World Wide Web Consortium
- Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee and was Director until June 12, 2023
- Around 345 technical Web standards,
460 in progress
- Over 400 members
- W3C, Inc created in 2023
Brief History
- Inventing the Web Platform - 1995 to 2005
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HTTP serving HTML, CSS, DOM, and Javascript became the core technologies for the Web
- Making the Web Platform Solid, Open, Interoperable - 2006 to 2019
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Make the Web platform work better
- The Present: Our Situation
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The Web is a clear public good, taken for granted, and "too big to fail"
History of the W3C
Neural Network API
Web Neural Network API,
W3C Candidate Recommendation Draft, 6 June 2023
- Hardware-agnostic abstraction layer for NN inference
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Use cases: Person Detection, Style Transfer, Image Captioning, Detecting fake video
- Sync/Async build and execution, device selection (cpu/gpu), power preference
- Operands: sigmoid, softmax, slice, gru, hardSwish, squeeze, etc.
- Issue #350: Apple's CoreML can distribute a workload
within a single ML graph across multiple devices including the Apple Neural Engine
Ethical Principles for ML
Ethical Principles for Web Machine Learning
W3C Group Draft Note, 29 November 2022
- Documents ethical issues associated with using Machine Learning on the Web
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general consideration of harms, risks and mitigations relevant to Web ML
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Accuracy: deviation from a true value can affect credit scoring, loan approval
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Bias: systematic deviation can disproportionately affect individuals or groups
- Privacy: operating without a user’s knowledge/consent, scraping personal information to train models
Security and the Web
- Challenge: the Web runs arbitrary and untrusted code
- Web Authentication: enable public key-based credentials to authenticate users
- Permissions: user's choice to allow or deny access to "powerful features"
- Permissions Policy: developers may enable and disable features
- WebRTC Encoded Transform: enable end-to-end video encryption
Private Advertising
- Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs): address advertising use cases while meeting privacy guarantees.
- attribution and reporting using private computation
- multi-party computation (MPC) vs trusted execution environments (TEEs)
- Ongoing: WG charter
WebRTC
- Works in every browser!
- Use case: Online games with voice, video conferencing, machine learning, game streaming, etc.
- Specifications: WebRTC, Screen Capture, WebRTC Encoded Transform, MediaStream Recording
- Can be combined with WebXR, WebGPU, WebNN, etc.
WASM
Web Assembly proposals
- v.next: tail call, extended constant expression
- proposals: GC & strings, tool conventions, Type system properties, Relaxed SIMD
- Focus is on server-side but projects like Flutter are focused on client-side
- Exposing Web APIs to WASM remains to be done
GPU for the Web
- Match the design of modern GPUs
- Still in development/refinements but getting close
- Relationship with WebNN?
Video: Transport and Codecs
- WebTransport: API to leverage HTTP2 and HTTP3
- WebCodecs: interfaces to codecs for encoding and decoding of audio, video, and images.
- Video Frame Processing on the Web: WebAssembly, WebGPU, WebGL, WebCodecs, WebNN, and WebTransport
Colors
Wide Color Gamut and High Dynamic Range for the Web
- Going beyond sRGB: HDR..
- Color primitives for the Web: CSS, Canvas, PNG, etc.
- CSS color() function
DID/VC
- Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials
- VC:
- tamper-evident credential that has authorship that can be cryptographically verified.
- Ongoing: Status List, JWT, Schema, Data Integrity
- DID:
- type of identifier that enables verifiable, decentralized digital identity
- Ongoing: (holding on deployments)
Deployment
- Steel, Oil, Agriculture Shipment into US Customs
- European Digital Wallet
- Digital Education Credentials in Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya
- Digital Age Verification
- Content Authenticity Initiative (Adobe)
- Microsoft Azure (Microsoft Entra Verified ID)
- Digital Permanent US Resident Cards
From Verifiable Credentials and DiDs - Manu Sporny
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
- WCAG 2.2
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New success criteria: focus not obscured, authentication
- WCAG 3.0
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different conformance model (atomic vs holistic), broader scope
Web Sustainability Guidelines
- The Web must be an environmentally sustainable platform - W3C TAG Ethical Web Principles
- SustyWeb CG: Evidence backed
guidelines similar to WCAG for Web Sustainability
- Sustainability CG: discuss all aspects of sustainability (s12y) with respect to web technologies
TPAC 2023
TPAC 2023: September 11-15, Seville, Spain & online
- 5 days about the future of core Web technologies with the best world experts!
- Welcoming community: Never hesitate to ask questions!
- Come and say hello to the W3C staff, they'll help you and introduce you around
- If you have a new topic of interest, gather momentum during breakout sessions
