Introducing the Extensible Web Report Card

[Post amended to further elaborate on how the Report Card fits into the rest of the TAG's Work]

The TAG is chartered to work on the architecture of the web.  As the Web continues to evolves from a Web documents to a Web of distributed applications, and as Javascript programming has become such an important part of web development, it's becoming more important than ever to focus on how we add new features to the web and how we extend existing features. Last year, some members of the TAG collaborated with others in the community in some thinking which resulted in the Extensible Web Manifesto. The ideas promoted by this vision of the future, which include exposing low-level capabilities and doing so in a layered way, have influenced a lot of the work of the TAG, particularly around our specification reviews.

We've had feedback at some of our developer meet-ups this year that people would like a better idea articulation from us of the design principles the TAG is employing when we review specs. We've also had a lot of questions about how the views in the Extensible Web Manifesto relate to the TAG's current work. We thought one way to address these questions would be to publish a review of (what we see as) some key standards and how they measure up against the ideals of extensibility. A kind of “Report Card” on the state of the extensible web that could simultaneously provide some feedback to individual standards efforts and show the community some examples of what we're talking about. The Extensible Web Report Card is the result and it's a document that we hope to continue to update as new information becomes available. Have a look and please feel free to comment on our work on GitHub or to fork and send pull requests.