W3C DevMeetup 2019 report

On September 16, 2019, in Fukuoka, Japan, the W3C developer relations team organized a developer meetup along the annual W3C TPAC19 (Technical Plenary /  Advisory Committee) event (see report), where the global Web community met to coordinate the development of Web standards.

Local Web designers and application developers from the Kyushu island and all over Japan were encouraged to participate in the meetup. In total, over 200 attendees came to listen to this year's exceptional speakers showing that the Web is definitely an exciting development platform:

• Alice Boxhall, Software Engineer at Google, made the case that accessibility and innovation actually go very well together. Designing for accessibility leads to better solutions, and in her presentation, Alice went through a few examples from both recent and older history of technology where solving problems for people with disability created solutions for everybody! See Alice's presentation video and slides.
• Ada Rose Cannon, Developer advocate at Samsung for the Web browser Samsung Internet, explained the evolution of WebXR and some of the important new features it brings to the Immersive Web. See Ada's presentation video and slides.
• Yutaka Obuchi, Pixiv's engineer, focused on the Web API that help an implementation of 3D character viewer and how it could be improved to make the Web an even better platform for 3D avatars. See Yutaka's presentation video and slides.
• Lin Clark, Code Cartoonist and Principal Research Engineer at Mozilla, demonstrated how Web Assembly can be used beyond the browser to bridge code from different programming languages and environments, via the proposed work on Web Assembly Interface Types. See Lin's presentation video.
• Melanie Richards, Program manager on Microsoft Edge, explained how to optimize styles for forced color modes—like High Contrast—using standards developed this year in the W3C CSS Working Group. See Melanie's presentation video and slides.

From left to right: Lin Clark, Ada Rose Cannon, Yutaka Obuchi, Melanie Richards, Alice Boxhall

Translating W3C resources into Japanese

From left to right: Yoshikazu Takamura, Momdo Nakamura, Shuji Kamitsuna

Another highlight of the event was the presence of three representatives of the W3C Japanese translators community.

All together, they have translated an impressive number of W3C resources, notably Web standards documents. As a result, more than a quarter of the current 410+ W3C recommendations are available in Japanese!

Sponsors

A big thank you to this year's sponsors for making it possible to organize the meetup: NTT Communications, Mozilla, Sauce Labs, Miscrosoft, Yubico, WithYou, GMO Pepabo, StickerMule, Igalia, and WebCastor.

Participants had the chance to look at a few demonstrations brought by the event's sponsors, such as an immersive telepresence experience between Fukuoka and Tokyo. Other demonstrated topics were: tests of Web performance thanks to WebDriver capabilities, standardization beyond browser vendors, shared server service 'Lolipop!', Web Authentication for better security, and an exploratory work about a standard for digital comics on the Web.

W3C Developers

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