Portable Web Content Format (PortableWeb) Community Group

AI-assisted tools can now generate high-quality interactive web content —games, presentations, simulations, educational materials— in minutes. This has created a massive and growing category of ephemeral Web applications that need to be shared and used immediately across devices and platforms, without a traditional server for distribution, without association with a Web origin, and without being confined to a web browser.

No existing format treats interactive web content as a portable, self-contained, immediately runnable unit. PDF loses interactivity. EPUB3 is constrained to a document and book model — its JavaScript support is an enhancement to a reading experience, not a general-purpose runtime. Web Bundles never achieved broad implementation and was designed as a network transport optimization, not a portable execution environment. The Web Application Manifest describes server-hosted apps and requires a live web origin. None of these addresses the need for content that has no server, no origin, and no installation —content that should exist, run, and be shared as a single portable file, across all platforms, entirely offline.

This mission of this group is to develop an open specification for a self-contained portable web content format that can be instantly shared and run on any platform —desktop, mobile, or offline— without a server, app store, or deployment pipeline. The format is content-model agnostic, equally supporting books, games, presentations, educational simulations, 3D experiences, scientific models, and collaborative applications.

The scope of work includes:

• Container and packaging format
• Manifest schema for capability and permission declaration
• Viewer conformance requirements and security sandboxing model
• Storage model —per-bundle isolated storage specification, defining how packaged content can persist state locally, how storage is scoped and sandboxed to the bundle, and guidelines for storage portability across viewer implementations.
• Inter-bundle communication model — a permission-gated channel specification enabling bundles to communicate locally via Bluetooth, WiFi Direct, or local network, making offline multiplayer, peer-to-peer, and collaborative interactive experiences possible without any server infrastructure. This is a genuinely novel capability not addressed by any existing format or specification.

In addition to a Specification, this group expects to create a Viewer conformance test suite, and a non-normative implementation guide for content creators, AI tools, and viewer developers.

Homepage

Homepage/Blog

Shortname

portableweb

Participation

Leadership

Chairs

• Omprakash Selvaraj

Links

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public-portableweb