New version of the Roadmap of Web Applications on Mobile

4 May 2018

W3C has published a new version of its Roadmap of Web Applications on Mobile, an overview of the various technologies developed in W3C that increase the capabilities of Web applications, and how they apply more specifically to the mobile context.

The contents of the roadmap have been updated to follow the evolution of the Web platform in the past few months, as well as to address feedback received on the January 2018 version. See the Change history for details. Among other changes, the new roadmap describes on-going exploratory work on:

• The Web Share API and Web Share Target API in Application Lifecycle,
• Requesting/Revoking permissions and Feature Policy in Security and Privacy, and
• Element Queries in Device Adaptation.

It also features useful technologies for mobile devices that were missing from the previous version, such as:

• CSS Grid Layout and the CSS font-display property in Graphics and Layout,
• the Streams specification in Network and Communications, and
• the passive flag for event listeners in Performance and Tuning.

Last but not least, accessibility aspects are better covered in the User Interaction section.

Implementation information now describes status on mobile browsers when known, and warns when a prefix is required or when a flag must be set to use a feature. The implementation info also links to the Web Platform status source from which it was gathered (Can I use?, Chrome Platform Status, Microsoft Edge web platform features status and roadmap, WebKit Feature Status).

Sponsored by Beihang University, this project is part of a set of roadmaps under development in a GitHub repository to document existing standards, highlight ongoing standardization efforts, point out topics under incubation, and discuss technical gaps that may need to be addressed in the future. New versions will be published on a quarterly basis, or as needed depending on progress of key technologies of the Web platform. We encourage the community to review them and raise comments, or suggest new ones, in the repository’s issue tracker.