W3C Strategic Highlights

October 2021
This public report, dated 19 October 2021, was prepared for the
October 2021 Virtual W3C Advisory Committee Meeting (member-
only link), part of TPAC. For the previous edition, see the April 2021
W3C Strategic Highlights. For future editions of this report, please
bookmark the latest version.

Introduction

Vitality of the work of W3C

Usage of the Web and W3C standards intensifies as the global
pandemic continues to weigh on society. The Web has become a
key technical infrastructure in a world where travel and physical
contacts need to be limited. People use it for e-commerce, home
learning, telehealth, conducting business in new ways,
entertainment or staying in touch with family and friends.

Many organizations joined the World Wide Web Consortium with

greater need for web technologies. This includes both technologies
that directly support the move to virtual, as well as technologies that
address the needs of a changing society, such as issues in privacy
and greater decentralization of the web.

Focus of this report

We are proud that W3C's work continues to be essential to the ways
in which our world is meeting the challenge of the health crisis while
working on the solutions for the web of the future.

This report highlights recent work done to enhance the Web

platform, and innovate for its growth and strength so that the web
remains a tool that has and will continue to accelerate scientific
cooperation and discoveries, a social means to bridge families and
friends, a way to learn online and grow skills, an instrument to
conduct successful business, and much more.

42 working groups and 10 interest groups enable W3C to pursue

its mission through the creation of Web standards, guidelines, and
supporting materials.

We track the tremendous work done across the Consortium –299

specifications– through homogeneous work-spaces in Github which
enables better monitoring and management. W3C
Recommendations as well as all other types of documents published
at W3C are available from all Standards and Drafts.

Future Web Standards

Identifying promising standardization areas

W3C uses a variety of mechanisms to engage community
discussion on future Web standards: conversations with the
Membership, liaising with other standards bodies, tracking the
activity of thousands of participants in 360 W3C community groups,
and hosting W3C Workshops. There are lots of good ideas. The
W3C strategy team works to identifying promising topics for
standardization and invites public participation.

W3C Workshops
W3C Workshops bring communities together around presentations,
panels, breakouts, and virtual "hallway" sessions to spur
collaboration on new work areas. While switching to virtual entailed
a change in mode and some re-setting of schedules, we committed
to making distributed meetings even more accessible and globally
participatory. We announced last July that all W3C Workshops are
to include standard accessibility accommodations such as English
captions on pre-recorded presentations, real-time captioning during
live sessions, and ASL or other sign language where possible upon
request.

Upcoming W3C Workshop:

 W3C/SMPTE Workshop on Professional Media Production on

the Web, 9-18 November 2021 (virtual event)

W3C Workshops recently completed:

 W3C Workshop on Wide Color Gamut and High Dynamic

Range for the Web, 13-24 September 2021 (virtual event)
 W3C Workshop on Smart Cities (report), 25 June 2021 (virtual
event)

W3C Strategy funnel

The Strategy incubation pipeline documents the exploration of
potential new work in phases of Incubation and Evaluation, and
eventually in the chartering stages of new standards groups. The
W3C Strategy Team's incubation pipeline is a GitHub Project where
new area are issues represented by “cards” which move through the
columns, usually from left to right. Most cards start
in Exploration and move towards Chartering, or move out of the
pipeline.

Public input is welcome at any stage but particularly once

Incubation has begun. This helps W3C identify work that is
sufficiently incubated to warrant standardization, to review the
ecosystem around the work and indicate interest in participating in
its standardization, and then to draft a charter that reflects an
appropriate scope. Ongoing feedback can speed up the overall
standardization process.

🎥 Watch Open UI - A year in review (October 2021, 4 minutes),

where Daniel Clark, Mason Freed, and Dave Rupert report on
current work from the Open UI Community Group to improve the
developer and user experience of creating web UI. The video gives
a glimpse into this future going over <select> dropdowns, a new
<popup> element and research into potentially a standardized tab UI
solution.

Business ecosystems: Meeting Industry

Needs

Web Payments & Web Commerce

W3C's payments standards enable a streamlined checkout process,
giving a consistent user experience across the Web with lower front-
end development costs for merchants. Users can store and reuse
information and more quickly and accurately complete online
transactions.

Secure Payment Confirmation (SPC)

Secure Payment Confirmation remains the focus of the Web

Payments Working Group and Web Payment Security Interest
Group. Spurred by the encouraging results of the Stripe experiment
in March which showed that users completed 8% more purchases,
that authentication was three times faster than one time
passwords, and with negligible fraud:

 The working group prioritized development of use

cases, requirements, and an API for SPC.
 The interest group has been discussing related compliance
topics, resulting in the draft using SPC to fulfill PSD2
requirements for SCA and dynamic linking. This work aims to
establish SPC as a valuable tool (in conjunction with other
protocols) for payment service providers and banks to fulfill
regulatory requirements.
W3C Members Airbnb and Adyen decided to experiment with SPC
too, and Stripe will conduct a second experiment.

In October, EMVCo announced support for SPC in version 2.3 of the

EMV® 3-D Secure protocol, which will help improve end-to-end
interoperability and security of card payments on the Web.

Payment Request API

Payment Request API 1.0 was published as a Proposed

Recommendation further to the removal of several features following
privacy and Internationalization reviews. This specification
and Payment Method Identifiers are still expected to reach
Recommendation status in 2021.

Merchant Community Group

The W3C Merchant Community Group –formerly a Business Group-

is a non-technical forum where participants discuss on a quarterly
basis merchant challenges, how emerging Web technologies could
help address them, and what additional Web capabilities may be
necessary.

Digital Publishing
The Web is the universal publishing platform. Publishing is
increasingly impacted by the Web, and the Web increasingly
impacts Publishing. Topic of particular focus
of Publishing@W3C (publication milestones) include typography and
layout, accessibility, usability, portability, distribution, archiving,
offline access, print on demand, and reliable cross referencing. And
the diverse publishing community represented in the groups consist
of the traditional "trade" publishers, ebook reading system
manufacturers, but also publishers of audiobooks, scholarly journals
or educational materials, library scientists or browser developers.

EPUB 3 Working Group

The EPUB 3 Working Group aims to maintain, develop and clarify
the EPUB 3 family of specifications, to represent the EPUB
community in W3C, and to support EPUB 3 content creators and
consumers. An important outcome of the group is to significantly
increase the interoperability of EPUB publications and reading
systems.

Without changing the technical requirements, the group is actively

improving the work to streamline and make the specifications more
readeable: EPUB 3.3 (the authoring requirements for EPUB
Publications), EPUB 3.3 Reading Systems and EPUB Accessibility
1.1 (both defining conformance requirements).

Among the several working group notes, EPUB Accessibility EU

Accessibility Act Mapping is particularly important for Digital Book
Publishers: per European Union directive European Accessibility Act
(EAA), binding accessibility targets must be met. Member states
have until the end of June 2022 to implement the EAA which will
become applicable by the end of June 2025.

Audiobooks Working Group

The Audiobooks Working Group (formerly Publishing Working

Group) has successfully completed its work and rechartered to
maintain the audiobook specification (Publications
Manifest, Audiobook profile for a Web Publication, and Lightweight
Packaging Format.)

Publishing Business Group

The Publishing Business Group explores new areas of work and

business needs generic to publishing on the web, by observing the
community, reaching out and communicating as a forum.

The group is instrumental in the development of EPUBCheck.

Media and Entertainment

The Media and Entertainment activity (Roadmap: Overview of Media
Technologies for the Web) tracks and standardizes media-related
capabilities and features needed to create immersive experiences.
HTML5, TTML and TTML profiles, WebVTT, brought standard audio,
video and captions to the Web and have revolutionized the media
pipeline and media consumption worldwide, turning the Web into a
professional platform fully suitable for the delivery of media content.

Reinforce core media support

 Continued progress towards Candidate Recommendation

for Media Capabilities, Picture-in-picture and Media Session.
 Update of the Media Source Extensions (MSE) standard with a
new codec switching feature for ad-insertion scenarios, and to
make is usable from workers and avoid jank.
 First public working draft of the Open Screen Protocol, which
ensures interoperability between devices in second-screen
scenarios.
 Enhancement of color support is discussed in the Color on the
Web Community Group. The W3C Workshop on Wide Color
Gamut and High Dynamic Range for the Web just ended in
September 2021.
 The Timed Text Working Group, which
maintains TTML and WebVTT, is looking for feedback on the
Hypothetical Render Model (HRM) of IMSC to evaluate
subtitles complexity (see keeping the complexity of IMSC
documents under control)
 Improvement of support for Media timed events (emsg, data
cues) takes place notably through the incubation
of DataCue in WICG and exchanges with browser vendor
representatives within the Media & Entertainment Interest
Group.
 New: Reducing needs for memory copies in web-platform APIs
(see WICG repo) are now being discussed, since they often are
 a performance bottleneck when media streams need to be
processed.

Reduce fragmentation

 Annual release in December 2020 of Web Media API snapshot,

a common and testable baseline for media devices.
 The Media & Entertainment Interest Group maintains the
roadmap: Overview of Media Technologies for the Web and
organizes monthly calls on Web technologies related to media
to gather pain points from media industries.

Create the future

 Joint W3C/SMPTE Workshop on Professional Media

Production planned in November 2021, to evaluate how the
Web platform may be used to manipulate professional media
assets stored in the cloud to run media production steps.
 The Media Working Group makes fast progress on
the WebCodecs specification, which gives applications more
control over media encoding/decoding and enables efficient
media processing scenarios (in realtime and non-realtime
scenarios).
 The GPU for the Web Working Group actively develops
the WebGPU and WebGPU Shading Language specifications
to harness GPUs for graphics and computing purpose.
 The Web Transport Working Group actively develops
the WebTransport API that could become a useful technology
for low-latency media streaming scenarios (live streaming,
cloud gaming).
 The Games Community Group organizes monthly calls to
explore game technologies and needs, alternating calls with
speakers and workshop-like calls for discussion. For example,
the August 2021 workshop was on game virality on the Web.
  The Immersive Web Working Group is stabilizing the WebXR
Device API and companion specs to enable VR/AR
experiences.
🎥 Watch a short demo of WebXR (October 2021, 2 minutes),
where Ada Rose Cannon introduces new features of WebXR:
hit-testing, lighting estimation, depth sensing API, XR anchors
and WebXR Navigation.

Network & Communications

The Web is the Open Platform for Mobile. Telecommunication
service providers and network equipment providers have long been
critical actors in the deployment of Web technologies. As the Web
platform matures, it brings richer and richer capabilities to extend
existing services to new users and devices, and propose new and
innovative services.

Real-Time Communications (WebRTC)

WebRTC became a standard in January 2021, recognizing the wide

availability of interoperable primitives in Web browsers to enable
real-time audio/video communications, of particular impact during
the COVID-19 pandemic.

The WebRTC Working Group has shifted its efforts towards bringing

its companion specifications Media Capture and Streams and
Screen Capture to Recommendation, and in parallel, the group is
reviewing technical proposals that enable the new use cases for
WebRTC: WebRTC Encoded Transform, which among other things
will open the way for fully end-to-end encrypted teleconferences in
Web browsers.

WebTransport

Chartered in September 2020 and operating in collaboration with the

IETF's WEBTRANS Working Group, the WebTransport Working
Group exposes low-level network primitives inspired by those from
the WebRTC API, enabling them in more contexts, in particular, to
make it easier to deploy in pure client/server situations. The group
released a qFirst Public Working Draft of its API.

🎥 Watch the WebTransport Working Group update video

presentation (October 2021, 12 minutes) by Will Law.

Web & Networks

The Web & Networks Interest Group rechartered in April 2021 to

continue work on the impact of Edge Computing on the Web
platform and explore how to incorporate network quality monitoring
and prediction in Web browsers. The latter topic has seen the
emergence of a possible opportunity to standardize network trace
formats to facilitate the capture and emulation of specific network
conditions.

Recent launch, together with the Media and Entertainment Interest

Group, of the Multicast Community Group, aimed to explore whether
and how to make use of multicast network distribution via Web
browsers, in a manner similar to what WebRTC did with real-time
networking.

🎥 Watch Multicast for the Web (October 2021, 3 minutes), where

Jake Holland introduces the newly formed multicast community
group and gives a brief overview of why multicast is important and
the work that is done to make it viable on the Web.

Automotive and Transportation

Shared data associated with transportation has great potential for
improving the user experience, with opportunities to offer enhanced
information, entertainment, efficiency, maintenance, safety, and
convenience. Parallel advances in sensors, communications, cloud
and data analytics infrastructure, geophysical mapping, machine
learning, mobile devices, user interfaces and related areas have
created a rich foundation that can offer tremendous opportunity for
creating value. The work in automotive and transporation addresses
the need for standards in a connected vehicle ecosystem, modes of
transportation and related services.

W3C Automotive Working Group

The W3C Automotive Working Group still learns from real world

experiences from the first Vehicle Information Service
Specification (VISS), which is in production vehicles, and
whose version 2 was recently published as First Public Working
Draft.

The standard, which aims to create a rich ecosystem for vehicles by

running on the "head unit", provides an access method to a common
data model for all the signals information available on vehicles, such
as engine temperature, fuel/charge level, range, tire pressure etc. It
currently knows about a thousand and will be growing to
accommodate advances such as electrification, autonomous and
driver assist technologies.

VISS version 2 includes HTTP REST in addition to WebSocket,

addresses access control authorization, and a robust authentication
model. This version also improves data feed subscriptions. A
reference implementation is currently exploring supporting MQTT
protocol which is used in the automotive industry.

W3C Automotive and Transportation Business Group

The Automotive and Transportation Business Group fosters and

advances the adoption and continued development of W3C
Automotive Working Group's standards including coordinating with
the broader transportation information space, and acting as an
incubator for future standards work. The group also works with the
data architects from ISO JTC1 WG11 SmartCities. Recent work
includes:

 Coordination with GENIVI on on Common Vehicle Interface

Initiative, and advancing the second release of Vehicle Signal
Specification (VSS) which refactored the underlying data model
  Development of VSS ontology (VSSo)
 Initial specification development of Remote Procedure Call
proposal from Jaguar Land Rover and accompanying service
catalog for vehicle interactions
 Development of In-Vehicle application Best Practices to
address privacy, business, safety and security concerns
 Development of Policy Guidelines surrounding data usage, in
coordination with other groups
 Promotion of VSS, VSSo and W3C Automotive service
standards
 Formation of the Transportation Ontology Coordination
Committee with W3C, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC),
ISO Intelligent Transportation Systems, and ISO SmartCities
 Continued incubation for W3C Automotive Working Group

Web of Things
W3C's Web of Things work is designed to bridge disparate
technology stacks to allow devices to work together and achieve
scale, thus enabling the potential of the Internet of Things by
eliminating fragmentation and fostering interoperability. The Web of
Things complements existing IoT ecosystems to reduce the cost and
risk for suppliers and consumers of applications that create value by
combining multiple devices and information services. There are
many sectors that will benefit, e.g. smart homes, smart cities, smart
industry, smart agriculture, smart healthcare and many more. A suite
of videos introduce the Web of Things (WoT) standardization
activities.

Web of Things Working Group

The Web of Things Working Group finished the initial Web of Things

standards in 2020 and rechartered to work on interoperability
profiles, discovery, lifecycle/onboarding, and ID management.
Web of Things Interest Group

The companion Web of Things Interest Group brings together

stakeholders to explore ideas prior to standardization by liaising with
external standards development organizations and industry
alliances. The group seeks to build a shared understanding of the
Web of Things and to identify opportunities for initiating W3C
standards-track work.

Web advertising
The Improving Web Advertising Business Group formed as a cross-
industry forum for business representatives to discuss how online
advertising could be made more effective and privacy-preserving.

The group seeks to identify areas where standards and changes in

the Web itself can improve the ecosystem and experience for users,
advertisers, publishers, distributors, ad networks, agencies, and
others. The group also oversees liaisons with existing Working
Groups and intends to create new Working Groups as needed.

The group aims to refine and incubate ideas and proposals, match

how they fit with important use-cases for privacy-protective
advertising on the Web.

The group's dashboard tracks issues across various discussion and

incubation repositories.

W3C Project Management: Strengthening the

Core of the Web

Audio
The Web Audio Working Group adds advanced sound and music
synthesis capabilities to the Open Web Platform.
Web Audio 1.0, which is implemented in all browsers, enables
synthesizing audio in the browser. Audio operations are performed
with audio nodes, which are linked together to form a modular audio
routing graph. Multiple sources — with different types of channel
layout — are supported. This modular design provides the flexibility
to create complex audio functions with dynamic effects.

The group published the Web Audio API 1.0 as a W3C

Recommendation in June, adding to the Web platform the standard
means to manipulate music and create audio directly from the Web
browser, including in a collaborative and interactive fashion.

Web Audio is used in many applications including: SoundCloud,

Mozilla Hubs, Firefox Mixed Reality, Ableton, Google Meet and
Stadia, SoundTrap, Amped Studio, BandLab, BeatPort, Soundation,
Leimma & Apotome, and Spotify.

Work has started on an 2nd version, in conjunction with the Web

Audio Community Group. This version will build on and enrich the
first version of the API, adding more complex and much-requested
features.

Browser Testing and Tools

The Browser Testing and Tools Working Group aims to create
technologies for automating web browsers, with a focus to enabling
automated testing of web applications running inside those browsers
while accounting for differences between browser engines.

WebDriver became a W3C recommendation in 2018, providing an

HTTP-based protocol for simulating user interaction with a website,
executing a script, in order to provide end-to-end testing and to
make writing tests very easy in a wide variety of programming
languages.

But when automation tools are tied to specific browsers, developers

have to decide whether to opt for advanced features or cross-
browser support and that's a problem for the open web. The group is
developing a 2nd version of WebDriver, because it is important for
the health of the Web to give the browser automation ecosystem a
basis in standards. This version aims to be able to observe internal
state changes happening in the browser, much as developer tools
do, and to address the non-determinism that can be introduced by
modern web applications that use scripts which might invoke
network requests.

The group also develops WebDriver BiDi, a slightly lower-level

protocol, to send events directly to the automation tool, rather than
only respond to commands.

🎥 Watch the browser testing and tools Working Group update video

presentation (October 2021, 11 minutes) by James Graham.

CSS
CSS is a critical part of the Open Web Platform. The CSS Working
Group gathers requirements for better pagination support and
advanced font handling, as well as intelligent (and fast!) scrolling
and animations. CSS is a collection of over a hundred specifications,
referred to as ‘modules’. The current state of CSS is defined by
a snapshot, updated once a year. The group also publishes
an index defining every term defined by CSS specifications.

Since our last report, the group published 1 W3C Recommendation

and 5 Candidate Recommendations. With 100 or more Editors
drafts, the CSS working group is a regular publisher.

🎥 Watch short recent videos (October 2021) to understand how

Cascade Layers, Container Queries and Scope improve the
architecture of CSS in a short overview and demo by Miriam
Suzanne (6 minutes), and learn about Nesting CSS with Adam
Argyle live coding (3 minutes).

Dataset Exchange
The Dataset Exchange Working Group is chartered to maintain and
develop the Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) which is an
interoperable and reusable data assets catalogue, and Content
Negotiation by Profile, a specification which is useful when
requesting and serving data on the Web.

The group is currently developing the third version of DCAT and

adding features to it. The specification is intended as an evergreen
standard regularly updated to address users' requirements.

🎥 Watch the Dataset Exchange Working Group update video

presentation (October 2021, 6 minutes) by Peter Winstanley.

Decentralized Identifier
The Decentralized Identifier Working Group specifies digital
identifiers that are easy to create, decentralized, persistent,
resolvable, and cryptographically verifiable. Decentralized Identifiers
(DIDs) are defined as specific URI schemes that have an associated
DID Document which contains primarily cryptographic information
that allows any agent to check the integrity of the defined subject;
allows to exchange private information with the subject and to get
information on the services (e.g., Web sites) related to it. The DID
documents are specified via an abstract data model that can be
serialized in various formats and can be stored on various types of
distributed ledgers, on Web storage systems.

The group has published DID Identifiers v1.0 as a Proposed

Recommendation which is when W3C Members give their final
review, and is the last step before publication as a Web standard.
The group will recharter, probably as a maintenance group.

Devices and Sensors

The Devices and Sensors Working Group aims to create secure and
privacy-preserving client-side APIs that enable the development of
web applications that interact with device capabilities.
Since the group rechartered at the end of 2020 it published a First
Public Working Draft of the Screen Fold API (since then renamed
Device Posture API), and plans to update its charter to add the
Contact Picker API to the list of specifications it works on.

Web Editing
The Web Editing Working Group aims to explore limitations in
existing browser primitives, provide use cases for new APIs and
suggest solutions either by standardizing existing behaviors or
introducing new APIs relevant for text editing. The goal is to facilitate
the creation of fully-featured editing systems as well as small editors
using JavaScript.

W3C launched earlier this year a working group that standardizes

features relevant for text editing –a work that has been ongoing for
more than seven years.

The group published last August a First Public Working Draft

of VirtualKeyboard API, which provides authors with greater control
over the visibility of the virtual keyboard (VK), and greater ability to
adapt the layout of web pages when VK visibility changes.

There is also work on EditContext – a new API which decouples

texting input from the DOM and enables web-based editors to have
full control of DOM while handling the user text input.

🎥 Watch the Web Editing Working Group update video

presentation which includes a demo of virtual keyboard APIs
(October 2021, 6 minutes), by Johannes Wilm, Alex Keng and
Anupam Snigdha.

Fonts
Web Fonts are used for languages such as Chinese, Japanese and
Korean, where downloading entire fonts is too costly; and Arabic and
Indic languages, where subsetted Web Fonts often do not work
correctly. The Web Fonts Working Group develops specifications
that allow the interoperable deployment of downloadable fonts on
the Web, with a focus on Progressive Font Enrichment (PFE) as well
as maintenance of WOFF Recommendations.

The Web Fonts Working Group published a First Public Working

Draft of Incremental Font Transfer, which allows to load only the
portions of a font that is actually need, which greatly speeds up
loading and reduces data transfer. A font can be loaded over
multiple requests, each incrementally adding additional data.

This work builds on the evaluation report for progressive font

enrichment which looked at group of languages currently unable to
use Webfonts (e.g., Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK)) due to
the very large file sizes, and evaluated solutions that would allow
WebFonts to be used where slow networks, very large fonts, or
complex subsetting requirements currently preclude their use.

HTML
HTML is the core markup language of the World Wide Web, a
foundational technology upon which websites are built. Originally,
HTML was primarily designed as a language for semantically
describing scientific documents. Its general design, however, has
enabled it to be adapted, over the subsequent years, to describe a
number of other types of documents and even applications.

Taking into account reviews from the W3C community, tracked by

the HTML Working Group, W3C Members endorsed in January the
first snapshot of HTML, and expects to endorse a snapshot of DOM,
which defines a platform-neutral model for events, aborting activities,
and node trees.

The group is working on a renewing its charter for 2021-2023. It will

maintain the expectations to publish a snapshot of HTML and DOM
every year, and to take into account the needs of the global
community, and continues to improve in areas such as accessibility,
internationalization and privacy while providing greater
interoperability, performance and security.
Web Machine Learning
Enabling efficient machine learning inference in the browser, as
opposed to in the cloud, enhances privacy and allows local
processing requiring low latency, such as object detection in
immersive web experiences, as well as access to platform
capabilities and dedicated hardware.

The Web Machine Learning Working Group launched in April 2021

to develop APIs following a two-year incubation period in the
companion Web Machine Learning Community Group which is
anticipated to continue to gather requirements and initiate
specification development.

The group published last June a First Public Working Draft of Web
Neural Network API as well as subsequent working drafts. It also
published a Web Neural Network API Explainer.

🎥 Watch a short video where Wanming Lin compares Web Neural

Network API Performance (October 2021, 2 minutes).

Math
MathML is a low-level specification for the Web and beyond, which
makes mathematics first-class on the Web so that mathematical and
scientific content is well displayed, accessible to people with
disabilities, and searchable.

The Math Working Group was chartered in April 2021 to revise

MathML so that features of the modern Web platform are
compatible.

MathML 4 will build upon previous versions of the language

(MathML 1, a 1999 web standard; MathML 2 published as a
Recommendation in 2001 and revised as a second edition in 2003;
and MathML 3, published as a Recommendation in 2010 and
revised as a second edition in 2014), as well as the experience with
needs for accessibility, and many years of practical experience and
use.

The group published a First Public Working Draft of MathML

Core last August, and subsequent working draft. The specification
defines the core subset of Mathematical Markup Language that is
suitable for browser implementation.

MiniApps
MiniApps are hybrid mobile apps that are small, install-free, fast-
loading, that use web technologies (especially CSS and JavaScript)
and integrate with capabilities of Native Apps.

The MiniApps Working Group published as First Public Working

Draft MiniApp Lifecycle and MiniApp Manifest, and is soon going to
publish as such MiniApp Packaging.

An important change is that the group is rewriting the MiniApp URI

Scheme to use http/https.

The companion MiniApps Ecosystem Community Group is

incubating new proposals, among which are Miniapp
for IoT and Miniapp Common UI Components.

Web Applications
The Web Applications Working Group produces specifications that
facilitate the development of client-side web applications.

The group recently published a Candidate Recommendation Draft

of ARIA in HTML in August, and a First Public Working Draft
of Indexed Database API 3.0 last March.

🎥 Watch the Web Applications Working Group update video

presentation and demos (October 2021, 2 minutes) in which Marcos
Caceres shows how the specifications developed by the group allow
to build Web applications that integrate better with their computing
environment. In a second recent video, Diego González gives tips
for integrating your PWA into your desktop environment (October
2021, 13 minutes).

WebAssembly
The WebAssembly 1.0 Recommendation is a virtual machine and
execution environment widely deployed in browsers and stand-alone
environments, that enables near-native performance, optimized load
time, and perhaps most importantly, a compilation target for existing
code bases.

The WebAssembly Working Group, working with

companion WebAssembly Community Group where proposals are
incubated before graduating to the former for final specification, has
been specifying many features to add to the standard which improve
performance, enable use of hardware capabilities, handle more
efficient support for language features, or improve integration
between compile language and JS/Web.

🎥 Watch the Web Assembly Community and Working Groups

updates video presentation (October 2021, 12 minutes) by co-chairs
Derek Schuff and Luke Wagner.

Web for All

Technical Architecture Group (TAG)

The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG), created in 2001, is a
special working group chartered with stewardship of the Web
architecture. The mission of the group is:

 to document and build consensus around principles of Web

architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when
necessary;
  to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to
the TAG;
 to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments
inside and outside W3C.

The elected Members of the TAG participate as individual

contributors, not as representatives of their organizations. TAG
participants use their best judgment to find the best solutions for the
Web, not just for any particular network, technology, vendor, or user.

Reviews, Findings, Guidance

The group operates according to the following 3 axes: review of

documents from other work groups that have a bearing on Web
architecture to support other W3C work groups along with other
horizontal review groups, publication of findings (such as the Ethical
Web Principles document or Unsanctioned Web Tracking), and
creation of guidance (including the foundational Self-Review
Questionnaire: Security and Privacy which is a pre-requisite for
documents reviews, but also the Web Platform Design Principles).

Ethical Web Principles

The group recently updated the Ethical Web Principles with some

additional text in the intro around harmful patterns, and adjustments
to the text on sustainability.

Web Platform Design Principles

New principles were added to the Web Platform Design Principles:

use of DOMHighResTimeStamp, factory methods vs. constructors,
and designing APIs on top of a hardware or device capability.

🎥 Watch a still current video from last year W3C Technical

Architecture Group (TAG) update: Principles for the Web (October
2020, 13 minutes), and read the October 2021 TAG update.
Security & Privacy Questionnaire

The TAG added text to both the Security & Privacy

Questionnaire and the Web Platform Design Principles covering the
topic of "non-'fully active' documents".

Security, Privacy
Privacy and security – integral to human rights and civil liberties –
have long been important in the Web Consortium's agenda. For
example, our work has been instrumental in improving Web security
through the development of authentication technologies that can
replace weak passwords and reduce the threats of phishing and
other attacks.

However, users rightly fear the misuse of their personal data and
being tracked online, including browser fingerprinting, the spread of
disinformation, and other online harms. These are difficult and
urgent challenges. We have begun discussions about how to help
users find trustworthy content on the Web without increasing
censorship.

Privacy incubation

The Privacy Community Group hosts incubation of new privacy-

focused specification and APIs, as well as monthly calls which
regularly attract vibrant participation. Recent work items include:

 A mechanism for private click measurement that may be useful

to measure advertising success while also preserving user
privacy
 A proposal for isolating sites' data from each other and an API
for requesting access to blocked storage
 Two proposals that may help facilitate login state management
in a world where third-party cookies and other tracking
mechanisms are being rapidly deprecated: one to declare what
 domain names are connected to each other and an API to tell a
browser if a user is logged into a site

Unlinkable and unphishable authentication

The Web Authentication Working Group published WebAuthn

Level 2 as a W3C Recommendation and a First Public Working Draft
of Web Authentication Level 3 in April. The group is re-chartering to
work on new features including device-loss recovery and other API
enhancements.

The companion WebAuthn Adoption Community Group aims to lift

obstacles that might prevent developers from adopting WebAuthn,
and help developers and users of the specification to improve
adoption of its interoperable security.

🎥 Watch a short Web Authentication Adoption Community Group

video update (October 2021, 5 minutes) by Nick Steele.

W3C Member Yubico and W3C collaborated to design for W3Cx

(W3C's MOOC platform) the first online Web Authentication course
for developers. Titled “Introduction to Web Authentication”, the
course equips learners with the knowledge to replace aging
password-based credentials with a secure model that incorporates
strong authentication.

Web Application Security

The Web Application Security Working Group published a new Note

on Post-Spectre Web Development, which outlines a threat model
we can share, and a set of mitigation recommendations. The group
is in the process of re-chartering.

Privacy and Security reviews

The Privacy Interest Group (PING) does privacy reviews of other

groups' specifications. It has been using new tooling to track
issues and has had renewed success making groups aware of
privacy and fingerprinting issues in their specifications. The group is
also writing a Target Privacy Threat Model document.

Security reviews are done by a pool of volunteer reviewers

coordinated by the W3C team. We welcome more people in that
pool. Issues raised are tracked using the same tooling used by
PING.

Internationalization (i18n)
Educational articles related to Internationalization • spec developers
checklist • overview of language enablement work in
progress • Internationalization Initiative

Only a quarter of the world's population of almost 8 billion speaks

English, and yet over 50% of online content is written in that one
language. Those whose voice and language are not included on the
Web are marginalized and excluded. They do not receive the
economic, educational or democratic benefits of the Web and by not
having their presence and participation, we lose the potential of the
Web to reflect the full richness of the world.

The Web Consortium launched the Internationalization Activity

(i18n) in 1998 to make the Web truly 'world wide'. For the Web to
truly work for stakeholders all around the world engaging with
content in various languages, there must be a collaboration of
language experts, Web site designers, developers, and vendors who
are active in moving the Web forward. We will only be able to
connect all communities that share a language when the Web
supports all the world's languages and international typography.

For an overview of current projects see the i18n radar.

Can you fund Web Internationalization?

The Internationalization initiative allows sponsors to fund extra

resources in i18n beyond what the core membership funding covers.
Additional funding increases resources allocated to this crucial
empowering work.

If you can donate time and expertise, please join to contribute in the
key areas of Language enablement, Developer support, and Author
support (education & outreach).

Language enablement

Documentation of requirements for specific scripts and languages,

and of barriers to their use in technologies that exist or are currently
in development.

 [New] Gap-Analysis Pipeline: A dashboard to identify critical

missing pieces of the internationalized Web and track support
for filling those gaps.
The tool shows distinct issues, pointers to underlying issues
and needed next steps.
 [New] feature support: WebKit support for isolation of
bidirectional text closed a key gap in supporting scripts such as
Arabic, Hebrew, and Adlam, and pages with both left-to-right
and right-to-left text. Chrome implementation of CSS Counter
Styles improves local customization of numbered lists and
headings.
 Japanese and Chinese layout task forces continue to meet
regularly and are actively working on their documents. We
need additional participants to drive the work, notably on
Arabic, Southeast Asian, Indic, European, African and
Americas languages.

For a summary of current status, see the language matrix and

the gap-analysis pipeline. Read more on language enablement.

Developer support

Reviews, discussion and advice for W3C work groups (and

sometimes for external initiatives at the Unicode Consortium or the
IETF, etc.) and preparation of guidelines and checklists that groups
can use to do self-review or self-education, as well as focus on
specific technological problems.

 [New] Internationalization Glossary: The new document

groups together terms used by the Internationalization Activity,
and provides or points to definitions.
 [New] Monetization primers: Publication as part of our support
of the Grant for the Web project of an explainer, a checklist,
and a blog post, aiming to sensitize developers of monetization
apps to the needs of the international community.
 Document Review is now the one goto page for working
groups wanting to engage with horizontal groups.
 Strings on the Web: Language and Direction Metadata has
been updated.

The Internationalization Working Group has been active reviewing

specifications and providing advice to other work groups. Completed
and in-progress reviews are listed in the Review Radar and issues
we are tracking or discussing are listed in the Review Tracker.

Author support (education & outreach)

Articles to help content authors, spec developers, and implementers

understand and use i18n features. I18N advice for courses,
maintenance of an i18n checker for authors of web pages.

 New articles:
o Typographic character units in complex scripts

o Use cases for bidi and language metadata on the Web

o Can we derive base direction from language?
 Updated resources, taking into account recent developments
and providing clearer guidance::
o Structural markup and right-to-left text in HTML
 o Inline markup & bidi text in HTML
o Inline bidi markup examples

See HTML & CSS Authoring Techniques, and other educational

Internationalization techniques.

Web Accessibility
WAI news • Accessibility fundamentals • Business case for digital
accessibility • WAI translations • participating in WAI

The Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), launched

in 1997, develops technical specifications and outreach and training
materials that promote awareness and implementation of web
accessibility. WAI’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is
regarded as the authoritative international standard for Web
accessibility, and has been adopted or referenced by many
governments around the world.

As the complexity of the Web increases, as technologies as diverse

as digital publishing and virtual reality converge onto the Web, the
need for up-to-date accessibility support in advanced technologies is
increasing. WAI supports W3C's Web for All mission, and helps
ensure a cohesive program of coordinated accessibility activities,
distributed across all areas of W3C.

WAI guidelines

 What level guidelines should you use to make your website and
web apps accessible? At least WCAG 2.1 AA.
 WAI published a second wide review draft of WCAG 2.2 in
May, and expect completion within 2021.
 An updated W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0 Working
Draft was published in June 2021 for review. WCAG 3 is
intended to cover a broader scope of technologies, with
different types of web content, apps, and tools, and a different
name, scope, structure, and draft conformance model.
  Recently published supporting resources:
o Making Content Usable for Cognitive and Learning
Disabilities
o ATAG Report Tool from Authoring Tool Accessibility
Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0.

How important is Web Accsssibility in times where Covid is

impacting people with disabilities?

 Making Audio and Video Media Accessible has useful

information for making videoconferences accessible.
 Accessibility of Remote Meetings is developed by the Research
Questions Task Force (RQTF) of the Accessible Platform
Architecture Working Group (APA WG).

Other progress on the technical side of Web accessibility

 Web accessibility reviews of all W3C specifications under

development is done by the Accessible Platform Architectures
(APA) Working Group. The Framework for Accessible
Specification of Technology (FAST) is a tool that allows groups
to perform self review.
 Drafts in progress of ARIA 1.3, Personalization
Semantics and Pronunciation.
 The Accessibility Conformance Testing Task Force (of AG WG)
completed the W3C Recommendation of ACT Conformance
Rules Format, and is now building the repository of rules.
 Emerging technology: the Research Questions Task Force is
developing user accessibility requirements for media
synchronization, for AR and VR ("XAUR"), and recently
published RTC Accessibility User Requirements.
 The Immersive Captions Community Group is exploring
research on effective use of captions in augmented and virtual
reality.
Learning more about accessibility

 Tips, tutorials, role-based learning resources.

 Learn Digital Accessibility Foundations from our free online
W3Cx course: "Introduction to Web Accessibility".
 Get engaged directly in development of educational resources
such as the draft What's New in WCAG 2.2, and other work
listed in the new EOWG charter.
 Help translating WAI materials so that more people can learn
about web accessibility.
 Learn about accessibility and anti-discrimination against
disability also as part of W3C's Positive Work
Environment work and Inclusion and Diversity work.

Outreach to the world

W3C Developer Relations

For a tight and effective feedback loop between Web Standards
development and Web developers, and growing participation from
that diverse community.

 Follow @w3cdevs, our twitter account promoting the enormous

amount of work done at the Web Consortium, tailored for web
developers.
 🎥 Watch tech videos on our W3COfficial YouTube
channel (short interviews of W3C members, workshops' talks,
meetup talks). Two recent videos give details on W3C DevRel
work:
o W3C & Web developers: why and how to get involved in
W3C as a developer or designer?
o Developer Relations at W3C - April 2021 Update
  The W3C team maintains the Webref project to collect re-
usable information from across a wide range of browser-
targeted specifications used by many developer ecosystem
tools, both internal to the W3C community (respec, bikeshed,
Web Platform Tests) and external (MDN, Typescript
declarations, validator libraries).
🎥 Watch a short video where François Daoust introduces Reffy
- a tool to analyse Web specifications (October 2021, 4
minutes) which powers Webref.
 Working with MDN Web Docs and Open Web Docs (OWD), the
W3C team has been able to significantly improve how W3C
specifications are referenced from MDN.
 The team is experimenting with a W3C Dev Advocate
program to encourage and give structural support to W3C work
group interactions with their developer communities.

W3C Training
W3Cx is W3C's partnership with edX since 2015 where we
develop MOOCs on core Web technologies.

 New MOOC: WebAuthn introductory course, to open on 30

November 2021. W3C Member Yubico and W3C collaborated
to design the first online Web Authentication course for
developers. Titled “Introduction to Web Authentication”, the
course equips learners with the knowledge to replace aging
password-based credentials with a secure model that
incorporates strong authentication.
 One of our latest MOOCs, "Introduction to Web Accessibility",
has been extended until end of December 2021.
 Since we passed the 1 Million enrollment mark at the end of
2020, the count of our students from around the world
increased to over 1.3M. The W3Cx "Front-End Web Developer"
(FEWD) program is still the most popular.
  W3C MOOCs are accessible via W3Cx or via the edX Web
site.

Translations
Many Web users rely on translations of documents developed at
W3C whose official language is English.

W3C is extremely grateful to the continuous efforts of its community

in ensuring our various deliverables in general, and in our
specifications in particular, are made available in other languages,
for free, ensuring their exposure to a much more diverse set of
readers.

Please, refer to the instructions in order to contribute translations.

W3C Liaisons
W3C engages in liaisons and coordination with numerous
organizations and Standards Development Organizations (SDOs)
who develope internet or web standards, to coordinate the
development of the Web.

The goals of liaisons and coordination are:

 make sure standards are interoperable

 ensure the global set of Web and Internet standards form a
compatible stack of technologies, at the technical and policy
level (patent regime, fragmentation, use in policy making)
 promote Standards adoption equally by the industry, the public
sector, and the public at large
 coordinate our respective agenda in Internet governance (W3C
participates in ICANN, IETF, ISOC, IAB, GIPO, IGF)
 ensure at the government liaison level that our standards work
is officially recognized so that products based on them are part
of procurement orders (W3C has ARO/PAS status with ISO.
 W3C participates in the EU MSP and Rolling Plan on
Standardization.)

Coralie Mercier, Editor, W3C Marketing & Communications

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