Meeting minutes
Chair introductions around the table
Niklas: chair of WebView CG, helping making WebViews more interoperable
Wolfgang: Publishing CG, focusing on epub, ebooks and audio books
ChrisW: co-chair of WICG (catch-all incubator for a huge variety of specs) and immersive web xg (feeding immersive wg)
Elf: co-chair of Solid, provided input to linked web storage wg
Florian: co-chairs DocsCG with Lola, contributing to MDN Web Docs
harsh: co-chair of the Data Privacy & Controls CG
… work a lot with legal staff, in other SDOs like ISO-CEN and IEEE
Peter: work for Natural Resources Canada, co-chair of Map for HTML CG
Thomas: co-chair of WebAssembly CG
Tom: work for Google, co-chair of Games CG (improving the Web for Games) and co-chair of Loading Control API for Games CG, a new CG I'll be presenting on shortly
Tzviya: I'm the chair of the Positive Work Environment CG
Dom: co-chair of this CG
Expected content for this series of calls
Ian: want to get hear from CGs on a regular basis; we'll hear today about Web Games and I'll talk about considerations on transition to standardization
Loading & Control API for Web Games CG
<tzviya> Tom: We have browsers, monetization co etc
Tom: Games CG has existed for a few years discussing the topic of games on the Web and its various apects e.g. monetization
… more recently, we've identified a specific technical need where game creators need to create variations of their builds to match the need of different portals, up to 10 or 20 variations
… all these portals share similar features - emitting events to notify the game is loading, space for video or rewards
… developers have to maintain compatibility with these many sdks; sometimes done in the game engines, possibly through plugins
… we've came up with the idea of this micro-API: methods commonly implemented across all these SDKs and integrate them in a way that would simplify the life of developers when distributing their games across portals
… maybe covering ~80% of what these SDKs would cover, with room for extensibility
<Ian> https://
Tom: another example is portals exposing global mute buttons - this could too be communicated through this standardized sdk
… already lots of good discussions, with a few portals represented (Google, Poki.com, Facebook) and independent games developers and game engine developers
<harsh> Ian: how is it going getting stakeholders in to the group? Have you known of any obstacles to get involved?
Ian: glad to hear good participation of stakeholders; any obstacles you're aware?
Tom: none in particular; we've started a separate CG to keep the discussion focused, but maybe to the cost of splitting the community, trying to keep the Games CG aware
Tom: does anyone have thought on the approach we're taking? identifying these scenarios, and building on this micro-API?
… not a browser API in this case
<Ian> Dom: I'm very interested in seeing what this group will manage to surface.
<Ian> ...this approach is a really interesting pattern
<Ian> ...it's not completely new; the RDF-JS CG is also developing an API for JS based libraries for parsing RDF
<Ian> ...it would be applied across libraries
<Ian> ...we had another API @@
<Ian> ...personally I think this pattern is currently underserved within w3c
<Ian> ...I'm not aware of any formal way to describe such an API, but it would equally apply to something like frames that embed video players
<Ian> ...or frames for maps
<Ian> tzviya: Lot of commonality with ebooks
<Ian> Tom :Games get fragile over time due to brittle relationship with portals
Loading & Control API for Web Games Community Group Charter – “CoLo”
General “CoLo” Project Details
<Ian> tzviya: With ebooks I remember testing on many many platforms (27 or more)
Tom: the name of "control & loading" is not Games specific, could be used in other contexts
Ian: re brittleness, do you have ideas similar to what WPT allows for browser quality? e.g. test suite that could detect some of this brittleness
Tom: we had thought about a test harness for game developers outside of a portal; there may be more to explore, I'm not very familiar with WPT; Assisting game portals?
Ian: yes
Considerations when transferring a CG specification for standardization
Slideset: https://
Harsh: an additional benefit is the legimitacy of being under the W3C umbrella
Peter: that's resonate with the Maps for HTML CG
Peter: sometimes hard to gauge whether it's ready to go or if we should give up
Ian: part of our hope is that standardization plan gets discussed before a spec reaches significant traction
… we can schedule a call to help break some of the blocking obstacles
… we want to help groups have timely conversations on standardization when traction happens, with some tooling to help detect traction as we showed at the call last month
… we've written a document to help guide CG chairs in thsis space
Thomas: the WebAssembly CG has been solving this problem of WG-not-free by having the WG adopting the work of the CG, and that has worked amazingly for us
Ian: there can be concerns around rubberstamping; part of what I am doing in a separate project at W3C ("structural evolution initiative") is to look at how we can avoid to "faking" it
Ian: part of the discussions on WebAssembly was also on how well our current process fits this particular ecosystem, e.g. on horizontal review
ChrisW: I co-chair a paired CG/WG, and big CG that passes its work to many other groups, including WHATWG
… a challenge of using a CG as a WG is twofold: getting IPR right (including at transition times)
… another one is consensus - covered by the fact that the WG is accepting the CG's work
… if cost is a barrier to WG participation, we should fix this - there are ways, e.g. invited experts can join for free
<Ian> https://
Elf: from my experience since 15 years in CG, and as invited expert in the Social Web WG, coordinating work across different groups (CG & WG) is the most challenging part
… e.g. in my experience there were at least 3 WGs working in the same space, which have now moved to 3 CGs
… unless there is specific structure to keep groups in sync, it's really hard to make it happen
Ian: there are some pieces in place: TPAC, breakout days in the Spring; but also don't want to overwhelm with too many coordination meetings
… this call may serve that purpose
<Ian> Dom: Part of this coordination issue is finding right incentives and opportunities. Ian mentioned some but there might be ways to do them more systematically in WG land (e.g., chartering process and identification of dependencies)
<Ian> ...wide review can force some conversations
<Ian> ..maybe lightweight but similar could work for CGs.
<Ian> ...CGs that need higher bandwidth between themselves
<Ian> Dom: We've had high-level conversations about use cases and requirements as a phase
Peter: I work in the Geospatial depart of Natural Resources Canada; besides being an AC Rep in W3C, we're a strategic member of the open geospatial consortium, a similar org to W3C for geospatial standards
… we also participate in ISO TC 211 (?)
… and are represented in the UN Committee of Expert on Geospatial
… and other standardization activities in Canada
… Map for HTML CG arose from a joint OGC/W3C workshop convened in 2014, and gave rise to the Spatial Data WG
… I also proposed the creation of a CG then
… the intersection of geomatics and informatics is not fully standardized
… in the CG context, we worked on gaining adherence and had some success that way
… I do believe we're ready for a WG at this stage
… when we started, I didn't know what a declarative approach to Map in HTML
Ian: let's follow up on this standardization plans separately to support the rest of the agenda
Elf: to facilitate synchronization, maybe a common set of curated tags for groups (e.g. linked data, idp)
Other news
Ian: Eight new CGs since this group's previous call on 3 September:
<Ian> Web Identity and Credentials Adoption
<Ian> Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines CG
<Ian> Meta-Layer Infrastructure
<Ian> Data Façades
<Ian> Web Forensics
<Ian> Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs in Industry
<Ian> NLWeb
<Ian> Cybernetic Avatar Community Group
Ian: Other news:
… slack channel #cg-program created
… at TPAC, we're planning a CG chairs lunch on Wednesday with signed tables
… we'll have a breakout session to continue discussion on CG spec enhancements
… with beta-testing in respec/bikeshed planned post TPAC
… and discussions on maintaining the relevant data and information
Next call
Ian: What do people think about a 2-months cadence for this meeting?
<elf-pavlik> +1
[several +1 on Zoom]
<wolfgang7> +1
Ian: will try to schedule a call early December, incl post TPAC debriefing
<Ian> Dom: Feedback on the structure of this meeting and format welcome