World Wide Web Consortium: Making Web Standards Better
September 2019

Future focus of W3C

Over the past decade, by all measures, W3C has grown consistently. Stimulated by ISOC's 2009 grant, W3C invested in creating a sustainable business model, including membership, sponsorship, and community engagement of non-members. Since then, membership has consistently grown, the number of engineers participating in the community has grown, and the attendance at our annual technical plenary has grown. We have every reason to believe that the forces behind the growth will continue because these are forces that emanate from outside W3C, in the larger society.

W3C works at problems that are at the nexus of three axes: core technology, industry needs, and societal needs. These are areas of constant change, which stimulates a need for interoperability and standardization. Engineers come to W3C's community groups to innovate. Companies - large and small - come to W3C to achieve interoperability. As we move forward, we continue to facilitate interoperability and ecosystem collaboration and seek to expand the benefits a vendor-neutral forum can provide.

Core technology

Information technology is a major driver of growth in the 21st century with rapidly developing technologies and new solutions. Often these technologies add value to the web experience, and that leads to a constant stream of new activity at W3C.

In the past decade, key enhancements include: video, real-time communications, payments on the web, and cryptographic authentication. The stream of possibilities continues based on new standardization work recently started, or, further out in time, incubation work underway in our community groups. Examples of that include immersive (VR/AR), web assembly, machine and federated learning, high performance graphics and high dynamic range color.

We recently reached an agreement with the WHATWG to mend the rift between competing versions of the HTML reference, agreeing to bring our community’s input and reviews to the WHATWG repositories and continuous-development work-mode. In both venues, this work continues on a royalty-free basis, with wide input, rapid iteration, and testing. Deployed specifications require ongoing maintenance, so core work also includes provision for updating specs, for example to manage errata or respond to new security best practices.

Industry needs

In the early days of the web, companies quickly found uses for the web to share information with their customers and as the conduit for e-commerce.

In the last decade, industries have created a more strategic relationship with the web, in which the web becomes a fundamental element of business strategy. For example:

This eventuality has thrust W3C into a new area of responsibility and opportunity. No longer are these industries mere customers of web technologies. Now instead, each brings their own challenges to enrich the problem set and diversity of contributors for the web. Often what begins as an industry-specific requirement, such as how to improve digital publication of texts; how to better support the web in telecommunications networks, becomes a core capability of the web, valuable to web users in general.

Web needs of industries are expanding in new directions. Industries with greater dependency on the web are entering a version 2.0 relationship with W3C - getting even more intimately connected with web technologies and the standards that can support new ones. For example, the Entertainment and Media industry first needed only basic video support in HTML. That need soon expanded to providing unique capabilities for streaming media on the web. More recently, they have started a new Web Media working group developing seven specifications that build out a broader media platform (detection of capabilities, autoplay, playback quality, etc.). A second example is digital publishing. The primary e-book standardization group (IDPF) became so dependent on the W3C community that in 2017 they merged into W3C.

A growing set of new industries are now using the web and looking to W3C for help. Manufacturing companies developing a global supply chain are looking at web technologies to secure IoT interoperability. Web advertisers and publishers are looking at standardizing approaches to preserve privacy while measuring ad conversion.

Societal needs

W3C has long focused on four key societal needs: security, privacy, internationalization, and accessibility. We have numerous standards related to security, such as the recently released Web Authentication API for strong cryptographic authentication, and we work on APIs and spec-driven guidance for applications that respect and leverage the web security model. Our privacy group reviews work web-wide to assure that feature development respects user privacy. Our internationalization matrix helps to identify gaps in the web’s language support and recommends fixes, such as support for vertical layout for Asian languages. We provide accessibility standards, some of which (notably our Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG) have been adopted as normative requirements by regulatory bodies throughout the world.

Looking forward, we see societal needs growing and demanding more widely coordinated responses that go beyond standards. The web needs reinforcement to rebuild its capacity to support trustworthy applications. For example, Web Authentication can eliminate some key sources of insecurity, password phishing, credential reuse, and brute force password-stuffing. WebAuthn’s widespread deployment and use will depend not only on specifications, but also on application developer guidance, education, and user outreach. Our Web Authentication Recommendation needs work to drive adoption until insecure password practices are eliminated.

In privacy, many questions are currently posed as zero-sum contests between feature advances and privacy protections. In the future, we seek to develop new approaches that support privacy-preserving functionality. These include better permission-scoping to help users make reasoned choices about feature-access requests; blinded anonymous reporting for measurement, for example in privacy-preserving advertising conversion-tracking; and use of federated learning to handle sensitive data and inference at the user’s client.

Our accessibility work requires constant focus. Each technology gain and each new industry need mentioned above can create new hurdles to people with disabilities -- or new opportunities to build equitable access from the start. Our exploration of “Inclusive Immersive Web” reflects this design for access, seeking to make virtual reality effective for participants of all capabilities.

How we work

The World Wide Web Consortium takes a multi-pronged approach to the Web’s standardization. Through application of the W3C Process, we help participants to reach consensus on API designs, data formats, and guidelines. We also provide incubators for emerging work, through workshops, community, interest, and business groups. W3C seeks to assure a web for all through a suite of horizontal engagements and reviews; to expand the web’s applications through business use-case-focused verticals.

To develop the technologies mentioned above, team contacts assist Working Group participants from across the web to produce specifications, which we issue as Recommendations if they garner wide review and consensus. This work continues on a royalty-free basis, with wide input, rapid iteration, and testing. Deployed specifications require ongoing maintenance, so core work also includes provision for updating specs, for example to manage errata or respond to new security best practices.

Horizontal activities coordinate cross-cutting involvement and review to support the web for all. That includes the aforementioned world-recognized guidelines for accessibility to people with disabilities, and review of all specs for inclusive design. Internationalization ensures the web can meet script, language, and localization needs of the global web’s users,with language matrices, gap analyses, and review tools. For vertical industries, meeting business needs in the standards-development process helps us press industry to build extensibly, with respect for end-users and other platform stakeholders. Industry verticals proceed at different paces, as different communities engage with the standards process.

New Technologies and their uses come from the community: including researchers, entrepreneurs, business extension, and innovative end-users. Our goal is to be a good forum to them, a community of experts in neighboring web technologies, a repository of good patterns and practices. Recent workshops include: Identity and Strong Authentication; Games on the Web; Immersive Web (including upcoming Inclusive Immersive Reality); Machine Learning. Interest and Business Groups on Web Payment Security; Web Advertising.