network primitives inspired by those from the WebRTC API, enabling them in more contexts, in particular, to make it easier to deploy in pure client/server situations. The group released a First Public Working Draft of its API.

🎥 Watch the WebTransport Working Group update video presentation (October 2021, 12 minutes) by Will Law.

Web & Networks

The Web & Networks Interest Group rechartered in April 2021 to continue work on the impact of Edge Computing on the Web platform and explore how to incorporate network quality monitoring and prediction in Web browsers. The latter topic has seen the emergence of a possible opportunity to standardize network trace formats to facilitate the capture and emulation of specific network conditions.

Recent launch, together with the Media and Entertainment Interest Group, of the Multicast Community Group, aimed to explore whether and how to make use of multicast network distribution via Web browsers, in a manner similar to what WebRTC did with real-time networking.

🎥 Watch Multicast for the Web (October 2021, 3 minutes), where Jake Holland introduces the newly formed multicast community group and gives a brief overview of why multicast is important and the work that is done to make it viable on the Web.

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 still learns from real world experiences from the first Vehicle Information Service Specification (VISS), which is in production vehicles, and whose version 2 was recently published as First Public Working Draft.

The standard, which aims to create a rich ecosystem for vehicles by running on the "head unit", 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. It currently knows about a thousand and will be growing to accommodate advances such as electrification, autonomous and driver assist technologies.

VISS version 2 includes HTTP REST in addition to WebSocket, addresses access control authorization, and a robust authentication model. This version also improves data feed subscriptions. A reference implementation is currently exploring supporting MQTT protocol which is used in the automotive industry.

W3C Automotive and Transportation Business Group

The Automotive and Transportation Business Group fosters and advances 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. A suite of videos introduce the Web of Things (WoT) standardization activities.

Web of Things Working Group

The Web of Things Working Group finished the initial Web of Things standards in 2020 and rechartered to work on interoperability profiles, discovery, lifecycle/onboarding, and ID management.

Web of Things Interest Group

The companion Web of Things Interest Group brings together stakeholders to explore ideas prior to standardization by liaising with external standards development organizations and industry alliances. The group seeks to build a shared understanding of the Web of Things and to identify opportunities for initiating W3C standards-track work.

Web advertising

The group aims to refine and incubate ideas and proposals, match how they fit with important use-cases for privacy-protective advertising on the Web.

The group's dashboard tracks issues across various discussion and incubation repositories.

Technical Architecture Group (TAG)

Reviews, Findings, Guidance

The group operates according to the following 3 axes: review of documents from other work groups that have a bearing on Web architecture to support other W3C work groups along with other horizontal review groups, publication of findings (such as the Ethical Web Principles document or Unsanctioned Web Tracking), and creation of guidance (including the foundational Self-Review Questionnaire: Security and Privacy which is a pre-requisite for documents reviews, but also the Web Platform Design Principles).

Ethical Web Principles

The group recently updated the Ethical Web Principles with some additional text in the intro around harmful patterns, and adjustments to the text on sustainability.

Web Platform Design Principles

New principles were added to the Web Platform Design Principles: use of DOMHighResTimeStamp, factory methods vs. constructors, and designing APIs on top of a hardware or device capability.

🎥 Watch a still current video from last year W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) update: Principles for the Web (October 2020, 13 minutes), and read the October 2021 TAG update.

Security & Privacy Questionnaire

The TAG added text to both the Security & Privacy Questionnaire and the Web Platform Design Principles covering the topic of "non-'fully active' documents".

Security, Privacy

Privacy incubation

The Privacy Community Group hosts incubation of new privacy-focused specification and APIs, as well as monthly calls which regularly attract vibrant participation. 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

Unlinkable and unphishable authentication

The Web Authentication Working Group published WebAuthn Level 2 as a W3C Recommendation and a First Public Working Draft of Web Authentication Level 3 in April. The group is re-chartering to work on new features including device-loss recovery and other API enhancements.

The companion 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.

🎥 Watch a short Web Authentication Adoption Community Group video update (October 2021, 5 minutes) by Nick Steele.

W3C Member Yubico and W3C collaborated to design for W3Cx (W3C's MOOC platform) the first online Web Authentication course for developers. Titled “Introduction to Web Authentication”, the course equips learners with the knowledge to replace aging password-based credentials with a secure model that incorporates strong authentication.

Web Application Security

The Web Application Security Working Group published a new Note on Post-Spectre Web Development, which outlines a threat model we can share, and a set of mitigation recommendations. The group is in the process of re-chartering.

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.

Internationalization (i18n)

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

Can you fund Web Internationalization?

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

If you can donate time and expertise, please join to contribute 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.

• [New] Gap-Analysis Pipeline: A dashboard to identify critical missing pieces of the internationalized Web and track support for filling those gaps.
  The tool shows distinct issues, pointers to underlying issues and needed next steps.
• [New] feature support: WebKit support for isolation of bidirectional text closed a key gap in supporting scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Adlam, and pages with both left-to-right and right-to-left text. Chrome implementation of CSS Counter Styles improves local customization of numbered lists and headings.
• 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 on Arabic, Southeast Asian, Indic, European, African and Americas languages.

For a summary of current status, see the language matrix and the gap-analysis pipeline. Read more on language enablement.

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.

• [New] Internationalization Glossary: The new document groups together terms used by the Internationalization Activity, and provides or points to definitions.
• [New] Monetization primers: Publication as part of our support of the Grant for the Web project of an explainer, a checklist, and a blog post, aiming to sensitize developers of monetization apps to the needs of the international community.
• Document Review is now the one goto page for working groups wanting to engage with horizontal groups.
• Strings on the Web: Language and Direction Metadata has been updated.

The Internationalization Working Group has been active reviewing specifications and providing advice to other work groups. Completed and in-progress reviews are listed in the Review Radar and issues we are tracking or discussing are listed in the Review Tracker.

Author support (education & outreach)

Articles to help content authors, spec developers, and implementers understand and use i18n features. I18N advice for courses, maintenance of an i18n checker for authors of web pages.

• New articles:
  • Typographic character units in complex scripts
  • Use cases for bidi and language metadata on the Web
  • Can we derive base direction from language?
• Updated resources, taking into account recent developments and providing clearer guidance::
  • Structural markup and right-to-left text in HTML
  • Inline markup & bidi text in HTML
  • Inline bidi markup examples

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

Web Accessibility

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

WAI guidelines

• What level guidelines should you use to make your website and web apps accessible? At least WCAG 2.1 AA.
• WAI published a second wide review draft of WCAG 2.2 in May, and expect completion within 2021.
• An updated W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0 Working Draft was published in June 2021 for review. WCAG 3 is intended to cover a broader scope of technologies, with different types of web content, apps, and tools, and a different name, scope, structure, and draft conformance model.
• Recently published supporting resources:
  • Making Content Usable for Cognitive and Learning Disabilities
  • ATAG Report Tool from Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0.

How important is Web Accsssibility in times where Covid is impacting people with disabilities?

• Making Audio and Video Media Accessible has useful information for making videoconferences accessible.
• Accessibility of Remote Meetings is developed by the Research Questions Task Force (RQTF) of the Accessible Platform Architecture Working Group (APA WG).

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 1.3, Personalization Semantics and Pronunciation.
• The Accessibility Conformance Testing Task Force (of AG WG) completed the W3C Recommendation of ACT Conformance Rules Format, and is now building the repository of rules.
• Emerging technology: the Research Questions Task Force is developing user accessibility requirements for media synchronization, for AR and VR ("XAUR"), and recently published RTC Accessibility User Requirements.
• The Immersive Captions Community Group is exploring research on effective use of captions in augmented 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.