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Colloquial Web group
The Colloquial Web group evaluates existing practices amongst core web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It aims to provide users and vendors with clear guidelines for deployment and innovation for web applications. Example problem domains include continued use of deprecated constructs, the rise in external services for hosting solutions such as Google Web Fonts or MathJax, and comparing attitudes to RDFa and microdata.
The group will not produce languages, but may for example create profiles of weighted technique matrices. In other words, more broadly speaking the group has a bias towards empirical and descriptivist methods, but is not constrained to these approaches.
The scope of the technologies involved is open because the emphasis on development is changing from components to frameworks. If CSS and JavaScript were ruled out, for example, then so would much existing web practice. This also allows the group to study emergent domains such as the relationship between privacy and the distribution of web application components across separate organisations.
Initial Thoughts
The colloquial web is a point of view rather than an architecture or a system. It's the idea that how we use the web, and what we do on the web, evolves differently to the web technologies that ought to cater for us. Sometimes this dissonance or tension is trivial. Sometimes it is more obvious and irritating. This CG is supposed to look at the differences, and comment on what to do about them.
What are the mismatches between web users and web technology?
Bridging the gap between "I want to" and "In order to do that you need..." there may be learning, or tools to bridge the gap. An outcome may be a recommendation or specification of a tool to assist with the bridge.