W3C Breakouts Day 2026 calendar - Breakout Sessions

This session will explore the findings and user needs described in a working draft note of four research modules published in February 2026 by the Cognitive and Learning Disabilities (COGA) Task Force.

The research modules are primarily intended for groups in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that may want to include our use cases or understand the topics from a broader perspective.

They may also contain useful information for:

• researchers,
• inclusion and research-related policy makers,
• designers, content creators, and developers who wish to have a more in-depth understanding of inclusion issues.

The session will review the following modules:

• Voice Systems and Conversational Interfaces: This module covers issues that our users face when using conversational voice systems, including voice menu systems, voice user interfaces, and voice AI assistants.
• Technology-Assisted Indoor Navigation and Wayfinding: This module is about technology that helps users who need cognitive accessibility support navigate indoor spaces, also known as wayfinding.
• Online Safety and Wellbeing (Algorithms and Data): People with disabilities that require cognitive accessibility support face a number of risks when using the internet and apps. This module covers safety issues that our users face on the internet including cybercrime, mental health, wellbeing, privacy, and more.
• Supported Decision-Making Online: This module describes the advantages and risks of supporting Supported Decision-Making (SDM). It offers suggestions for safely supporting SDM online, helping more people take part in the digital world while keeping their dignity and independence.

Goal(s):

• Raise awareness of the cognitive accessibility related issues identified in the drafts.
• Discuss user needs and barriers influenced by issues such as cognitive load, memory, social reasoning, and mental health.
• Explore practical solutions.
• Collect community feedback on what may be missing in the draft modules, such as user scenarios, technology, user needs, or research.
• Identify opportunities for cross-group collaboration within W3C groups (e.g., COGA TF, APA WG, AG WG, and other relevant groups).

Over the last few months, the MiniApps WG has been discussing the evolution of its activities to broaden the scope and support the upcoming trends of hybrid apps, including on-the-fly AI-generated apps in response to chatbot-user interactions, dedicated standard profiles to support existing super-app ecosystems, and other use cases such as OS widgets. This session aims to explore those new use cases and opportunities for standardization, and get feedback for the re-chartering of the WG.

During TPAC 2025, we met and discussed the feasibility of including the requirements of the WebViews community, as most of the cases we discussed involve embedded browsers. We considered the interesting Isolated Web Apps (IWA) proposal, since IWA offers a way to pack, distribute, and isolate small apps, as super-apps require.

We expected to be enlightened by experts from other communities, including, but not limited to, MiniApps, WebViews, WebDevX, and WinterTC.

Goal(s):
Objective: Obtain feedback to launch new standardization activities related to hybrid apps, probably leveraging the MiniApps WG (discussion on rechartering)

In FY2025, OP-CIP experimented with the Originator Profile (OP) technology implementation in real-world environments. This session will present practical implementation experiences based on two deployment cases:

1. Application of OP to news articles published by five Japanese media organizations and two official local government websites.

2. Integration of OP into ad images from existing advertisers, distributed via ad networks, and displayed on media websites.

We will explain the actual workflows and the challenges identified through deployments.
We welcome questions about implementation and proposals for new use cases.

Goal(s):
We would like to get feedback and ideas from the community.

The Pointer Events Working Group would like to explore the possibility of adding native gesture support to the web platform. Currently, authors have to rely on third-party solutions, or roll their own gesture recognition from basic principles (tracking individual pointers and analysing their movement to determine if they user is trying to perform a gesture or not).

This feature has been requested various times over the years.

At this stage, we envisage a basic set of gestures such as "swipe", "scale", "rotate" that authors can "listen for" - see https://github.com/w3c/pointerevents/issues/636

Goal(s):
We would like to get feedback, ideas, use cases from the community, to help the group make initial design decisions for the API.

The ActivityPub specification defines a social API and a federation protocol. Mastodon and compatible platforms implement the latter but not the former.

This session will discuss the social API, its value in the distributed social ecosystem, and the efforts to revive its use.

Goal(s):
Review the ActivityPub social API and efforts to revive it

Many jurisdictions have enacted (or are currently enacting) regulations on age-based restrictions to online content. These regulations, and their requirements, can have significant effects on technical architectures and on end users. Some proposed solutions may be misaligned with such core web principles as privacy, interoperability, and freedom of expression. Given this potential threat to a healthy web, and the need for collaboration among many stakeholders to address the challenges of online safety, we propose that W3C should provide a forum where these issues can be discussed among a diverse group of experts. In this session, we will present an initial proposal for bringing together technologists, policymakers, and other interested parties to examine these issues in depth. One concrete outcome from this breakout could be the creation of a W3C Community Group which could address the specific web-related conversations on age restrictions. Community Groups enable anyone to gather at W3C to socialize ideas, including topics that involve coordination as complex as this one. We are already involved through the October 2025 W3C/IAB workshop on Age-Based Restrictions on Content, and activities in groups such as the Privacy Working Group; we are well-positioned to offer the necessary forum for the community to figure out where and when to take the next steps.

Goal(s):
Get feedback from the web community on a proposal for advancing the technical and policy discussions about age-based restrictions to online content, including new ideas, potential opportunities, ways to promote collaboration, and obstacles to avoid.

The software industry is facing the rapid uptake of AI-assisted and AI-generated code development.

Beyond the broader impact of AI on the Web, this new approach to software development raises a number of questions on the Web standardization process:

• should web standards be designed to (also) cater for implementation by coding agents?
• what architectural and processes may need to evolve if coding agents become key to broad adoption of web technologies? e.g. what would it take for agents based on LLMs trained on old code patterns to adopt possibilities offered by new standardized features ?
• how does this impact the work on guidelines and coding guidance?

This session will start with a scoping presentation followed by open discussions.

Goal(s):
Identify experimentations worth running in that space

Background

The Web Sustainability Guidelines provide recommendations to help digital teams make informed sustainable development decisions.

The group (SWING) is currently looking at improving the document's conformance model. Open questions include what the scope of conformance is (both what to claim conformance of, eg a website or a page, and what to claim conformance with, eg a guideline or success criterion), the balance between allowing for partial conformance and enabling greenwashing, and how the conformance model fits with external factors like regulation.

Session

In this session we'll present what we've got so far and ask your feedback on the direction, possible ways to improve and caveats we may have missed.

Goal(s):
Gather feedback from the wider community on the in progress WSG conformance model

This session presents an overview of the feedback provided by SING Members (Simone Onofri, Giovanni Corti, Luca Lumini) on ETSI's EN 304-617 "CRA: Essential cybersecurity requirements for browsers" vertical draft standard.

Additionaly, we present some of our proposed adjustements to the standard.

The presentation will be in English

Goal(s):
Present W3C SING's feedback on ETSI EN 304-617 vertical draft standard

At W3C, we like it when the slides of talks are in HTML. They are easy to publish on the web (no need to convert them to PDF) and typically more accessible than other formats. We provide an HTML template for people talking on behalf of W3C. And, as we also like it when all talks for an event follow a common graphical style, we also publish templates for certain events, such as AC meetings. The majority of presenters at each AC meeting indeed uses its template…

… but not everybody! Why is that? One reason is probably that there is no dedicated editor that makes it easy to write slides. And so I set out writing one.

In fact, different people have different opinions on what makes it easy to write slides, so the one editor became two: one that lets people edit slides as Markdown text and one WYSIWYG editor.

Goal(s):
This breakout takes a look at two dedicated editors in early development for writing slides in HTML, asks where they should be heading and how they can help people write slides for events such as TPAC and the AC.

Many of the Web’s hardest problems are no longer protocol-level failures, but coordination failures across layers: platforms, institutions, governance, and interfaces.

Fragmentation, reality collapse, and narrative dominance are often discussed socially or politically, but they also reflect a deeper technical condition: context, provenance, and accountability do not travel together across today’s Web architectures.

This session introduces a design challenge framework for “breaking out of silos” by making these hidden constraints visible. Rather than proposing solutions, we focus on orientation: mapping where coordination breaks, why certain outcomes feel inevitable, and where seams might exist for standards, tooling, or governance to intervene.

The goal is not consensus or advocacy, but shared visibility into the systems we are already inside.

Goal(s):
To help participants see the structural conditions shaping today’s web - and collaboratively map where coordination breaks, power concentrates, and alternative design paths might still exist.

The Internet Society (ISOC) has provided the IETF Policymakers Program since 2012. As their program description explains, "The IETF Policymaker Program offers training to policymakers on how the Internet works. It also provides visibility into the Internet’s standards development process. When policymakers understand how the Internet works, how it’s evolved, and the standards that underpin it, they can develop better policies that support the Internet as a resource to enrich people’s lives." Last year, W3C launched a Policy Engagement initiative, which shares similar goals: providing expertise and insight from the W3C community to governing bodies and policymakers to ensure future policies are better informed by our collective knowledge and values.

One possible way for us to provide expertise is to create a program similar to the ISOC Policymakers Program, leveraging what they have learned over decades of experience and, hopefully, finding a way to adapt their approach for a W3C context. We would like to get feedback and ideas from the community about this approach to policymaker training. This session includes a presentation on the basics of the Policymakers Program, followed by interactive discussion.

Goal(s):
To explore the idea of deploying a "policymakers program" for the web/W3C

This breakout will demonstrate an interactive tool for exploring decision spaces and making trade-offs between design alternatives visible. The tool lets users map interconnected choices and highlight issues as decisions evolve, and suggests optimal design combinations based on defined priorities. We'll walk through how the tool works using a standards example (originally tried for one of the TC39 proposals). We'll discuss how the tool could potentially help W3C groups compare options, structure discussions, and move complex proposals forward with more clarity. The session focuses on hands-on demonstration and open discussion around practical use in W3C work.

Goal(s):
Demonstrate an interactive decision-support tool and explore whether it could help W3C groups structure discussions and compare design alternatives.

Discuss the benefits of ISO/IEC 23008-12 (HEIF) as a supported imagery format in web browsers. Review HEIF capabilities against emerging use cases to show benefits over legacy formats. Discuss codec options and container capabilities vs restrictions related to a specific codec.

Goal(s):
Promote discussion and build consensus for adopting HEIF as an imagery format in web browsers.

This session will discuss the guidelines document I proposed for the development of standardized Trust, Scale, and Usability in Voice Agent Web Integration.

We'll discuss how the the content within the document could be operationalized into discrete code snippets to be shared & used on Github.

The session focuses on applied development applications for Smart Voice Agents.

Goal(s):
Identify and plan for how coding snippets representing Trust, Scale, and Usability functionality can be created and used in the integration of smart voice agents.

At TPAC 2025, we introduced the Hyper-Layering Architecture (HLA) as a Web-native approach to spatial integration. Since then, a Hyper-Layering Architecture Draft Community Report has been published, and related discussions are continuing within the Maps for HTML Community Group.

This session shifts the focus from architectural discussion to practical progress.

SVGMap and its reference implementation (SVGMap.js) provide a lightweight, client-side foundation reflecting HLA principles. Recent momentum has centered on the growing ecosystem of ready-to-use layers collected in svgmapAppLayers, along with practical tutorials.

We refer to this model as Layers as WebApps (LaWA) — treating each map layer as an independent Web application that can be combined directly in the browser.

This session will be an informal, interactive meetup focused on demos, international community updates, and sharing real-world layers that are ready to use today.

The session will be conducted primarily in English, with Japanese support if needed (slides can include bilingual elements)

Format

Informal meetup style:

• Short intro & updates (10–15 min)
• Lightning talks / participant shares (15–20 min)
• Open discussion, live demos, and idea jam (rest of time)
• Tools: Browser (SVGMap demo pages), IRC/Zoom chat for links & questions
• Real-time scribing on IRC (W3C bots will handle minutes)
• If recording the session, consent will be sought at the start

Why at Breakouts Day?

• Strong alignment with Web geospatial interests (SVG WG, Spatio-temporal Data on the Web CG/IG topics)
• Focus on practical, open, client-side tools that anyone can try instantly
• Opportunity to grow an international community around ready-to-use map layers
• Encourage cross-pollination: "If you have geospatial data, let's make it a LaWA layer!"

Related Links

• tutorials: https://github.com/svgmap/tutorials
• svgmapAppLayers overview & catalog: https://deepwiki.com/svgmap/svgmapAppLayers
• SVGMap repo: https://github.com/svgmap

Looking forward to your thoughts, emoji reactions :+1:, or "I'd like to join/share my layer!" comments!

Goal(s):
Share practical progress on HLA and SVGMap since TPAC 2025 and gather community feedback.