PortableWeb Community Group: Status Update

The Portable Web Content Format Community Group has defined the initial scope of work for the .pweb format.

The main goals within the Community Group scope are:

1. Container and packaging format — current focus
2. Manifest schema for capability and permission declaration
3. Viewer conformance requirements and security sandboxing model
4. Per-bundle isolated storage model for local state persistence and portability across viewers
5. Permission-gated inter-bundle communication over Bluetooth, WiFi Direct, or local network for offline peer-to-peer and collaborative experiences
6. Viewer conformance test suite
7. Non-normative implementation guide for content creators, AI tools, and viewer developers

We are currently working on the first goal: the container and packaging format.

This phase focuses on defining the basic .pweb package structure, manifest and entry point discovery, and consistent loading behavior across viewers.

Beyond the Community Group specification work, the broader PortableWeb effort also aims to explore viewer implementations for major platforms, helping validate the format in real environments.

After the packaging foundation is stable, the group can move toward permissions, security, storage, inter-bundle communication, conformance testing, and implementation guidance.

Feedback and participation are welcome as we build PortableWeb step by step.

As part of this process, we will also consider early community feedback and use cases, including:

• Starter themes and authoring templates — exploring reusable .pweb styling templates for documents, slides, apps, reports, and educational content, instead of relying on uncontrolled external style inheritance.
• Optional package metadata — considering metadata files such as JSON-LD, RDF, or Turtle for indexing, discovery, learning object metadata, attribution, and AI-assisted retrieval.
• Integrity and authenticity — considering future mechanisms for verifying .pweb resources, including possible digital signing or integrity metadata.

These inputs will help guide the packaging work and identify areas that may need to be addressed in future layers of the specification.