Form for W3C Advisory Committee to vote (W3C Member-only) | TAG home
This page lists publicly nominations and statements for the 2023 election to Technical Architecture Group (TAG). Each person has been nominated by at least one W3C Member according to the TAG election process.
The W3C Membership elects the members of the TAG. For this election W3C will fill five seats.
Timeline:
Note: The deadline for votes is 04:59 UTC, 13 December 2023 (23:59 Boston Time, 12 December 2023).
The following nominations have been made (listed in random order):
An asterisk (*) indicates that the nominee is a current participant. All individuals were nominated by the AC Representatives of their organizations unless otherwise indicated below.
The following nomination statements have been made (listed in random order):
Hi, I’m Matthew (he/him), and I’m running for election to the TAG, in order to contribute a combination of technical and horizontal review accessibility experience to the team. I am passionate about making the web both a welcoming platform, and an empowering platform, for people who face accessibility barriers, and educating developers and authors on how to achieve this.
I believe that the ability for people to both create content, and communicate, via the web is vital to their inclusion – and, thus, the health of the platform. We have taken great strides in terms of making increasingly rich and nuanced web content, consumed on a wide range of devices, more accessible (though still with a huge amount of work to do – both educational, and in further standards development). But, nowadays, people are collaborating via the web extensively, with many new ways to do so on the horizon. I want to ensure that we are ready to welcome everyone into the existing, and upcoming, creative and collaborative environments. Being part of the TAG would give me the opportunity to act as advisor and mentor to the people authoring the standards on which those environments are being built. There’s so much potential for these new ways of working to empower people. I have benefited from this kind of empowerment as a person with a vision impairment, and I continue to work on projects involving accessible authoring tools.
As co-chair of the Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) WG, I have gained significant experience with the horizontal review process, and work hard to maintain, and build, the great relationships with other groups that we are honoured to have. I have 11 years of experience of accessibility consultancy, having reached the position of Principal Accessibility Engineer at TPGi (an active and dedicated W3C member). I have recently taken up a new role as Head of Web Standards at Samsung R&D Institute UK (which incorporates developer advocacy), where I look forward to collaborating on, and contributing to, a range of existing and upcoming standards that will support developers in creating engaging, accessible, and privacy-preserving experiences and tools for people using the web.
In the APA WG, we also work on many original documents, including some normative specifications that we are developing. Some of these (from our Adapt Task Force) involve technical collaboration with Blissymbolics Communication International, a standards organisation that maintains its own symbolic human written language. This collaboration is very-much a team effort (I’m just one steward of it), and it helps us ensure that our work caters for a global and diverse community of users – in this case, this includes people who find that both traditional print media, and web content, can pose significant barriers to entry.
Whilst my experience in stewarding normative documents is not as great as others on the TAG, I am familiar with the standardisation process, and I believe it is the combination of my understanding of standards, and working towards consensus, coupled with my considerably greater horizontal review, and long-term accessibility experience, that will allow me to bring something valuable to the table.
I would greatly appreciate your vote, if you feel you’re able to give it. Please do use your vote regardless. Thank you for your consideration.
Summary of web-related experience:
Some additional (not web-specific) academic and technical accessibility experience:
Adobe supports Peter’s continued participation in the TAG. His efficient and fair chairing has helped the group become more effective and responsive. His experience will be useful as we navigate our organizational changes over the next few years.
I have been serving on the TAG since 2011. After serving one elected term, I participated in the "TAG reform" movement of 2012/13 in order to increase the TAG's engagement with the W3C community and have it play a more active role in the stewardship of Web architecture. My vision for an improved operating mode for the TAG led Tim Berners-Lee to appoint me as co-chair along with Dan Appelquist in order to lead the TAG into becoming the effective organization that it is today.
Under our leadership, the TAG has completed nearly 800 reviews of W3C specifications and provided significant feedback into the design of Web technologies across the spectrum. This review and feedback process has helped improve the API surface of the Web as well as improve the architectural cohesion of the Web as a whole. The TAG has also produced over a dozen findings as well as other documents, such as our Web Platform Design Principles, and has been active in engaging the developer community outside the W3C.
My personal experience with the Web runs deep. In the 90's, I was the principal architect of the Gecko rendering engine, which in addition to still being the engine that Firefox uses, provided the architectural template that underlies all modern web browsers. In addition to my work on the TAG, I have been a member of the CSS Working Group since 1998 and served as its co-chair for 8 years, helping make it one of the most productive working groups in the W3C.
With the recent transition into a legal entity, a new CEO, and changes to the W3C process impacting the composition of the TAG, I feel it's important for the TAG to have experienced leadership to help navigate the changes ahead. It's also valuable to have members familiar with the history of the TAG to ensure that it doesn't fall into some of the traps that led to the need for its reform ten years ago. Due to changes in the appointment process, I ask the AC to elect both myself and Dan in addition to giving careful consideration the the other fine candidates to give the TAG the membership skills it needs to be the best it can be.
I will be self-funding my participation in the TAG.
Daniel Clark is a principal software engineer with extensive experience furthering the web platform. His track record includes years of contributions in various W3C working groups including the CSS WG, the Editing WG, and the OpenUI CG, as well as other web standards organizations such as TC39 and WHATWG. He has made significant contributions to standards including the CSS Custom Highlight API, the EditContext API, Import Attributes, and the WHATWG HTML spec with JSON module scripts and CSS module scripts. He has made substantial contributions in the Chromium project and formerly EdgeHTML in a variety of areas including a11y, DOM, editing, CSS, and JS. This broad experience will provide a solid basis for making the right long-term decisions for the architecture of the web and for solving problems that span different technologies. Daniel believes in objective, consistent, and timely technical guidance and is eager to advance web architecture to further empower both developers and users without sacrificing accessibility, privacy, or security. Daniel is also well versed in forward-looking topics like AI and the considerations needed when creating new technologies. Should he be elected, Daniel has reserved time in his schedule to fulfill the duties of TAG and to diligently represent the interests of the web.
It is my great pleasure to nominate Dan for this TAG election. Dan's candidacy statement makes it clear why I am nominating him.
I was first elected onto the TAG in 2010. I was subsequently appointed by Tim Berners-Lee in 2013 to re-join as co-chair along with Peter Linss. Since then, working with Peter and with the TAG's membership, I've helped to re-imagine how the TAG operates and how to delivers value back to the membership and to the web community at large. I was instrumental in initiating TAG developer meet-ups. I worked with other TAG members to develop a GitHub-centirc approach to working (specially for design reviews), a break-out groups process that allowed for greater parallelisation of design reviews, and a virtual F2F process that allowed us to continue to function through the pandemic. I worked to recruit people to put themselves forward for TAG election, and in the process increased the diversity of TAG as well as its breadth of expertise. I initiated the work on the Ethical Web Principles and more recently on the Privacy Principles task force. I've contributed to many of our design reviews as well as towards our design principles, findings and other documents. My technical contributions have been born of my work in the mobile industry (Vodafone, Telefónica, Samsung), as well as my long-time work in the web, starting with the company I co-founded in the mid 90s to put scientific journals online, and my work as a "dot com CTO." Through my career I have maintained a strong connection to the developer community as well as focus on user needs - which has been reflected in way that TAG conducts design reviews. I am also someone who works to bring people together to hammer out consensus, even for contentious problem spaces.
Since 2010, I have been happy to have been re-appointed every term by the Team. In this current election cycle, however we have some important changes. First of all, we have 2 additional elected seats. We will also be introducing term limits for appointed seats, a measure which I support. Consequently, I would ask the A.C. to vote for me to remain on the TAG. I will work to ensure that the TAG remains a reliable design authority within the W3C and that it continues to evolve both its focus and process as the W3C and the web continue to evolve. I remain as passionate about the web, and about its future, as I was when I started my involvement with W3C in the early 2000s.
I will be self-funding for my participation on the TAG.
It’s my great pleasure to nominate Martin Thomson of Mozilla for election to the TAG. Over the years since we first met I have been consistently impressed by Martin’s ability to analyze complex technical challenges and to synthesize cogent, timely, and insightful ways to overcome them. I believe his experience and skill set make him an excellent fit for the TAG. He would bring absolutely critical expertise in networking, privacy, and security to our work.
As listed on the TAG home page, there are three aspects to the TAG’s responsibilities:
Martin is uniquely well-suited to positively impact all of these.
Hi, I’m Martin. This year I’m offering my services as a potential TAG member.
This note won’t be an impassioned plea for you to vote for me. Of course, I still believe that there are ways in which the TAG would benefit from my participation. This note is my attempt to give you a bit of context on who I am, establish some relevant credentials, and maybe help you understand my perspective on the role.
I currently work at Mozilla. They pay me, which is important, but it is Mozilla’s mission that inspires me. That mission has a special place for the Web as a medium for providing people with real agency in the world. It’s a real privilege to be able to work at a place that delivers products of real substance but does so in a way that consistently places values above profits.
Standards engagement has been a large part of my professional life for close to 20 years. Most of that work has been with the IETF, where I’ve made contributions to some protocols you might have heard of (HTTP, QUIC, TLS, and more) and published 40-odd RFCs. My W3C participation traces back to early Geolocation work, but WebRTC and WebPush were probably the first substantive projects.
From a technical standpoint, implementing networking protocols like QUIC and TLS has provided good experience with networking and security as they relate to the Web. I do not claim deep expertise on many topics, but rather broad working knowledge.
More recently my focus has been on privacy and how we might safeguard privacy without entirely neglecting advertising, identity, fraud management, and other functions that have come to rely on mechanisms that are easily abused. I have also come to better appreciate the limitations of technology and the dangers that come from only considering technological solutions to problems.
In addition to technology, the systems that regulate something as complex as the Web are of great interest to me, including the interaction between code, products and services, standards, regulation, governance, and social norms. There is an enormous opportunity — and responsibility — that comes from standardization. Standards have no compulsive power and compliance is always voluntary. Still, well designed standards can be structured to admit the possibility of empowering the disempowered, to open up closed technologies for anyone to use, and to create opportunities where there were none before.
Four years of service on the Internet Architecture Board has provided some experience with the sorts of things that a TAG member might need to contend with. I am also very familiar with the sorts of reviewing functions that are expected of the TAG.
Recent changes in the make-up of the W3C present some challenges that I expect will require some adaptability. Even this year, there will be some fairly major changes, with more members and higher turnover. This presents a unique opportunity. The TAG is positioned to take more of an important role in the operations of the W3C. There is great potential for the TAG to provide leadership that extends beyond the purely technical and even outside of the W3C.
I’d like to thank Apple for their nomination and kind words.
Alibaba Group is honored to nominate Dapeng(Max) Liu for the TAG.
Dapeng(Max) Liu has serves as TAG member since 2022, demonstrating both commitment and expertise. He is willing to continue contributing for the forthcoming term.
Max’s engagement with W3C standardization dates back to 2015. He has worked on Web Payment, MiniApps, Client Edge Coordination and other areas in W3C. His efforts on Web payment method manifest have been instrumental in expanding the W3C web payment standards to native apps such as Alipay. Served as the co-chair of W3C Web Commerce IG in 2017， Max has helped to incubate Web Payment and Web Commerce related standards.
Max is currently the Technical Director in Alibaba Cloud, and he has more than 15 years of professional standardization work experience and has strong technical background in various areas. His record of leadership includes positions in a number of international standardization organizations, such as co-chair of IETF DMM working group, vice-chair of automation working group of Bluetooth SIG, etc.
We believe Max’s strong technical standardization background and comprehensive technical experience in various areas will be very valuable to the mission and work of TAG.
Alibaba Group fully supports Dapeng (Max) Liu in undertaking the duties and responsibilities in this role and extends resource necessary for his success. We sincerely appreciate your support for his candidacy in the upcoming TAG election.
Google is pleased to nominate Jeffrey Yasskin for the Technical Architecture Group.
The Chromium project believes the TAG is a critical body to ensure the Web remains One Web. A strong relationship between the TAG and the Chrome team is essential to the TAG's agency in the evolution of the web. Google sends a lot of review requests to the TAG, and we would like to ensure we can be responsive to concerns as well as contribute to other reviews. Jeffrey is uniquely placed to help explain and evangelize TAG feedback to Chromium engineers, as well as help organize TAG reviews requested by Chromium.
Jeffrey's depth of knowledge, passion for users and human rights, and ability to work collaboratively with everyone will make him a great asset for the TAG. He continues to be a key leader in Google and the community in working to improve user privacy. Improving user privacy is a challenging journey from where the Web has been in the past, and Jeffrey has been pivotal in trying to encourage collaboration across the community. He has shown the depth of his commitment by driving the Privacy Interest Group's Target Privacy Threat Model and then co-editing the Privacy Principles document in the TAG's Privacy Task Force.
As one of the Web Standards Tech Leads for Chrome as well as being a senior engineer with deep technical expertise, Jeffrey is very experienced in pulling together experts to get the job done. Having worked alongside Jeffrey as the other Web Standards Tech Lead, I give my complete support to Jeffrey as an outstanding collaborator.
Hi, I'm Jeffrey, and I would appreciate your vote for a seat on the TAG.
The TAG has been doing excellent work on principles documents and findings over the last several years. This includes the Privacy Principles document that I've been co-editing for 2 years. This work, and my contributions to it, will continue whether or not you elect me to the TAG. If you elect me, it'll be so that I can improve the TAG's design review work in the following ways:
With your support, I hope to help the TAG better serve our users and our shared goals for the Web. Thank you for your consideration.