New version of the Roadmap of Web Applications on Mobile

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 November 2019 snapshot refreshes the list of technologies under incubation in Community Groups or on the standardization track in Working Groups. See the Change history since April 2019 for details. New standardization proposals have notably emerged, including:

• WebTransport, an API similar to WebSocket but closer to UDP and based on QUIC, described in Network and Communications;
• WebCodecs to expose media encoders/decoders to web applications, described in Media;
• WebGPU, described in Graphics and Layout, which has made significant progress in the past few months;
• Input for workers and worklets, described in User Interaction;
• Various low-level specifications for Performance and Tuning, such as isInputPending, the <virtual-scroller> element, and Audio Device Client in Media.

Former proposals under incubation in Community Groups have moved to the standardization track since April 2019. For instance, media specifications such as Media Capabilities, Picture-in-Picture, and Media Session are now being standardized by the Media Working Group (see Media). Similarly, the CSS Animation Worklet API has been adopted by the CSS Working Group (see Performance and Tuning).

Still in the performance ballpark, WebAssembly has made quick progress on the standardization track and was moved to well-deployed technologies in Performance and Tuning.

On top of specifications, the November 2019 snapshot also reflects on implementation progress. For instance, Resize Observer shipped in Firefox and Safari (see Device Adaptation), Background Fetch shipped in Chrome (see Application Lifecycle) and the <datalist> element defined in HTML shipped on all main browsers (see Forms).

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.

W3C Recommends WebAssembly to push the limits for speed, efficiency and responsiveness

5 December 2019

The WebAssembly Working Group has published today the three WebAssembly specifications as W3C Recommendations, marking the arrival of a new language for the Web which allows code to run in the browser.

• WebAssembly Core Specification defines a low-level virtual machine which closely mimicks the functionality of many microprocessors upon which it is run. Either through Just-In-Time compilation or interpretation, the WebAssembly engine can perform at nearly the speed of code compiled for a native platform. A .wasm resource is analogous to a Java .class file in that it contains static data and code segments which operate over that static data. Unlike Java, WebAssembly is typically produced as a compilation target from other programming languages like C/C++ and Rust.
• WebAssembly Web API defines a Promise-based interface for requesting and executing a .wasm resource. The structure of a .wasm resource is optimized to allow execution to begin before the entire resource has been retrieved, which further enhances responsiveness of WebAssembly applications.
• WebAssembly JavaScript Interface provides a JavaScript API for invoking and passing parameters to WebAssembly functions. In Web browsers, WebAssembly’s interactions with the host environment are all managed through JavaScript, which means that WebAssembly relies on JavaScript’s highly-engineered security model.

WebAssembly provides a safe, portable, low-level code format designed for efficient execution and compact representation. This technology enables the Web platform to perform more efficient execution of computationally-intensive algorithms, which in turn makes it practical to deliver whole new classes of user experience on the Web and elsewhere. Because WebAssenbly is a platform-independent execution environment, it can also be used on any other computer platform. Please, read our press release for additional information and acknowledgements.

W3C Invites Implementations of Publication Manifest and Audiobooks

5 December 2019

The Publishing Working Group has just published a Candidate Recommendation for two documents, namely:

• Publication Manifest – This specification defines a general manifest format for expressing information about a digital publication. It uses schema.org metadata augmented to include various structural properties about publications, serialized in JSON-LD, to enable interoperability between publishing formats while accommodating variances in the information that needs to be expressed.
• Audiobooks – This specification describes the requirements for the creation of audiobooks, using a profile of the Publication Manifest specification.

The Group has also published an accompanying Working Group Note of Lightweight Packaging Format (LPF). This specification defines a file format and processing model for packaging into a single-file container the set of related resources and associated metadata that comprise a digital publication.

Candidate Recommendation means that the Working Group considers the technical design to be complete, and is seeking implementation feedback on the documents. The group is keen to get comments and implementation experiences on these specifications as issues raised in the the documents’ respective GitHub repositories (see the document headers for the exact references).

The group expects to satisfy the implementation goals (i.e., at least two, independent implementations for each of the test cases) by 31 March 2020.

W3Cx Introduction to Web Accessibility – New Online Course

3 December 2019

On the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, W3C and the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (UNESCO IITE) launched a new W3Cx course: “Introduction to Web Accessibility“.

The course is designed for technical and non-technical audiences, including developers, designers, content authors, project managers, people with disabilities, and others. The course will start on 28 January 2020 and is self-paced.

Please, read our press release and blog post, and watch our short teaser video for more information about the course. Enroll now, and encourage others to, too.