W3C Launches Initiative to Improve the Web for Merchants
21 October 2020 | Archive
W3C today launched the Merchant Business Group, an open forum to address challenges for customer experiences and business needs using Web technologies. Merchants, integrators, platform providers, and others will discuss how emerging Web technologies could help address customer experience challenges, and what additional Web capabilities may be necessary. The group offers participants an opportunity to learn directly from the organizations building Web experiences about how Web standards trends can affect (and improve) e-commerce. W3C Members Worldpay from FIS, Fiserv, Coles Supermarket Group and Connexus are the first organizations to join the new group, whose first meeting will take place on October 26, 2020.
A W3C Business Group gives innovators wanting to have an impact on the development of the Web in the near-term, a vendor-neutral forum for collaborating with like-minded stakeholders, including W3C Members and non-Members who can participate in the Business Group without full W3C Membership. Please read more in our press release.
First Public Working Draft: Propagation format for distributed trace context: Baggage
20 October 2020 | Archive
The Distributed Tracing Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Propagation format for distributed trace context: Baggage. Distributed tracing is a set of tools and practices to monitor the health and reliability of a distributed application. A distributed application is an application that consists of multiple components that are deployed and operated separately. It is also known as micro-service.
The main concept behind distributed tracing is event correlation. Event correlation is a way to correlate events from one component to the events from another. It allows to find the cause-and-effect relationship between these events. For instance – find which user action in a browser caused a failure in the business logic layer.
To correlate events between components, these components need to exchange and store a piece of information called context. Typically context consists of an originating event identifier, an originating component identity and other event properties. Context has two parts. The first part is a trace context. Trace context consists of properties crucial for event correlation. The second part is baggage. Baggage carries user-defined properties. These properties may be helpful for correlation scenarios. But they are not required and components may choose to not carry or store them.
Unifying the format of distributed tracing context as well as aligning on semantic meaning of the values is the main objective of this working group. The goal is to share this with the community so that various tracing and diagnostics products can operate together.
