Deprecating earlier WebIDL based Automotive specifications

The W3C Automotive Webplatform Business Group worked on a pair of WebIDL specifications for exposing vehicle signals as a first class object within a browser runtime. They were published as final reports in December of 2014 to be handed over to a newly chartered W3C Automotive Working Group to bring them through the W3C standards process. Based on feedback from various other groups at W3C, including the Technical Architecture Group, and how the Auto industry is split between HTML5 and Qt for developing applications for head units we switched to a service approach (VISS) in July of 2016. A service also allows for headless applications that do not need to operate in HTML5 or Qt, example being data collection for fleet management.

In December of 2016 The VW Group joined W3C and submitted their similar approach (ViWi) for consideration. As prototypes were underway and we wanted to further our understanding of issues from implementation experiences the group resolved to continue VISS work and formed a task force for converging the two approaches for next version specification (RSI). The group intends to complete VISS and recharter for RSI end of 2017 or early 2018 and publish First Public Working Drafts (FPWD). RSI has modules for other services that will be made available, media services, media libraries, CDN, notifications with more planned Location Based Services (LBS).