Matthew Atkinson

The move to Github for tracking our work - including actions, and various horizontal review tasks - has been a boon for productivity, and transparency. However, it can be hard to keep up to date with all the work that's going on, especially for TF facilitators, WG chairs, people who take part in horizontal review activities, and people who find the command line more accessible.

With a hat tipped to Tracker, our long-time action management tool, APA WG has been exploring the possibilities for presenting the rich and robust GitHub process on the command line. But this isn't just for APA WG; it's intended to be of use to TF facilitators and WG chairs across W3C.

Demonstrate our command-line work tracking tool, and seek feedback from potential users

• Use cases for a new interface to the GitHub process

• Demo of Nu Tracker

• Roadmap

• Questions and feedback

• W3C Calendar

• minutes

• Session proposal on GitHub

Ora Lassila, Adrian Gschwend

This session will have a short presentation about the current state of the work the RDF-Star WG is undertaking, followed by Q&A and discussion.

Inform interested parties about RDF-Star (aka RDF 1.2)

• W3C Calendar

• Session proposal on GitHub

Ege Korkan, Jan Romann

The Web of Things Working Group is working on defining a registry mechanism where the wide WoT community, including other organizations like other SDOs, can contribute WoT bindings of existing protocols and media types. The WG has analyzed approaches within (official and not official ones) and outside of W3C and in this breakout we want to share our findings with the wide W3C, get inputs, and collaborate on building knowledge on how to manage registries for each technical report.

Slides

Discussion and Collection of Opinion

• Share the registry analysis of the WoT WG with everyone and get feedback

• Discussion on managing registries in W3C

• W3C Calendar

• minutes

• Session proposal on GitHub

Wendy Reid

Facilitating meetings in technical spaces is an important skill, and there are not many resources on how to do it for people new to the practice or new to W3C. Based on the meeting facilitation training developed by the Positive Work Environments CG at W3C, this session will provide a condensed version of the training covering how to effectively run meetings in a W3C context, how to handle code of conduct matters, and how to handle conflict.

Provide meeting facilitators with information and guidance on running better meetings.

• Effective meeting facilitation

  • Setting the stage

  • Tooling

  • Fostering discussion

• Introducing the code of conduct

  • Role of the facilitator

• Handling difficult situations

  • De-escalation

• W3C Calendar

• minutes

• recording

• Session proposal on GitHub

Matthew Atkinson

Navigation around sites can be complex, presenting barriers for people who struggle to understand the visual layout, or terminology that a site uses. However, there are several key sections or pages that can be found across many sites. The WAI-Adapt Task Force is exploring an approach (pending review) to address these barriers.

This session introduces the problem, shows how we envisage the solution working, from the user's perspective - via a demo of an interactive browser extension - and describes our proposed approach, in order to answer your questions, and gather informal feedback before we apply for horizontal and wide review from the community.

Raise awareness of the challenges of site navigation, and a potential simple, semantic, standardized solution

• Site navigation barriers

• What support could look like in the browser (demo)

• WAI-Adapt's proposed solution

• Next steps (i.e. seeking review)

• Discussion

• W3C Calendar

• minutes

• recording

• Session proposal on GitHub

Daniel Appelquist, Robin Berjon, Jeffrey Yasskin

The Technical Architecture Group Privacy task force, together with participation from Privacy Interest Group, has been working on a set of privacy principles for the web. This is intended to be used by browser developers, authors of web specifications, reviewers of web specifications (such as the TAG and other groups participating in horizontal review), and web developers themselves. Now this document is going through wide review in advance of publication as a W3C Statement. We will present the principles and then have an open discussion.

Increase awareness of the Privacy Principles, answer questions, gather feedback on how to improve the draft.

• Brief presentation of an overview of the principles

• Guided discussion

• W3C Calendar

• minutes

• Session proposal on GitHub

Ege Korkan

As a follow-up of Schemata Breakout of TPAC23, we want to further discuss ways to manage ontologies, schemas, and similar documents together. In the scope of the Thing Description Task Force at the Web of Things WG, we have analyzed some approaches such as LinkML, TreeLDR, Eclipse Semantic Modelling Framework, that we want to present. We have also identified that the topic of versioning, packaging, and serving these resources is a pressing topic that is not specific to the WoT. After these, we want to discuss on how to better continue the discussions in this topic area within the W3C.

Slides

Discussion and Collection of Opinion

• Recap of the TPAC2023 Breakout

• Results of the analysis of tools at the WoT WG

• Versioning, packaging and serving resources

• Continuation of the work

• W3C Calendar

• minutes

• Session proposal on GitHub

François Daoust, Patrick Brosset, Kadir Topal

How do web developers talk about web features? What names do they use? How do these features map to specifications, fine-grained API functions and tests? What does a developer view tell us about the interoperability of the web platform?

The web-features project, envisioned in 2022 and launched in 2023, explores the set of interoperable features of the web platform by:

• Creating feature definitions, which identify and describe capabilities of web browsers.

• Generating Baseline support data, which summarizes the availability of web features across key browsers and releases.

• Publishing the web-features npm package, which bundles feature identifiers with Baseline statuses.

Developed by the WebDX Community Group and contributors, web-features data leverages compatibility data from the browser-compat-data project, is already integrated in MDN, Can I Use, Web Platform Tests, and is starting to reach additional authors of JavaScript libraries and dashboards.

Looking forward, feature identifiers at the "right" level make it possible to tag signals from the web community in surveys, browser standard positions, bug trackers, polyfills and usage counters. It also makes it easier to combine these signals with other projects that generate data out of specifications such as browser-specs and webref.

Features are also used in standardization groups, informally to organize discussions, but also formally to address transition requirements set forth by the W3C Process Document for advancing specifications on the Recommendation track. Within the Process, new features are defined as substantive changes that add new functionality, and used to assess implementation experience, document functionality that is considered at risk, and scope changes that may be incorporated in a specification depending on its maturity stage. This raises questions on the intersection between web-features and W3C’s standardization process, including:

• Can web-features provide useful information to working groups?

• Can it also inform the standardization process, e.g., to detect the need to transition a feature implemented by more than one browser out of incubation?

• What additional data or tooling would make web-features a powerful tool for standards bodies?

• How would you like to see web-features data presented in standards work?

Share updates on the web-features project, its use to inform the standardization process, and additional data, tooling and visualizations to make web-features a powerful tool for standards bodies.

• Presentation (20mn - see slides)

  • Web developers and web features

  • Web features and standardization

  • First stab at gathering signals to inform standardization process

    • Late incubations

    • Late Working Drafts

    • Not-so-well supported Recommendations

• Discussion (30mn)

• W3C Calendar

• minutes

• Session proposal on GitHub

Rupak Chakraborty, Dr. Humera Noor Minhas

The proliferation of Generative AI has disrupted many industries and is poised to change significant aspects of our society. Without guardrails, we have often seen conversational AI agents overfitting to the bias in the training data which negatively impacts users. At eyeo, we build machine learning solutions on a web-scale, and in order to ensure our models are fair and sustainable, we have taken several concrete steps to transform the input data and calibrate the model evaluation to reflect real-world scenarios. We believe it’s high time to start a discussion around having a formal framework which outlines the ethical considerations for the use of Generative AI and AI in general. During the session, we will explore the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead from a technical and social perspective.

This builds on our session on Ethical AI during TPAC 2023, with a focus on Generative AI.

Brainstorm ideas on the ethics of these new and upcoming technologies (Generative AI) and discuss the implications of adopting these on a large scale from a social, economic and technical perspective.

1. Rise of Generative AI

2. Role of the World Wide Web in the adoption of these technologies

3. Steps we take at eyeo to de-bias our web-scale Machine Learning models

4. Ethical Implications of the use of these technologies

5. The future of setting ethical standards for Generative AI

Additional Information

During the course of the session, we will be making use of this Miro Board, please make sure you are able to view this. The board is password-protected at the moment. At the beginning of the session, we will share the password with all the participants.

We have also planned a short presentation at the start of the session. You can find the slide deck here

Finally, while preparing for the session we made notes and organized relevant details pertaining to the existing literature on Ethics for AI and Generative AI. In case you are interested please have a look at this Google Doc

• W3C Calendar

• Session proposal on GitHub

Brian Kardell, Robin Berjon, Eric Meyer

The Web has billions of users, and most users have many, many dependencies on the web. The ecosystem around the web, which includes things like web engines, is both incredibly complex and fundamentally critical.

But the model that has driven, funded, and sustained this ecosystem isn’t ideal. There is no guarantee that it will be sustainable over the long term, but beyond that, it already falls quite short of funding everything that needs to be done. There is just too much. Many things go long ignored simply because prioritization is hard, and funds are ultimately limited. This includes everything from new features in popular languages like CSS and JS up to entire languages like MathML and SVG, which have largely been the work of (often unpaid) individual contributors.

In this session, we intend to have a community discussion of alternative models for funding the web ecosystem, from collective funding pools to changes in open source project policies to changes in tax law, and beyond.

To help further discussions toward better solutions

• W3C Calendar

• minutes

• Session proposal on GitHub

Marcos Caceres, Reilly Grant, Matthew Reynolds, Carl Smith

The following proposal is based on this email and related discussion in the Gamepad API repo. Posted here as Chair of the WebApps WG.

This proposal for a W3C breakout session aims to address a critical limitation of the web as a platform for applications requiring low-latency response to user inputs. Despite technological advancements, the web's current input handling mechanisms are inadequate for such applications due to their dependence on the main thread.

User input APIs, which include keyboard, pointer, gamepad, HID, USB, MIDI, Bluetooth, and serial interfaces, are currently designed to register handlers on the main thread. This design results in inconsistent and unreliable response times, as the main thread is frequently occupied with other processes. This limitation adversely affects a broad range of applications, particularly those requiring precise user inputs, such as certain video games, Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs), synthesizers, and art programs that rely on touch gestures.

While incorporating timestamps in input APIs could offer some improvement, a more effective solution is to allow these APIs to be accessible from Web Workers. This change would significantly reduce input latency issues. Some APIs are already making progress in this direction, but others, especially those tied to the DOM API like keyboard and pointer events, face more complex challenges due to their inherent link to the main thread.

This issue, recently discussed with folks involved with the Gamepad API, highlights the need for a comprehensive approach that encompasses various APIs. Therefore, this session proposal seeks to gather community input and collaboration to explore and develop solutions that enhance the web's ability to handle user inputs with the necessary low latency. This effort requires a broad perspective and collective action, addressing the current limitations and identifying feasible paths for improvement in web application responsiveness.

See if it's feasible to route some HID events to workers

• W3C Calendar

• minutes

• Session proposal on GitHub

Alan Bird

The mission of the Real Estate Community Group is to provide a forum for real estate-related technical discussions to track progress of technology features on the Web within W3C groups, educate on the use of Web technologies by external organizations, and to identify use cases and requirements that existing and/or new specifications need to meet to deliver a more inclusive, robust experiences to the Real Estate ecosystem. This session will discuss the group, answer questions and briefly demonstrate the DO AudioTours technology built by Direct Offer.

Additional session chair: Amy Chorew.

Get support for the group

• Introductions

• Why we're creating the CG

• Who are the potential actors in the group

• What it does for the real estate industry

• demo of DO AudioTours

• W3C Calendar

• slides

• recording

• Session proposal on GitHub

Chris Wilson

The process of incubation, and some of its parameters, are not currently well-defined at W3C. I'd like to gather perspectives to further the work on Incubation in the AB (https://github.com/w3c/AB-memberonly/blob/master/documents/Incubation.md).

Some provoking questions to explore:

• How should incubation work?

• At what stage of "doneness" should work move from an incubation venue to a working group?

• How should an incubation group be communicating their work to a broader venue to ease acceptance as a WG deliverable?

• What expectation of incubation should there be before work is accepted into a WG, or into its charter?

• What best practices should we define for referring to incubations?

Gather input and perspectives to further the AB work on improving incubation process

• W3C Calendar

• minutes

• Session proposal on GitHub

Diego Gonzalez-Zuniga, Amanda Baker

This breakout session is to talk about ideas we have regarding enabling installation of web apps and web content through the platform natively. This is a new proposal that aims at democratizing application distribution.

The goals for the session are to describe and generate discussion about the challenges functionality like this might have. The session is open to the public.

Describe and generate discussion about the challenges functionality like this might have.

• W3C Calendar

• minutes

• Session proposal on GitHub

Will Bamberg

At the Secure the Web Forward workshop in 2023, writers from Open Web Docs led a discussion about the state of web security docs on MDN. One outcome from this was that OWD would draft an outline for some improved security documentation for MDN, which would be written in 2024.

We've now written up a draft outline and it's had some internal review: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p1GtjmTd1uQrO2PRb_uUflAfQpEsfs7hBaopYeuoPMM/edit, and we're ready for some more extensive review of the outline before we start writing docs.

We're very keen on finding security experts to collaborate with us on this project, both in these early stages as we scope the project, and for detailed technical review of documents as we write them.

In this session, we'll present the draft outline, discuss any feedback, and next steps, which we hope will be making a start on the documentation!

Review MDN web security docs outline proposal

Agenda

• W3C Calendar

• minutes

• recording

• Session proposal on GitHub