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.

Bottom up description of role of W3C staff

Standards organizations use different combinations of professional staff, outsourced work, volunteers, and member organizations to achieve standardization in their respective domains of focus.  This section describes W3C's approach which relies heavily on a professional staff.  

We expect that as part of the move to a legal entity, W3C will have more flexibility in performing these tasks.  W3C will explore different modes to achieve lower cost or better results.  Some tasks that are not core to W3C (e.g. on the administrative side) may gain greater professionalism if outsourced.  Other tasks may be performed more efficiently.

However, herein we describe the current model.  While the legal entity enables us to study alternatives (and indeed we have started to explore them), we do not anticipate a major cost savings to arise.  W3C's model of professional staff has served it well in the past - W3C was able to develop a level of professionalism in support of standardization.

When W3C started the staff supported the W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee.  As the inventor of the world wide web, Tim played a unique role as Director of W3C: assuring openness of the web, vendor neutrality, freedom from proprietary influences, architectural cohesion, and shepherding new features.  That was a lot for one person to do and so the W3C staff played an important role in supporting Tim's efforts.  The staff helped set the rules for what technologies should be worked on, enforced vendor neutrality, and were heavy technology contributors.

Much has changed in the 25 years since the founding of W3C.  The web community has absorbed the basic tenets of vendor-neutral collaboration and the need for continued innovation and refresh of the web architecture.  The web architecture technical community achieves much of the roles without Tim.  Accordingly, the role of the W3C staff has evolved.  No longer does the staff need to spend so much time on core standards facilitation - the technical community achieves much of that themselves.  But the staff's role has evolved to play a different vital role - one that is anticipated to continue or intensify in the future.

Thinking about the web and W3C from the perspective of the traditional layered model of interconnected systems, the web essentially is occupying the Application Layer (as opposed to IETF, for example which works at the network or transport layer for the most part).  The Application Layer is the layer at which all of the needs of society: users, broad social goals, companies, industries, etc. - meet the technology infrastructure of the Internet.  At a high level, the current role of the W3C staff is to be the key place in society in which the requirements of the world are translated into open technical standards that can address those requirements. 

So we have discovered that as we evolve towards a mature web standards community, a more agile process to generate standards, and a reduced role for the W3C Director, we have discovered new critical roles for the staff.  The staff is critical connecting tissue that (a) educates and facilitates the participation of new stakeholders (innovators, developers, companies, entire industries), (b) provides connections across industries so that different stakeholders can participate in the same venue, and (c) ensures that societal needs - that might be secondary to some stakeholders - take center stage.  That takes place in several functions as described below.

Core web technology needs


2010: 45% of technical headcount
2019: 14% of technical headcount

The trend over the last several years has been to reduce the staff effort on core web technology.  The key stakeholders that need to be involved in those discussions typically have many years working in the standards environment and are quite adept at getting work done.  The W3C process is still there to impose openness, vendor neutrality, and broad participation, but culturally these are accepted norms in these communities.  W3C still spends some effort in these areas as they are core to the web.

In that sense, the movement of core HTML maintenance to the WHATWG was not a major impact on W3C resource allocation.  To be sure, W3C continues to have some concerns about the development of HTML (e.g. in areas of meeting broad societal needs), but that is addressed through the W3C/WHATWG partnership agreement.  But other major parts of the core of the web are still developed at W3C (e.g. CSS, SVG, WebIDL, Web Performance, etc.).  Typically these require less support than in the past.

Industry needs

2010: 8% of technical headcount

2019: 17% of technical headcount

W3C has substantially increased its allocation of resources to industry verticals.  Whereas ten years ago there was almost no staff assigned to industry verticals, today, it represents a significant investment.

Engineers from industry verticals who contribute requirements and technical solutions to W3C are typically not experienced in developing web standards.  They work for companies that worked on standards in unique industry groups.  Often those bodies are quite different from W3C.  Key factors are: our openness, we work in public, decisions are made by consensus based on technical merit, horizontal review, the W3C Process, and our royalty-free patent policy.

These engineers might also be less knowledgeable about our core technology elements: Javascript, HTML, test cases, web accessibility, security and privacy considerations.  W3C staff plays an important role to support these stakeholders working in our community.  Indeed, the relative fraction of our Members that are from industry verticals (as opposed to classic web or IT companies) has increased over the years.

At the same time, W3C facilitates the interaction between industry vertical participants and the traditional web development community.  We ensure that traditional developers are open to the approaches, needs, and methodologies of industry vertical communities.

Some of our resource is assigned to our Champion program.  For each of six industries we assign a staff Member whose key role is to align the visions of what the industry needs from the web platform with the fundamental architecture and required capability of the web platform.

***More examples of outreach.


Broad societal needs

2010: 24% of technical headcount

2019: 38% of technical headcount

As we have been reducing W3C support for core web Working Groups, we have been increasing support for the topics of enduring impact on  broad societal needs.

Broad societal needs relate to our value of Web for All.  We focus on internationalization and accessibility.  Most W3C Members also care dearly about these values.  However, W3C brings a unique skill base in these areas which is difficult to reproduce in every development team from every Member company.  The topic of internationalization becomes more challenging as we attempt to spread the web to the Global South and to regions where the world's major languages are not spoken.  Accessibility is more challenging as the web increases in sophistication (e.g. immersive technologies, greater usage of video).

Additionally, many Members - being product focused - might overlook concerns about internationalization and accessibility; preferring to optimize for function and time-to-market.  The W3C process and support forces them to take these two sets of requirements as primary requirements.  We expect to continue to add resource to these areas.

Society also has strong needs for security and privacy.  These areas have become more than technical curiosities - they are societal issues that appear daily in the newspaper.  Lack of trust has become a major concern which could move people away from using digital infrastructure.

Security is a multi-layer, multi-faceted issue that does not have a single solution.  W3C continues to increase resources both in support of solutions for security problems (e.g. our recently released WebAuthentication spec), as well as ensuring that all new web technology is reviewed for security holes.

Privacy on the web has become a significant issue both technically, in the media, and in government.  Companies are getting increasingly adept at mining personal information, and any new technology runs the risk of providing new techniques to allow vendors to fingerprint users.  Society at large is much more concerns about the privacy issue then vendors are.  W3C's role as neutral stakeholder is critical to ensure that this issue is addressed.  W3C has been increasing resources, and needs to increase more in the strategic timeframe.

Incubation and developer support


2010: 0.4% of technical headcount
2019: 10% of technical headcount

New ideas for the web come from multiple sources.  These are not always from web product companies.  Often these come from startups or from developers who build applications on top of the core web platform.  These two groups require facilitation to get attention to their ideas and that has become a major focus within W3C.

Ten years ago there was no focus on developers and no focus on incubation.

Today, there are over 300 Community Groups involving over 10,000 engineers that are incubating pre-standardization technology.  W3C Strategy Team facilitates that work and has a funnel of maturing ideas that W3C ensures get brought to the standardization track at the proper speed. 

W3C's developer relationships works with developers through MDN, runs meetups and conferences, and provides courseware.  Through MIT's EdX on-line courseware, nearly one million developers have been education in web technologies.  Future courses will focus on having first rate training for accessibility.

Global footprint


2010: 0% of technical headcount
2019: 4% of technical headcount

W3C has always been a globally focused organization with multiple hosts, but its technical strategy has focused on solutions for web audiences who were primarily based in North America, Europe, and Japan.  W3C Hosts have provided a small amount of geographic-specific support.

Different parts of the globe operate differently and technology solutions often sprout up differentially around the globe.  However, due to the principle of One Web, W3C staff plays a key role in coordinating global strategies.

In 2013, W3C added a team in China to ensure we are addressing requirements from China.  We followed that up more recently with a Chinese Interest Group, and that group - which has had several meetings with over one hundred people - have been describing China-unique solutions (e.g. MiniApps) that need to intersect global standards.  W3C has begun to dedicate staff to these solutions.

We want to continue the staff sensitivity to locality and believe that it will continue to drive a broadening technical agenda for the W3C community.  This will intensify as we address more geographies and in particular the Global South.  Solutions for disparate areas such as payments, application development, media, and publishing are all different in different geographies, and W3C needs to increase resources in those areas.

Tooling


2010: 23% of technical headcount
2019: 18% of technical headcount

Since W3C is a Member-based organization with approximately 450 Members working in many different groups, W3C has always created unique tools to ensure that Member participation is as strong as possible.  We also have unique tools for our Patent Policy - since W3C Members make significant commitments of IPR for W3C specs, they need sophisticated tracking tools.

Over time, we have reduced staffing for tools to support collaboration.  That is because there is increased availability of industry tools (e.g. github) to help manage our work and so we have been able to reduce our support staff.  However, there is still sufficient high-touch capability that this expense cannot be reduced much further.

Additionally, there will be a short increase in tooling expense.  As we make the consortium more agile so that Members can publish more freely that will require enhancements to existing tooling.