The Web NFC Community Group will create a Near Field Communication API that is browser-friendly
and adheres to the Web's security model. We believe that means the API will not expose full,
low level NFC functionality, but rather a higher level subset that is safe for Web pages,
protects user privacy, and does not annoy users with unnecessary or complex permission requests.
See the Web NFC Community Group Charter
and the Web NFC specification for more information.
Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
Today, I am beyond excited to announce the Web NFC API is shipping in Chrome 89 for Android by default! Thanks to the early adopter feedback received during 2020, the new API in Chrome 89 is even easier to use and offers the most flexible NDEF support optimized for your key use cases.
If you’re a web developer and want to learn more, please check out the most excellent developer documentation that explains with easy to understand code examples how to scan and write to NFC tags and interface with other exciting capabilities of this API.
The Web NFC API is available now in Chrome Dev and Canary channels and is coming to Beta in Jan 28 – Feb 4, 2020 and hits Stable in March 2, 2020.
Since its inception in 2015, the Web NFC Community Group has been exploring means to allow web sites to read and write to nearby NFC (Near Field Communication) devices (e.g., tags and phones) in a secure and privacy preserving manner.
I’ve had an honor to lead this passionate group of people on this journey and see how the early (some said crazy!) idea has grown and gathered a passionate community and fans around it. Thanks to encouraging feedback from a diverse group of browser engineers, spec authors, web developers, NFC technology, usability and privacy experts, and the inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee himself, the Web NFC capability is now exposed through an ergonomic yet capable API able to support both emerging and established NFC use cases. What has remained throughout the years is the focus on a lightweight binary message format called NDEF that works across different tag formats, and provides a stable foundation to build on in the future.
Today, I’m thrilled to announce the group has reached the point at which it feels the Web NFC specification (explainer) and its Chromium implementation are ready for broader ecosystem feedback. You should see Web NFC pop up in Chrome’s Active Trials in January 2020, and if you just can’t wait, you can try Web NFC already today using Chrome Canary on Android by toggling the “enable-webnfc” flag.
This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2015-03-11 by Wayne Carr. The following people supported its creation: Wayne Carr, Jeffrey Yasskin, Zoltan Kis, Aswini S, Anssi Kostiainen. W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of the activities.
w3c/web-nfc
