Overview of Media Technologies for the Web

Dear Media and Entertainment Interest Group,

I have been working on an "Overview of Media Technologies for the Web" document that lists Web technologies that can be used to build media applications and services, and highlights known gaps:

http://w3c.github.io/web-roadmaps/media/

The purpose is to provide a single resource that web developers in the media industry, as well as those involved in the standardization process, can use to find out about the current status of relevant Web technologies.

The document is structured around different aspects of the media pipeline:
- Media rendering
- Media control
- Media distribution
- Media processing
- Content orchestration
- Media capture
- Media application development

It details Web technologies that apply to each of these aspects, with a short description of what that technology enables in a media context each time. Technologies are sorted in different categories depending on their status:

- *Well-deployed technologies* are technologies that are finished or nearly finished (e.g. CR and beyond in the W3C Rec track) and that have already found significant adoption among implementations;
- *Technologies in progress* list features that have already started their standardization track progress;
- *Exploratory work* groups features described in specifications prior to their proper standardization work;
- *Features not covered by ongoing work* identify functionalities that are known to be needed for some use cases, but that no existing specification adequately covers
- *Discontinued features* point out attempts to develop a feature that was deemed useful at a point in time, but that was stopped for some reason, or that led to some alternative proposal.

This overview should not be considered as anything else than work in progress right now. Some technologies are probably missing, descriptions should be improved. I wanted to share this document with you for two reasons:

1. to invite feedback on the document (look and feel, usefulness, structure, content, etc.).
2. to check whether the Media and Entertainment Interest Group would be interested to adopt this document as working document.

In particular, the current charter of the Interest Group says that the group will "maintain a public list of the media features on the Web that it is tracking and investigating. These features will include identified gaps, stable features deployed in browser implementations, as well as features under development in W3C and external groups":
https://www.w3.org/2017/03/webtv-charter.html#deliverables

I'm wondering whether the Overview document could provide a good basis for that list, and a good working document to structure discussions within the group. If people are interested, I'll be happy to present that document during one of the IG calls as well as during the group's F2F during TPAC.

This document is intended to be lightweight to maintain and complete over time. It is part of a series of roadmap-like documents, developed with a common framework. The framework takes care of adding implementation data for each feature/technology listed in the document, and of providing means for users to navigate between pages. The framework is still very sketchy for the time being, but will be maintained and improved by W3C team over time. 

You'll find more information about the ins and outs of such documents in:
https://github.com/w3c/web-roadmaps#framework-for-web-technology-roadmaps

Feel free to raise comments on the associated issue tracker:
https://github.com/w3c/web-roadmaps/issues/
(replies to this email are of course welcome as well)

Thanks,
Francois.

Received on Thursday, 28 September 2017 09:22:21 UTC