For a few weeks now we have been hearing concern in the Web community in regard to Web Environment Integrity, and are asked more and more about it. Our silence is due to the fact that the Web Environment Integrity API is not being worked on in W3C, nor has there been any submission to W3C for W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) review.

In the rest of this article, I want to take the opportunity to explain generally how new work is brought to the World Wide Web Consortium, and how several W3C work groups coordinate what we call "horizontal review". This review and other safeguards we have in place, transcends a particular technology by focusing on aspects that impact people and the Web: Web accessibility, architecture, internationalization, privacy, and security.

Bringing new work to W3C

Candidate W3C work arises from W3C Workshops or Member Submissions, or tracking the activity in public W3C Community Groups. New work starts at W3C by initiating new working groups based on interest from W3C Members and Team, or landing in existing working groups (in which case, the groups' charters are updated.) New charters and revised charters both require Member consensus.

Passing W3C "horizontal review"

The W3C Process Document enshrines "horizontal review" as a requirement. For a new working group, the review is done internally before any proposed charter is brought to W3C Members for approval. For new technology or specifications, the review must be done as part of publication on the W3C Recommendation track (i.e., the progression stages from an idea to a Web Standard.)

The redesigned W3C website is now live! 

There is more to do, but this deployment concludes the four months the site was available in Beta, which followed a year of internal preparation, and two years of work with UK-based digital agency Studio 24, to whom we awarded the website redesign project in early 2020. For me personally, this is a milestone of the “action item” I took over 4 years ago to communicate more effectively what our organization does with a more modern, inclusive, usable website. 

Redesigning a website and content that has been building up since 1994 is a massive undertaking, so we chose to break it down into phases and focus first on a subset of the public-facing pages most useful to key audiences: 

• W3C homepage 
• /Standards, /Participate, /Membership, /Consortium 
• W3C Blog & Blog article 
• Business ecosystem landing pages 
• Work Groups 'profile' pages (new) 
• /TR homepage 
• Account pages 
• Others as determined by Information Architecture 

This as well as goals and other related elements are documented in a slide deck I created at the start of the project. 

On the surface, the new site implements current web best practices and technologies, donned a cleaner and elegant visual design, and provides information (in many cases rewritten and consolidated) in a more user-friendly fashion. 

Under the hood, everything changed. From the complete information architecture to the CMS and the tools that make all of our sub-sites work together. 

Feedback on the site itself and the content is expected as issues on our GitHub repository. 

We will gradually work to address existing non-blocking issues (in association with Studio 24 who now help us with support and maintenance), and to include the rest of the site as part of this design, starting with deploying the Chinese and Japanese localized sites for which we have seeded a lot of the work already. 

Finally, I want to acknowledge the considerable help I got along this captivating project from the entire W3C Systems Team, in particular this project could not have happened without the contributions from Vivien Lacourba, Jean-Guilhem Rouel, Gerald Oskoboiny, Laurent Carcone, Denis Ah-Kang. Thank you. 

More information on the W3C Website redesign: 

The goals of the redesign were to achieve a cleaner and modern look and greater usability, better accessibility, as well as ultimately simplifying how the site is managed. We also want to offer integrated Japanese and Chinese versions. 

Studio 24 documented the collaboration and process on the redesign of our website in a “work in the open” site, notably today's update. You can read more about today’s milestone from Studio 24’s blog post. 

本帖也有简体中文版本 (This post also exists in Simplified Chinese)

It is with bittersweet emotions, that I share that Karen Myers’ time as W3C Business Development Leader for the Americas and Australia is ending.

After 18 years, Karen has chosen to retire from the World Wide Web Consortium to pursue personal endeavors. We want to take this opportunity to thank Karen and to reflect upon her contributions to W3C over her many years of service.

We welcomed Karen Myers in 2004 to assume the role of Acting Director of Communications, and we were fortunate to later gain her help with marketing and business development for memberships. In both areas, Karen’s technology marketing experience, her positive energy and love of learning were strengths which enabled her to accomplish the challenge to create business value propositions that made clear both the power of the Web and the value of Membership so that organizations would consider joining W3C.

Karen’s achievements over the years, allocating her time between marketing, media coordination, and business development were numerous. To name only a few:

• coordinating the communications of our Director Tim Berners-Lee’s knighthood by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in 2004.
• planning the W3C ten-year anniversary events and gala.
• working with Tim on some of his speeches —including his first TED talk.
• putting together international W3C events at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas (USA) and Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona (Spain), the first Web and TV W3C Workshop in Hollywood (USA) where we began the work to “make video a first-class citizen of the web”, which in turn led a few years after to W3C receiving one of 3 National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) technical Emmy® Awards.
• coordinating with W3C Evangelists and Chapters in publishing, media and entertainment, automotive and accessibility, and supporting global outreach and educational events.
• recruiting and onboarding hundreds of new members to participate in W3C standards activities and more.

Going forward, I, Alan Bird, Global W3C Business Development Lead, will resume Karen’s day-to-day responsibilities immediately. Naomi Yoshizawa, Global W3C Member Relations Lead, will handle member relationship and other administrative questions. And Philippe Le Hégaret, W3C Project Management Lead is the contact for operational questions regarding W3C groups charters, W3C process, and participation in work groups.

Farewell and best wishes to Karen in whatever new adventures she chooses to pursue next!

With the start of the year 2023 we pass a milestone in the evolution of the global collaboration project that is the World Wide Web Consortium: In our 29th year of operation, we are operating now as World Wide Web Consortium Inc, continuing with Beihang University (China), ERCIM (France), and Keio University (Japan) as partners.

At the broadest level our mission continues unchanged, with the W3C Advisory Board leading a project to renew the expression of that mission.

Our community – our Members, non-Member contributors, Team, and all who use the results of our collective work – will continue to refine their expectations of this project and we will continue to adapt to those expectations.

Our strength derives from the diversity of our global inclusion. This should be our guide as we continue to refine the best arrangement of the elements of this project.

Thank you for your continued engagement in this global effort to maintain one world wide web with equitable access for all its users.

–Ralph Swick, W3C Interim CEO

As part of our commitment and continued focus on diversity and inclusion here is the annual report for our most senior bodies.

Over a several year period we have substantially improved our geographic and gender diversity in these groups. But we still have much more to go. More broadly in the consortium we still have many under-represented groups.

As you can see in the graphs, since last year (and yearly since 2018) we continue to make incremental improvements.

The W3C Diversity bar charts and figures for 2022 are also available in a standalone public document.

Diversity data for W3C

Notes on the graphs and information collection: Because we do not collect participants’ data, to preserve privacy, it is difficult to gather data for different characterizations of diversity. We are able to focus on gender identity and geography for several of our representative bodies: W3C Advisory Board (AB), W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG), W3C Management (W3M).

W3C Advisory Board

The W3C Advisory Board provides ongoing guidance to W3C on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution. Created in March 1998, the AB has now for several years conducted its work in a public wiki. The elected Members of the Advisory Board participate as individual contributors and not as representatives of their organizations; the AB use their best judgment to find the best solutions for the Web, not just for any particular network, technology, vendor, or user.

The 11 Advisory Board positions are member-elected. The gender diversity of the AB has not changed this year. After the last election last month, the board has 4 women and 7 men for the fourth consecutive year.

Tabular version of AB by gender identity.

Looking at the Advisory Board by geography, we see that the geographical diversity which was heavily tilted toward North America between 1998 and 2009 steadily improved and reached in 2018 an equal number of participants in each region. The Asian representation has expanded without regressing since 2016 and this year it reached its highest number, surpassing the North American representation. The European representation which was more or less consistently about 1/5^th since 2004 and peaked around 1/3^rd in 2017 and 2018, has continued to shrink after this and has been at its lowest for the third year in a row.

Tabular version of AB by geography.

W3C Technical Architecture Group

The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) is a special working group within W3C, chartered to steward web architecture, document and build consensus around principles of web architecture, resolve issues involving general web architecture brought to the TAG, and to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C.

The 9 Technical Architecture Group positions are a mix of member election and appointment by the W3C Director. The group was composed only of men during its first nine years until 2011 when the TAG counted a woman during the next eight years except in 2015 where there were 2 of them. In 2019 and 2020, a third of the TAG were women. After the last election earlier this year, the composition of the TAG remained the same: a non-binary member, 3 women and 5 men.

Tabular version of TAG by gender identity.

Looking at the TAG by geography, we returned to the same representation as in 2020: the North America contingent is the most represented again, followed by Europe, and Asia/Pacific.

Tabular version of TAG by geography.

W3C Management

The W3C management team is responsible for the day to day coordination of and decisions for the team, resource allocation, and strategic planning.

Note: The diagrams use percentages because the number of persons on W3M has changed over the years.

Gender diversity of W3C management continues to be heavily tilted toward male representation. The trend toward an increase in female representation has started in 2012. It has been rather stable between 2016 and 2021. In 2022 we have reached for the first time 1/3^rd of women in W3C management. There are 12 men and 6 women in W3C management today.

Tabular version of W3M by gender identity.

The geographical distribution in W3M is relatively good and has been trending steadily toward more balance since 2012. The Northern America contingent is still the most represented, but it is at its lowest and for the second year in a row. Asian representation which surpassed the European's in 2021 has increased a bit. For the 5^th year in a row, the European and Asian representatives amount to slightly over 50% of the W3C management.

Tabular version of W3M by geography.

A letter from our CEO

Marking two years since the start of the pandemic, W3C CEO Jeff Jaffe reflects on how the web became the ultimate tool of resilience for the world.

The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world

It’s hard to draw a thread between Wordle, vaccine appointments, and the trillions of dollars exchanging hands each year via e-commerce. But there’s not just a thread, there’s a web.

The World Wide Web

Last week marked two years since a COVID-19-imposed lockdown manifestly changed our lives in most of the world. It not only brought the magnitude of the pandemic’s threat into clearer focus, but offered a forecast of the ensuing challenges society would navigate. It was a period of fear and uncertainty, as we pivoted to life at home and did our best to adjust our roles as parents, teachers, students, workers, and caregivers within reality forced upon us.

Last week coincided with the birthday of the World Wide Web, invented by W3C’s founder and Director, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Within the new reality, the web became not just a convenience, it became our lifeline.

As we reflect on the past two years of altered life amid the pandemic, the importance of the web and all it enables has been on high display. These past two years have brought profound hardships – illness, death, isolation, layoffs. I shudder to think, however, what pandemic life would have looked like if it had transpired prior to the advent of the web.

It's difficult to think of an industry that hasn’t been substantially aided by the web during the age of Covid. Video-conferencing service is a conspicuous example. Zoom, for one, saw a jump to more than 200 million daily meeting participants in March, 2020, up from approximately 10 million in December, 2019. The Web makes all that possible for workers across industries to interact if not perfectly, at least in a manner that allowed most to remain productive. Web access kept millions employed, no doubt preventing a full-on economic depression. Businesses quickly saw that success and progress could take place with a remote workforce, delivering a viable long-term option to reduce costs and contribute to better work-life balance. The web makes all that possible.

As we yearned for normalcy amid the pandemic, home entertainment is another web-enabled sector that saw dramatic gains in the Covid era. Streaming services made long days and nights of confinement more bearable, delivering content to our devices with video streaming services reaching 1.1 billion global subscribers in 2020. Netflix alone added 36 million subscribers.

The web connecting us

Perhaps the most crucial role the web played during the pandemic was allowing families and friends to remain connected. In June, 2020, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the web’s inventor and our Director, said that “the web has been the critical unifying force, enabling work, school, social activity and mutual support. Always intended as a platform for creativity and collaboration at a distance, it is great to see it also being used more than ever for compassion at a distance too.” Being able to see and communicate with loved ones brought comfort amidst the chaos, allowing us to share birthdays, holidays – even funerals – from the depths of isolation. Literally and figuratively, the web allowed us to endure.

The web has been essential in enabling remote learning; it has facilitated the delivery of everything from groceries to home décor; it has helped countless small businesses stay afloat; and it has allowed hundreds of millions of people to schedule Covid tests and vaccines.

Coincidentally, this week marks another anniversary– the invention of the web itself. It was this week in 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee wrote a memo: “Information Management: A Proposal.” It did nothing less than invent the web. While 33^rd anniversaries are typically not celebrated with fanfare, as we reflect on the last two years, I am in awe of what that memo enabled – how many lives it saved, how it enabled communication, and how it became all that Tim anticipated.

Shepherding the future of the web

Yet we must not take the web for granted. It can do more. It can be more. And it will take a collaborative effort to ensure the web becomes more accessible to people around the world, more secure, and can function as the engine to fuel growth in key parts of economy and society.

The cultural, economic, and societal shifts of the past two years underscore the importance of web-based technology and services. They have cast light on the need for universally accepted technical specifications, guidelines, and web standards. This means acknowledging that the web enables both the dissemination of vital information and that it creates channels to spread misinformation. It means recognizing that while the web is the ultimate accelerator of business and commerce, its ubiquity also facilitates significant misdeeds. All of this compels us to a sustained, heightened state of vigilance to ensure one of humanity’s greatest achievements does not fall victim to those who would misuse its enormous power for ill purpose.

A web for everyone

Finally, the past two years also has compounded the digital divide, which prevented too many people from accessing the capabilities of the web during the pandemic or otherwise. While some of us take the web for granted, an estimated 37 percent of the world’s population lacks web access. Of those, the UN estimates that 96 percent live in developing countries.

One of the W3C’s primary goals is to ensure the web and its basic functions be available to everyone on Earth, delivering on the promise delivered by Sir Tim Berners-Lee that the web is accessible, internationalized, secure, and works for all. As Tim has said in succinct terms: “This is for everyone.”

We are aware of a complaint from “Movement for an Open Web” (Marketers For An Open Web Limited) that accuses W3C of “favouring the giant tech corporations in its procedures and decision-making and failing to comply with antitrust laws.” We have seen only the public statement on their website. These allegations have no basis in fact.

W3C operates an open, transparent, vendor-neutral Process that we established and refined collectively, in public, since 1994. In that Process, every member has an equal voice, and every input or objection gets a hearing. Our antitrust and competition guidance reminds participants of their legal obligations as potential competitors to comply with applicable antitrust or competition laws and regulations. Our royalty-free patent policy aims to enable widespread implementation and use of W3C recommendations. Through wide and public review of draft specifications, we gather input including security, privacy, accessibility, and internationalization reviews.

As a non-profit whose mission is to lead the web to its full potential, the Web Consortium is able to bring together myriad stakeholders by upholding values and design principles that foster one web, for all, built openly and collaboratively. We are first and foremost a level playing field, which we take seriously as one of the pillars to advance the web.

Last week, two UK regulatory agencies, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), issued reports with favorable reference to W3C processes and guidance. The ICO opinion on “Data protection and privacy expectations for online advertising proposals” sets an expectation that online advertising proposals for potential web standards or “significant impact on the broader web” should “engage organisations such as the W3C at an appropriate stage in the development lifecycle” and “have worked through any applicable review process. For example, the established means at W3C to obtain wider review, which includes the ‘Self-Review Questionnaire: Security and Privacy.’ This is intended to address likely questions raised by key W3C groups such as the Technical Architecture Group and Privacy Interest Group.”

Twenty-seven years ago, on 1 October 1994, Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web Consortium as the next step in the evolution and support of the Web. Quoting from the proposal:

“The web allows human communication and cooperation by sharing knowledge, and opens this to ordinary people who need no technical skill. […]

At the same time, companies which are becoming increasingly committed to the web as a way of working and doing business are calling for a central body to define the web, ensure its stability and smooth progression through continued technological innovation.”

True to Tim Berners-Lee’s vision

Much as Tim’s original vision for the web as a global information sharing space has proved visionary for the web, so does his original design of the Web Consortium.

The aims he described for the Consortium have stood the test of time and his vision is a guiding star: after 27 years, we continue to act as a primary point of contact for those interested in the web; coordinate the development of the web standards that undergird the web; promote the use of the web in new domains; aid especially the less technically developed countries in using the web for the rapid transfer of knowledge, diffusion of culture and as an economic enabler.

Please bookmark and read our latest report to see our work in context. The next version of our Strategic Highlights document will be published in a few weeks.

Thousands of specifications to weave the web

Since October 1994, W3C published 446 Recommendations (final standards), part of a total of 8367 different classes of technical specifications.

These technologies power the web and are made robust by our focus on interoperability, security, privacy, web accessibility, internationalization. The web of 27 years ago still works, just as the web now will work 27 years in the future. As W3C’s Dominique Hazaël-Massieux mentioned recently: “That's part of the promise of web standards. It's amazing to think that we can can still load the first website in any of our browsers without any challenge. The confidence that business can have is that part of the business we're in at W3C is building to last."

A visionary web community

One unusual aspect of the Consortium is that many of those who were at W3C at its start are still in the staff (among others, the “father of CSS” Bert Bos and “father of SVG” Chris Lilley), part of our membership or of our larger community. This community is global and ranges from new coders to experts who have contributed to the building blocks of the Web.

Since then, many more have joined the ranks of web standards, from around the world and more diversity means better representation, which leads to better and more inclusive web standards design. The staff, members, and community who have given their time (sometimes decades of their time), expertise and vision, are unique in their efforts to together make the web and the world better.

Tim Berners-Lee once said: “The Web is humanity connected by technology.” The specifications we write are blueprints for the web, which in turn become web pages available in hundreds of languages and accessible to people with disabilities; video conferencing with colleagues or family; beautiful graphics, fonts, videos, games, VR, movies; online shopping; music, photos or works of art. They are the power of data, connected cars and connected cities. They are people connecting, sharing and learning.

As we celebrate this anniversary today, we are grateful for the incredible energy and good will that the web sparks off. With our community, the Web Consortium continues to make the web work, for everyone.

On 6 August 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted information about his WorldWideWeb project to the public and introduced the Web to the world.

“Try it“, Tim noted in his message - and since then, billions of people have.

Think about how often you use the Web. Aren’t you surprised at how essential the Web is to your life?

60% of the world is online. We use the Web every day in our communications, jobs, connecting to family, sharing knowledge and even our democracy depends on it. But what do we take for granted about the Web? How utterly ubiquitous it is, for one thing.

In 2019 Pew Research noted that: "Overall, 81% of Americans say they go online on a daily basis." Statistica found: In Europe internet access stood at around 63 percent in 2009, within a decade that expanded to almost 80 percent. Less than 5 percent of the people living across Africa had access to the internet in 2009, while now almost a quarter of people across the continent have access to the internet.” The number of online users has also grown rapidly in Asia. As of 2021, about 2.6 billion people in Asia are online. As many as 40 million people in Southeast Asia came online for the first time in 2020, reported by CNBC and that increased the total number of internet users to nearly 70% of the population in Southeast Asia.

This anniversary is particularly meaningful in China where, according to a poem by Confucius, a 30th birthday means one's feet are firmly planted upon the ground (三十而立). China has been on the internet on a permanent basis since the 1990s. Since 2000 when there were only 22.5 million internet users in China, that number has multiplied nearly 38 times in two decades. CNNIC reported that the number of Chinese online users has now reached nearly 1 billion. Web technologies have been playing an indispensable role in people's daily life, and in the rapid development of China's digital economy.

The World Wide Web Consortium has been producing technologies in some of the most vital areas of the growth of the Web, how we lived our lives during the global pandemic crisis; and how we will live in the future. To understand the magnitude of it, see “What happens in an Internet Minute” in 2020, for example:

• Zoom hosts 208,333 meetings
• There are 404,444 Netflix user streams
• YouTube users upload 500 hours of video
• Consumers spend $1,000,000 online
• 1,388,889 people make video/voice calls

The Web’s richness, health, and future potential is linked to the immense amount of work done at the Web Consortium since its founding in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, to ensure it is open, interoperable and works for everyone. If many big companies are mentioned in press about the Web (and for some people, a few have even become synonymous with it), it is because their engineers unite at our table. Because of the work accomplished at the Web Consortium you can use the Web on any device; you can go to a Web page on any browser; you can read and write on the Web in almost any language; you experience the same Web on desktop, laptop, mobile, TV (not separate silos); you can use the Web whether you are blind or have mobility or accessibility issues; and your use of the Web is more and more secure. Please read our most recent state of the work document.

The Web is one of the most powerful tools in history. Despite many users’ fears of social, political and technological misuse of the Web, the Web community are working at the Web Consortium to ensure that the Web can indeed be a force for good and connection, and we continue to translate the needs of humanity into Web technologies.

And our Technical Architecture Group states in their Ethical Web Principles that:

The web should be a platform that helps people and provides a net positive social benefit… The web should empower an equitable, informed and interconnected society. It has been, and should continue to be designed to enable communication and knowledge-sharing for everyone. In the 30 years since development of the web began, it has become clear that the web platform can often be used in ways that subvert that mission. Furthermore, web technologies can be used to cause harm, which is not in keeping with the spirit of this social mission. The web should be a platform that helps people and provides a net positive social benefit. As we continue to evolve the web platform, we must therefore consider the ethical implications of our work. The web must be for good.

In their Vision for the Web, our Advisory Board has stated that:

Our vision is for a World Wide Web that is more inclusive, and more respectful of its users: a Web that supports truth better than falsehood, people more than profits, humanity rather than hate

We will improve the fundamental integrity of the Web platform. The Web will not only grow in scope and importance in our lives; it will grow in respect for its users, grow in the trust of its users, grow in its inclusion of all humanity as its users.

The Web is for all humanity. The Web is designed for the good of its users. The Web must be safe for its users. There is one interoperable world-wide Web.

As we celebrate the release of the Web to the public, we celebrate the Web and all the Members of W3C who have helped to shape and evolve Web technologies to give us the accessible, international, secure, Web we use all today. Our Advisory Board, Technical Architecture Group, Members and community are committed to, 30 years on, making sure that the Web which Tim Berners-Lee gave to the world and which has changed history and changed our lives, will continue to be a benefit to humanity.

The Web Consortium: making the Web work, for everyone.

60% of the world is online and we want and need to reflect the diversity of the whole world as more people continue to access, use and create the web. We believe that more diversity means better representation, which leads to better and more inclusive design. Indeed, more background, more use cases, more edge cases, lead to a better Web. More diversity also brings higher quality results.

We aspire to be a model in supporting greater diversity in technology. We continue to have a long way to go but we have taken steps and are doing the background work so that we both attract more diverse participants and also encourage them to be welcome in our environment.

In this post I report on related work and I also include an update of the gender and geography charts we shared last year and yearly since 2018.

Positive Work Environment

The Black Lives Matter movement stimulated a conversation about diversity in W3C which furthered the attention that our community has given it these past few years.

Many from W3C groups, our Members, the W3C Team, and our extended community joined the Inclusion and Diversity Community Group (since then merged with the Positive Work Environment community group) to develop axes for improvement. We take to heart the message we internalized while focusing on BLM: we need to work on our own environment, to make our community more welcoming by recognizing and combating biases (including unconscious bias).

The Positive Work Environment Community Group prepared language guidance, developed training on conflict management, is proposing updates to our Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (CEPC), and has been re-designing our TPAC Inclusion Fund (formerly 'Diversity Fund'), which I will present in this post. Anyone is welcome to join the PWE Community Group to suggest steps that we can take to make a difference in the future.

Inclusion Fund and Fellowships for W3C TPAC

The PWE group has designed the Inclusion Fund and Fellowships to respond to the obstacles that might block participation from underrepresented groups at our yearly conference, TPAC, and encourage outreach to new participants.

TPAC Inclusion Fund

As this year’s TPAC will continue to be virtual, we are continuing the efforts to ensure that people can attend, for example through assistive technology or caring support. We are of course happy to hear ideas on what else the fund should support.

Examples of what the Inclusion Fund might help to cover:

• technology to participate more effectively online
• help with paying internet costs
• child care (or care for a relative)
• noise cancelling headphones if you need quiet to concentrate
• co-working space if you don’t have room at your office or home

Applications opened today, until August 15, 2021 (Note: being designed for people who would like to participate in our standards work or who already do, the form requires applicants to have a W3C account. Request one here.) The application form gives information on eligibility and how the applications will be assessed. Please, share this information with your teams, your friends that are concerned with TPAC participation, on your social networks, enterprise networks, at virtual meet-ups, etc. Also, consider encouraging someone directly if you think W3C could benefit from their attendance at TPAC.

TPAC Fellow Honoraria

In September 2021, we will open a different application period to award three to five persons a TPAC Fellow honorarium of US$ 500 to encourage participants in TPAC from underrepresented groups who may not have the wider support from their organization to dedicate to W3C goals, so they can contribute in a more meaningful way, such as:

• pitching and running a particular session
• preparing documents such as explainers or drafts for discussion
• reviewing a group’s work and preparing comments for discussion

The honorarium would pay for the work that they would have to do outside of their work to contribute in a meaningful way.

Contributions can be on any topic that is appropriate for TPAC, and don’t specifically have to focus on diversity. This fund recognizes that participating in these events can be time-consuming and people from unrepresented backgrounds face struggles within their workplaces and life that may mean they can’t prioritize attendance or a meaningful contribution without financial support.

Successful usage of the honoraria in 2020

For TPAC 2020, the Diversity Fund financially supported the work of 8 external contributors from underrepresented communities and was instrumental in the organization of 3 breakout sessions that explored the intersection of W3C technologies and the challenges facing underrepresented communities in using or shaping them to their needs: Creative Imagination for an Ethical Web, Accessing WebXR Through Art and Consent Communication on the Web.

In the feedback we collected on breakouts, these sessions were often quoted as the best of this TPAC edition and even the best ever by several participants.

Diversity data for W3C

Notes on the graphs and information collection: Because we do not collect participants’ data, to preserve privacy, it is difficult to gather data for different characterizations of diversity. We are able to focus on gender and geography for several of our representative bodies: W3C Advisory Board (AB), W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG), W3C Management (W3M).

W3C Advisory Board

The W3C Advisory Board provides ongoing guidance to W3C on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution. Created in March 1998, the AB has now for several years conducted its work in a public wiki. The elected Members of the Advisory Board participate as individual contributors and not as representatives of their organizations; the AB use their best judgment to find the best solutions for the Web, not just for any particular network, technology, vendor, or user.

The 11 Advisory Board positions are member-elected. The gender diversity of the AB has not changed this year. After the last election this month, the board has 4 women and 7 men for the third consecutive year.

Tabular version of AB by gender.

Looking at the Advisory Board by geography, we see that the geographical diversity which was heavily tilted toward North America between 1998 and 2009 steadily improved until reaching in 2018 an equal number of participants in each region. The Asian representation has expanded without regressing since 2016 and this year it is exactly the same as the Northern America's. The European representation which was more or less consistently about 1/5^th since 2004 and peaked around 1/3^rd in 2017 and 2018, has continued to shrink after this and has been at its lowest for the second year in a row.

Tabular version of AB by geography.

W3C Technical Architecture Group

The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) is a special working group within W3C, chartered to steward web architecture, document and build consensus around principles of web architecture, resolve issues involving general web architecture brought to the TAG, and to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C.

The 9 Technical Architecture Group positions are a mix of member election and appointment by the W3C Director. The group was composed only of men during its first nine years until 2011 when the TAG counted a woman during the next eight years except in 2015 where there were 2 of them. In 2019 and 2020, a third of the TAG were women. After the last election earlier this year, a non-binary member joined 3 women and 5 men in the TAG.

Tabular version of TAG by gender.

Looking at the TAG by geography, the European contingent is now the strongest --a first highest for that geography. The Asia/Pacific representation has shrunk to its minimum, and the Northern American continent hit the same lowest point as in 2019.

Tabular version of TAG by geography.

W3C Management

The W3C management team is responsible for the day to day coordination of and decisions for the team, resource allocation, and strategic planning.

Note: The diagrams use percentages because the number of persons on W3M has changed over the years.

Gender diversity of W3C management continues to be heavily tilted toward male representation. It has improved to some extent because there was a period when there was only one woman on W3M. The trend toward an increase in female representation has started in 2012. It has been rather stable since 2016, with no change for the fourth year in a row. There are 12 men and 4 women in W3C management.

Tabular version of W3M by gender.

The geographical distribution in W3M is relatively good and has been trending steadily toward more balance since 2012. The Northern America contingent is still the most represented, but not as much as before. Asian representation has once again surpassed the European's as it had in 2018. It is notable that for the 4th year in a row, the European and Asian representatives amount to slightly over 50% of the management.

Tabular version of W3M by geography.

Today we are releasing to the public the April 2021 edition of the W3C Strategic Highlights, our semi-annual report about the tremendous work to enhance, grow and strengthen the Web platform. This document focuses on progress in key areas of the web, how the Web Consortium meets the needs of industry and society as a whole.

Today also marks the anniversary of the release of the World Wide Web into the public domain, for general use, and at no cost, on 30 April 1993 by CERN. This quiet gesture, advocated by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, has had implications beyond what anyone imagined at that time: the Web has changed our lives.

I would like to use this anniversary to reflect more broadly on the importance of this infrastructure in today's world.

The world's premier information commons

Billions of people use the Web every day. It is one of the most significant and powerful inventions of our time. The Web fosters communication, collaboration, education, entertainment, innovation, and democracy on a global scale. The W3C Community has helped weave a Web that empowers all of us to expand our potential as humans. W3C global web standards are the building blocks for more than a billion web sites, trillions of dollars of online commerce, and myriad transformative phenomena.

In 1994, the year following the release of the code of the Web to the public, Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. The Web Consortium leads the Web to its full potential by convening more than 400 members, industry, researchers, and the global web community to create open standards –meeting the requirements of web accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security– to power the Web experience. Web standards are the blueprints for the digitally connected world. W3C standards make the Web works, for everyone.

The increasing impact of the Web

Our future vision is anchored in today’s reality. Since early 2020, the world has accelerated its movement from physical interaction to virtual.  This is exciting, humbling - and troubling that it was a byproduct of a public health nightmare. Statistics abound that speak to the centrality of the Web.

Whether it is e-commerce, remote learning, telehealth, conducting business in new ways, entertainment, or staying in touch with family and friends, we know this acceleration will continue. The web has become a key technical infrastructure for the global society.  If there was ever a question about the mission of the Web Consortium to build a web that works for all of humanity – the last 14 months have brought our calling into absolute clarity.

We are proud that the Web Consortium’s work has been essential to the ways in which our world has met the challenge of the past year of crisis and in providing solutions for what will come next.

The bridge between network and human imagination

For over 25 years, the Web Consortium has been working at the nexus of three axes: core technology, industry needs, and societal needs. Our proven open standards development forum and process enable software –and programmers– to work together without explicit coordination, on a royalty-free basis, with wide input, rapid iteration, and testing.

Though not well-known by the general public, the Web Consortium has earned recognition for its global impact: our accessibility standards have been adopted as requirements by regulatory bodies throughout the world. Our organization has won two Emmy Awards: in 2016 for making online videos more accessible with captions and subtitles, and again in 2019 for standardizing a Full TV Experience on the Web. The Web Consortium's impact extends even beyond this planet: NASA has used W3C standards in the Spirit, Opportunity, and Perseverance Mars rovers.

This pattern of solving problems critical to society, helping them scale to the web level, ensuring interoperability while addressing challenging problems of security, privacy, performance, accessibility, and internationalization is the sine qua non for society and the raison d’être of W3C.

There are numerous ongoing and future projects on the W3C roadmap:

• Now more than ever, the Web Consortium's work directly supports the move from physical to virtual (e.g., WebRTC recently became a standard) as well as innovations that address the needs of a changing society.
• As browsers drop third-party cookies, we're looking at privacy-preserving alternatives to cross-site tracking that can provide monetization opportunities for online publishers and marketers on the open web.
• The Chinese tech community has asked W3C to be the standardization venue for MiniApps – hybrid apps that leverage both native platforms and key web technologies, which need to work for everyone. This means enabling global interoperability and maximizing the convergence between the miniapps platforms and the Web.
• As the breadth of our work has expanded, we continue working in many areas of the Core web.  Key examples are CSS, Web Application Security, Performance, Graphics APIs, Service Workers, and WebAssembly.
• We are streamlining e-commerce, enabling immersive applications, looking at the exploitation of high speed, low latency networks (e.g. 5G), streaming in media and entertainment – and many more.

The web, sitting at the interface between what the network provides and what the human imagination craves, will always provide us with new challenges.

Re-launching ourselves for the next 25 years

The Web is a force for good that has catalyzed major social changes. At the same time, the Web's phenomenal success has led to many unintended consequences such as scams, phishing, fraud, business models based on data exploitation, misinformation, etc. We must take steps to address the unintended consequences of the standards we develop.

Our Advisory Board has been publicly developing a stronger vision statement for the Web Consortium and welcomes input from the broader community. The vision builds on –and complements– the Technical Architecture Group's excellent Ethical Web Principles published in 2020. Aiming to give the Web Consortium a new focus to improve the Web’s Integrity, reaffirmed values and principles map out the course for W3C to turn vision into action for the next 25 years.

One of these strategic goals is to strive for greater diversity and inclusion. As we continue to champion accessibility and internationalization as core principles for the Web, we must attract participants from different geographical locations, cultures, languages, accessibility needs, gender identities, and more. This applies as well to greater organizational diversity and inclusiveness – an area that we have been paying attention to for a few years, and where we make little but encouraging progress. Over the past couple of years, we have put this issue to the fore and been challenging our Members to consider diversity when proposing people to participate in W3C groups.

I hope you contribute to this important work. Human civilization is at an extraordinary juncture. The Web Consortium is in an incredible position to host the open forum where diverse voices from different parts of the world come together to incubate and build the global standards for web technologies.

Anniversary of the web

Today we mark a yearly celebration, that of the invention of the Web in March 1989 by our Director Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

A year into the pandemic, relying on the web

But also we mark a year into the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and global lockdowns.

The UN noted that Covid-19 has been a "human, economic and social crisis". We have seen incredible loss of life, disruption, worry and an increase in income inequality, the digital divide, and a disproportionate impact on working women.

In June 2020, Tim Berners-Lee wrote in the Guardian about the Covid-19 crisis:

“... the web has been the critical unifying force, [that enables] work, school, social activity and mutual support. Always intended as a platform for creativity and collaboration at a distance, it is great to see it also being used more than ever for compassion at a distance too”

We have all been tremendously reliant on the web during this year of crisis. According to the World Bank: "around the world, the pandemic and associated lockdowns are underscoring that digital connectivity is now a necessity. The internet is the gateway to many essential services, such as e-health platforms, digital cash transfers, and e-payment systems."

The web has provided a way for our world to adapt to the crisis. Online education, teleworking and remote medicine filled some of the void and according to that same World Bank post, more than a third of companies have increased the use of digital technology.

Having in mind the welfare of everyone in our community, in February 2020 we suspended all work-related travel and and moved our work to the web.

W3C works at problems that are at the nexus of three axes: core technology, industry needs, and societal needs

The pandemic, the movement to remote work, other global challenges are causing a great change in how the web and W3C technologies are used by society. The Web Consortium continues to provide leadership for the future of the web. This includes both work that directly supports the move from physical to virtual (e.g., WebRTC is now a standard) as well as innovations that address the needs of a changing society, including issues in privacy and greater decentralization of the web, web payments, web performance, entertainment and media, Web accessibility.

Looking forward, we see societal needs growing and demanding more coordinated responses. Soon the next 50% of the world will join the web for education, commerce, information sharing, and entertainment. For these new entrants, the web must be safe, inclusive, international, and accessible.

In that same Guardian article, Tim ended with a call for everyone to work together to create a better future:

“History shows us that after all great global upheavals there are major attempts to repair the damage and rebuild, with some more successfully delivered than others. In the midst of this turmoil, we must surely strive to ensure some good emerges out of the darkness.
The web can and must be for everyone — now is our moment to make this happen.”

Happy birthday, Web; thank you, community!

We are proud that the work of the Web Consortium has been essential to the ways in which our world has met the challenge of the past year of crisis and in providing solutions for what will come next.

We are grateful to Tim for the web. We are grateful for our community. Together we can make a web that works for everyone - when we need it - and for a better future for all.

This post is co-authored by Yongqing Dong, Anqi Li, Tengyuan Zhang, Yongjing Zhang and Dan Zhou.

Traditional HTML5 applications are easy to develop, but the performance and user experience are not perfect, so there have been many attempts to develop applications having user experiences similar to native applications using Web technologies, including Cordova, Electron, NativeScript, Progressive Web Apps, W3C Widgets, and many others.

A new attempt called MiniApp appeared and quickly became popular. MiniApps are small, install-free, fast-loading programs that run inside a larger native application or directly run in the operating system. MiniApps leverages both Web technologies like CSS and JavaScript as well as the capabilities of native applications.

Currently, there are many variants of MiniApps developed by different vendors with different APIs. To enhance the interoperability between MiniApp platforms, mainstream MiniApp vendors including Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, and Xiaomi have been working together in the W3C Chinese Web Interest Group since May 2019 and published a MiniApp Standardization White Paper in September 2019 as the initial standardization exploration for MiniApp technologies. As more global companies get interested in joining the MiniApp related discussion, the MiniApps Ecosystem Community Group launched during TPAC 2019 so that the global Web community can join the discussion.

After a year of incubation, the MiniApps Ecosystem Community Group has developed a few technical proposals and a requirements document. In order to enable MiniApp standardization to promote interoperability and maximize integration with the Web, the W3C Team and the MiniApps CG coordinated and organized a global MiniApp workshop. W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) participants and more than 20 global organizations participated in the meeting to discuss the future standardization direction of MiniApps.

Many thanks for contributions to the work to MiniApps Ecosystem CG Chairs, Yinli Chen (Xiaomi), Keith Gu (Google), Anqi Li (Alibaba) and Ming Zu (Baidu), editors and all the participants. The CG will continue to incubate new ideas for MiniApps standardization.

Based on extensive standardization requirements, W3C today announced the formal establishment of the MiniApps Working Group, dedicated to in-depth exploration and coordination of the diverse MiniApp ecosystem with W3C members and the public, and enhancing the interoperability of different MiniApp platforms, thereby maximizing the integration of MiniApps and the Web, reducing technical fragmentation and the learning cost of developers.

Anqi Li (Alibaba), Yongjing Zhang (Huawei), and Ming Zu (Baidu) co-chair the MiniApps Working Group. The working group (see charter) will deliver the following specifications:

• MiniApp Manifest: This specification defines a JSON-based manifest document that enables developers to set up descriptive information, window styling, page routing, permissions, and other information of a MiniApp. The MiniApp Manifest specification inherits the basic members of the Web App Manifest (like name and lang), and extends it based on the difference of the environments, adding members like version management, page routing, window configuration, etc. (like versionName).
• MiniApp Packaging: This specification defines the standardized MiniApp package structure and its construction method, and improves the interoperability of identifying, loading, caching, and updating MiniApp packages in different runtime environments. A MiniApp package contains the resource files required by the application, including document templates, UI components, style sheets, scripts, localized configuration files, security signatures, manifest files, etc.
• MiniApp Lifecycle: This specification defines the MiniApp lifecycle events and the process that enables developers to manage the lifecycle events of both the application lifecycle and each page's lifecycle. It will provide the basis for the cross-platform interoperability of MiniApp. Based on this specification, different MiniApp platforms can achieve consistent lifecycle management, and then achieve a consistent presentation of MiniApp pages.
• MiniApp Addressing defines how MiniApps can be accessed, standardizes the syntax of MiniApp package information, page path, parameter information, and the semantics of these syntax components in a MiniApp URL. The specification also defines the hosting platform's dereference algorithm, and documents security considerations in the addressing process.
• MiniApp Widget Requirements: MiniApp Widget is a special form of MiniApp page. Unlike a page, a widget can occupy a certain area instead of the entire screen. It is used to display key information and respond to simple user operations, such as displaying the user's itinerary, order delivery, and other services with simple interactions in a smart assistant. The MiniApp Widget Requirements document describes the scenarios and requirements that need to be considered when formulating the MiniApp Widget specification. It includes the modifications to the MiniApp Manifest, Packaging, Lifecycle, and other specifications in the widget scenario, as well as widget-specific requirements, such as the communication between the widget and the hosting platform.

For all specifications, the MiniApps Working Group will seek horizontal review for accessibility, internationalization, performance, privacy, and security with the relevant Working and Interest Groups, and with the TAG to ensure technical continuity.

Join us to promote extensive exchanges and industry interconnection about MiniApp standardization through W3C, a vendor-neutral organization, and align with the vision of One Web, enabling the MiniApp technologies to serve a wider audience.

The Web Consortium is grateful to the W3C community, especially this year which has been so difficult for so many. Our community has remained an inspiration and light, and has accomplished so much.

We are immensely proud of all the work the W3C community has done this year. In-depth accounts of the work of our many groups can be found in our May 2020 and October 2020 Strategic Highlights documents which I encourage you to read. As we reflect on the overall year, we wanted to emphasize a few areas of recent success and what is underway.

Enhancing the Web Platform

W3C’s 37 working groups and 10 interest groups enable us to pursue our mission through the creation of Web standards, guidelines, and supporting materials. Tremendous work across the Consortium includes 277 specifications in active development.

Notable advances in Web Payments were made with the launch of an initiative to improve the Web for merchants, and the release of a document explaining how to enable more secure and convenient payment during an e-commerce checkout on the Web.

In the Publishing space, Audiobooks and the Publication Manifest reached the status of Recommendation.

Media and Entertainment saw the creation of the GPU for the Web and the WebTransport working groups, and the update of the Roadmap of Web Applications on Mobile.

The Web of Things working group published a series of Web of Things Recommendations, keeping the promise to enhance interoperability and counter fragmentation in IoT.

Increasing attention to privacy on the web, the Privacy Community Group launched at the beginning of the year and is already incubating new features; the Improving Web Advertising Business Group is investigating privacy-preserving means for web monetization; and the Privacy Interest Group stepped up the pace of privacy reviews.

Adjusting to the COVID-19 pandemic

A substantial concern for not just our community but for the whole world this year was, of course, the Coronavirus 2019 pandemic. At its start we were concerned both for the welfare of the planet and our ability to keep moving the Web forward.

We are gratified to not have been impacted too much as an organization. Respecting the importance of social distancing, we prioritized the needs of people first and quickly suspended all work-related travel, operating completely remotely the most vital work that we do with our community – creating Web standards. We successfully converted our physical meetings and workshops to virtual ones, fully leveraging our own technology, as you can read in the case-study of our video player.

The 2020 global pandemic accelerated a trend for the world to go more virtual, making the Web even more critical to society – in information sharing, commerce, real-time communications, entertainment, and many more.

WebRTC, which is on the path to becoming a W3C Recommendation shortly, has been playing a key role in making the Web a critical digital infrastructure. Combining the universal reach of the Web and the richness of live audio and video has reshaped how the world communicates, especially in the pandemic.

In December, our learning platform W3Cx celebrated one-millionth enrollment for its long-standing and well-regarded courses on Web technologies related to front-end Web development.

We are proud that the processes and technologies developed at the Web Consortium have been foundational to the critical ability for the world to connect in 2020 and we look forward with excitement to what our community will develop for the future of the Web and the world.

Agile standard development

In 2020 the Web Consortium worked to improve the responsiveness and agility of our standardization processes and practices. In September of this year, the 2020 updates of the W3C Process Document and Patent Policy took effect.

The updates give a real boost to building the Web and increase and strengthen the responsiveness of our standardization activities by adding, among other changes, a continuous standard development mode that includes a living standard approach, and earlier Royalty-Free protection for implementers, reinforcing access to the Web's technology as common infrastructure.

Fourteen working groups have already switched to the 2020 version of the W3C Patent Policy launched in September. The remaining groups are due to recharter in 2021 and will switch at this time.

A glimpse at our pipeline

• The Miniapps working group charter is under consideration by W3C Members, aiming to standardize a new form of mobile applications built on top of Web technologies and using capabilities of native applications.
• Web Audio, which specifies processing and synthesizing audio in web applications, is on its way to Recommendation.
• The Immersive Web working group is finalizing the WebXR Device API and companion specifications to enable VR/AR experiences on the Web.
• The W3C Workshop on Web & Machine Learning brought together providers of machine learning toolkits, framework providers, Web platform practitioners who recommended the creation of a standard based on the Web Neural Network API. We are drafting a Web and Machine Learning Working Group charter.
• We will soon confirm a W3C Workshop on Wide Color Gamut and High Dynamic Range for the Web to be held in the Spring of 2021.

Thank you for a great year

The work accomplished by the W3C Community enhances the Web platform and innovates for its growth and strength. Our standards build on top of the core work done on the Internet, giving us the Web: a tool that has and will continue to accelerate scientific cooperation and discoveries, a social means to bridge families and friends, a way to learn online and grow skills, an instrument to conduct successful business, and much more.

2020 saw great progress in the work of the Web Consortium and in the connection, support, and capability of our community. We look forward to building upon it for an even stronger 2021.

Thank you to all who contributed, used, and supported our work this year. We are grateful for such an incredible community. We send all our best wishes for the holidays and in the coming year.

TPAC 2020, our 20th Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee meetings just concluded. The W3C Community convened remotely for our annual all-groups meetings which were online and virtual. The event spanned most of October and focussed on collaborative meetings to create momentum and collective brainstorming, and brought together W3C technical groups, the W3C Advisory Board, TAG, Advisory Committee, and for the first time, the public.

It was a difficult event to put together and in no way a substitute for a physical meeting. A lot of behind-the-scenes work ensured it went smoothly. We did the best we could to stimulate it, drawing from our experience last spring --including our video player case-study leveraging our own technology-- but it was strenuous, intense and exhausting.

How our first virtual conference went

Notwithstanding some hurdles there were positives, including a record number of people registered for the conference and for the first time a subset of meetings open to the public. Here are notable figures about the conference:

• 787 registrants –record attendance to date, and 242 separate registrants for the public breakouts;
• 23 Working/Interest groups and 9 Community Groups meetings, and 16 joint group meetings;
• 54 breakout sessions took place;
  • Over 650 participants attended the breakouts;
  • 200+ breakout participants attended every day, with a maximum of 250 parallel participants on Monday;
  • 36 video-recorded presentations during breakouts have been publicly released

Among the very popular breakout sessions were "defining a privacy baseline", "the waning Web Platform engine diversity", "learning from mini apps" and "WebID, a federated SignIn API". In terms of notable breakouts, the conversations in the three panels organized by P5.js ("Creative Imagination for an Ethical Web", "Consent Communication on the Web", "accessing WebXR through art") were all very highly rated by people who attended.

We followed the impressions of our attendees using #w3cTPAC in Twitter and they really liked TPAC 2020! Here are snippets of positive comments: “really enjoyed”, “I’m really happy”, “very productive”, “looking forward to”, “fascinating discussion”, “thought-provoking”, “great talks”, “amazing and inspiring panels”, “absolutely floored”, “very informed and educational time”.

Public release of W3C strategic highlights

Today we are releasing to the public the October 2020 edition of the W3C Strategic Highlights, our semi-annual report about the tremendous work to enhance the Web platform, and innovate for its growth and strength. I invite you to read it for updates in key areas of the Web, and to learn how W3C meets industry needs, as well as the latest information around Web for all and outreach to the world.

We are at a time where the world goes more virtual, making the Web even more critical to society in information sharing, commerce, real-time communications, entertainment, etc.; and we are at a time where the Web has grown in importance to industries conducting business online, emphasizing the need for standardization work in video communications, media, publishing, financial services, ad technology, etc. This demands responsiveness and agility from the Web Consortium's standardization processes and practices. In September the 2020 updates of the W3C Process Document and Patent Policy became effective, with a goal to generally increase our responsiveness and strengthen our standardization activities by adding, among other changes, a continuous standard development mode that includes a living standard approach, and earlier Royalty-Free protection for implementers, which reinforces access to the Web's technology as common infrastructure.

This year has also seen the first update to our Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (CEPC), since its introduction in 2015. W3C's CEPC defines accepted and acceptable behaviors and promotes high standards of professional practice. This code provides a benchmark, affords transparency in community and group management, ensures an environment where people can participate without fear of harassment, and contributes to the identity of our organization.

Next meetings

We are looking forward to the 2021 edition! Of course, whether this is virtual or in-person depends on the coronavirus situation, but we are looking at venues, and Vancouver, where we originally intended to hold TPAC 2020, is confirmed for 2022. ]]> 0 Fri, 28 Aug 2020 21:44:00 +0000 https://www.w3.org/blog/2020/w3c-website-redesign-new-information-architecture-wireframes/ https://www.w3.org/blog/2020/w3c-website-redesign-new-information-architecture-wireframes/ Coralie Mercier https://www.w3.org/blog/2020/w3c-website-redesign-new-information-architecture-wireframes/#comments Coralie Mercier

Our website redesign work is shaping up nicely and although due to COVID-19 we've had a few understandable delays, we are nearing an important milestone as navigation design is about to begin:

Studio 24 have just published a new Information Architecture --and a summary of the content design work that informs it-- as well as wireframes that illustrate the content hierarchy of key pages.

Note: the wires, which currently are "mobile first" (because starting from mobile ensures the best experience for the most limiting view), are quite likely to evolve and change a bit during the upcoming design phase.

The CMS choice is another important aspect of the project. Since the publication of Studio 24's notes on CMS platform selection a month ago, slow progress was made: accessibility testing, conversations and one frustrating observation: many tools don’t really seem to consider accessibility from the onset which may have to make for difficult decisions around how we ensure editing tools are accessible for all users.

To put this update in context, the upcoming phases in this project are design & production, beta site setup, QA testing and launch.

For the remainder of the 2020 W3C website redesign project, we are moving to share documents by default on the W3C website redesign project mini site and marking as such any draft documents, and moving discussions to GitHub, where I will monitor and funnel questions and feedback from the W3C community to Studio 24, who work with us on this exciting project.

The Timeline page now acts as an update log for all additions and changes to the site, and its RSS feed now displays timeline entries. Changes to existing documents will be noted there (and as appropriate at the bottom of the documents themselves.)

Hi everyone! As part of the 2020 W3C website redesign, I am looking for volunteers among those who use the current W3C website, to take a couple of short surveys. They will help Studio 24 determine the best Information Architecture for our site.

• How users find content associated with standards, specifications and technical reports on the w3.org website (e.g. HTML5, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, requirements for presenting text in the Tamil script on the web). We want to review how users currently do this to help improve the new W3C website. Please, take the short survey on finding technical content.
• How users find content associated with groups on the w3.org website (e.g. working group, community group, interest group). We want to review how users currently do this to help improve the new W3C website. Please, take the short survey on finding groups.

The surveys are open until Monday, June 29, 2020. You may take either or both!
Thanks in advance for taking it!

We must start, reflecting on our times, by saying clearly that we need to do a lot more to improve our diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) including race, gender and disability. We have a long way to go, and we’d like to start taking steps to correct it.

Work on DEI takes place in several areas at W3C but I’d like to specifically highlight the establishment of the Inclusion and Diversity Community Group in 2018, who wanted to increase the presence of under-represented groups at the W3C, and strengthen W3C culture by supporting diversity. Today, that group is increasing focus on developing concrete steps of how we can improve further. Additionally, I’m encouraging our community to participate in the IDCG and suggest steps that we can take to make a difference in the future.

We have made some progress in the last two years, although not as substantial as we’d hoped. Last week, reflecting on current events, we tweeted about revising our Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. Among the W3C community values it highlights, is standing against prejudice, racism and discrimination. We have in the last year prepared a thorough revision of the 2015 version, to modernize our Code and be aligned with evolving norms. W3C Members are currently reviewing it and we expect to approve it in early July. The public Positive Work Environment Community Group which prepared this revision continues to focus on how to improve our environment and make it welcoming for all.

Future of the W3C Diversity Fund

We are committed to attracting a diverse community, and to that effect, W3C stakeholders established a TPAC Diversity Fund in 2018 to fund travel to and participation in our annual technical plenary meeting. This year, for the first time, W3C itself is contributing toward that Fund and we expect to continue contributing in subsequent years. Sponsors in the past have typically given $1,500 and we hope they will continue to do so. W3C has decided for 2020 to contribute $5,000.

With this year’s TPAC going virtual, we need to consider where to focus Diversity Fund efforts. One leading idea is to fund equipment which can help support community members who are underrepresented to allow them to participate better in TPAC, and also to improve their effectiveness beyond. Please let me know if you have other ideas.

Diversity at W3C

The 2020 update to the gender and geography figures we shared last year follows.

Graphs on W3C diversity: Collected information

Different participants are involved in different ways, with mailing lists and GitHub postings distributed across many locations. As we do not collect participants’ personal and demographic data to preserve privacy, it is difficult to gather data for different characterizations of diversity, but we are able to focus on gender and geography for several representative bodies: W3C Advisory Board, W3C Technical Architecture Group, W3C Management (W3M).

W3C Advisory Board

The W3C Advisory Board provides ongoing guidance to the Team on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution. The Advisory Board also serves the W3C Members by tracking issues raised between Advisory Committee meetings, soliciting Member comments on such issues, and proposing actions to resolve these issues. Created in March 1998, for several years, the AB has conducted its work in a public wiki. The elected Members of the Advisory Board participate as individual contributors and not as representatives of their organizations; the AB use their best judgment to find the best solutions for the Web, not just for any particular network, technology, vendor, or user.

The 11 Advisory Board positions are member-nominated. The gender diversity of the AB has not changed this year after four solid years of progress resulting from our continued outreach to encourage more women and underrepresented groups to run.

Tabular version of AB by gender.

Looking at the Advisory Board by geography, all members during the first two years were from Northern America. Starting in the year 2009 and in subsequent years, the geographical diversity steadily improved until reaching in 2018 an equal number of participants in each region. Since then, the Asean representation has been expanding slightly with no change since last year, while the European representation has been shrinking and the Northern American representation has regained and exceeded the majority.

Tabular version of AB by geography.

W3C Technical Architecture Group

The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) is a special working group within the W3C, chartered with stewardship of the Web architecture, to document and build consensus around principles of Web architecture, to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG, and to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C.

TAG positions are a mix of member nominations and appointment by the W3C Director. Gender diversity has started to improve in 2011 –the 10th year of that group. For the second year, a third of the TAG are women. We need to continue to make more progress towards greater diversity.

Tabular version of TAG by gender.

Looking at the TAG by geography, the Northern American's contingent is now again the strongest with Asia/Australia unchanged at its previous highest, but the European representation remains fair. Improvement in diversity has been happening since 2013 as a result of outreach, including from the TAG itself, in search of the right people involved in building the Web in smarter ways.

Tabular version of TAG by geography.

W3C Management

The W3C management team is responsible for the day to day coordination of and decisions for the team, resource allocation, and strategic planning.

The diagram uses percentages because the number of persons on W3M has changed over the years. There was a period when there was only one woman on W3M. It has improved to some extent, trending toward increase with no change for the third year in a row.

Tabular version of W3M by gender.

Looking at W3M by geography is relatively good, still a little tilted towards Northern America, but not as much as before. Asean and European representation are comparable, amounting to slight over 50%. This has not changed in the past three years.

Tabular version of W3M by geography.

As part of the W3C Website phase 1 redesign work, we are seeking the review and feedback of our exceptionally well-informed and helpful external contributors, on choosing a front end framework.

Studio 24, with whom we are working on the Website redesign, have reviewed the questions around HTML/CSS frameworks and have written up the pros and cons of Bootstrap and Apollo —which is Studio24-made and aims to be less of a framework and more of a layout system— to help the decision-making process.

Please, read the document "Choosing a front end framework" and kindly share your review comments, advice on the topic and other considerations, to help us make the better informed possible decision. You may do so by responding to the public mailing list. We are aiming to make a decision around mid-June, so the due date on this consultation is **Thursday, June 11, 2020 (EOD)**

W3C held its annual Members meeting in May 2020. For the first time in the 25 years of our organization, it was fully virtual. And the feedback was uniformly positive. That meeting consisted of reading material and pre-recorded presentations shared in advance. The videos of 19 presentations, totaling 4 hours, were available via a viewer developed in-house that synched with slides and included not only transcripts and captions but also their translations into Chinese, Japanese and Korean. We invited our Members to submit their questions in advance or save them for the two virtual sessions of questions and answers, which featured live captioning in English and simultaneous interpretation from English to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

How the virtual meeting went

A lot of work to get it working behind-the-scenes went into ensuring it went smoothly. Many shared the same feedback that communicating about how it was managed (tools, strategies, outcomes) would be really helpful for other organizations trying to produce similar events, and we plan to augment our recent document on Continuity of Operations under Travel Restrictions.

At many levels and under the circumstances, this meeting was stellar. Our members' testimonials emphasized many advantages of pre-recorded presentations:

"The pre-recorded sessions were excellent. They have the advantage of being able to view it at one's convenience. One can also pause and rewind if needed. Additionally, viewing when convenient has the advantage that the viewer is not distracted."

Or the feeling of community during the live virtual sessions:

"I was blown away by how well that worked. The fact that most people kept their cameras on was really good. There was definitely a feeling of community that I wouldn't have expected, and frankly, it's good to see the faces of people that speak."

Or the efficiency of the whole meeting:

"I've been gushing to my colleagues about the structure of the Advisory Committee Meeting. It was a great format for efficiently covering a lot of material with virtual participants."

Or making this a best practice:

"I suggest W3C management exchange opinions with other standard bodies to make a best practice about big virtual meetings."

And several praised our Team for the work:

"Kudos to those who worked behind the scenes to transition from in-person to a virtual event. Unwinding a year of planning and shifting in mere months is no small feat. Great job!"

Format of the W3C Advisory Committee meetings going forward

Via the feedback survey, we are asking our Members their preference for the format of the W3C Advisory Committee meetings going forward. There is a diversity of viewpoints around how frequently to do virtual Advisory Committee meetings in general. The options are whether we should always go virtual for Spring meetings, or have a spring virtual meeting every other year instead of a physical version, or have a spring virtual meeting every three years instead of a physical version, or whether we should not do any virtual meeting anymore.

An emerging idea that the W3C Advisory Board has started to discuss is whether when safe we should always have a Spring Advisory Committee physical meeting and move the Fall Advisory Committee meeting into a virtual meeting, thus taking it out of our yearly Technical Plenary (TPAC) week-long meeting – overcoming the overlap of the Advisory Committee meeting with work group meetings would give everyone the possibility to participate fully.

• This would guarantee that both those who want the physical meeting and those that want the virtual one get at least one event per year.
• This would help deconflict the very busy TPAC week because we can move the Fall Advisory Committee meeting to a different week.
• We probably could have a more informal Advisory Committee discussion during TPAC to allow the Advisory Committee representatives to work together in a less conflicted way.

We are already working on the format of W3C TPAC 2020 and details will be communicated as soon as possible.

May 2020 edition of the W3C Strategic Highlights

Today we are releasing to the public the May 2020 W3C Strategic Highlights which gives an overview of recent work on the Web platform, on innovation, on incubation and research –in other words, the Road-map for the Web.

The report covers the massive and critical work that took place since last September at the Web Consortium toward the growth and strength of the Web. I invite you to read it for updates in key areas, how W3C meets industry needs, and the latest around Web for all and outreach to the world.

Hi everyone, I am looking for volunteers among those who use the current W3C website, to take a short user survey. In the context of the W3C Website phase 1 redesign work, Studio 24, with whom we are partnering, are nearing the end of the “Discovery” phase.

Following on from the user stories submitted thus far, Studio 24 now want to test via a short survey if we have the right information, by gathering feedback from the wide range of different types of users on why they visit the W3C site.

The aim is to identify specific user tasks and look at ways we can help them achieve their goals - from designing content, defining functionality, and deliverables. This helps measure the success of the project. The responses will be reviewed against the existing user groups and stories, to determine if we have missed any groups and if we have the right needs for each group.

The survey is open until Wednesday, May 20, 2020. Thanks in advance for taking it!

Yes, W3C is redesigning (most of) its website!

W3C and Studio 24 have started working together on redesigning the W3C Website; this work will be conducted as much as possible in the open.I will be coordinating and managing this ambitious project.

We plan to expose more of the ongoing work, via a small project site that Studio 24 will set up, such as:

• Public reports on progress, around 1-3 times a month
• Surveys to gather feedback from the wider W3C user base
• Project outputs (e.g. documents such as reports, design approach, IA, etc. or project work such as HTML prototypes, designs, beta site, etc.)
• Demo videos that show progress or proposals

And dedicated spaces are available (or in the process to be) to solicit and accept feedback from the broader W3C community:

• A public wiki where work in progress is identified and open to comments/edits from the broader W3C community
• Project documentation is important to retain for the future and can be added into version control (e.g. markdown files)
• Production code to be shared in a public GitHub repo on the W3C account

What happened in March?

After an actual work contract was finalised, we started the Discovery phase, explaining our systems infrastructure, identified roles and contacts at W3C and Studio 24, lined-up the "deliverables" of the Discovery phase, and started some content design work. And we could use your help, if you have moments to invest!

You can help with Brand and identity

Please, take a 4-question survey that will help Studio 24 get an initial understanding before broaching the design approach in depth.
Responses welcome by Monday, April 13, 2020.

You can help with User stories

If Studio 24 can understand our users, their motivations and needs, then they’ll have a really strong platform on which they can design a successful site!

Please, help us write strong user-stories!
Responses welcome by Monday, April 13, 2020 (possibly a bit beyond that date).

Acknowledegments

I am getting invaluable help from Vivien Lacourba, Jean-Guilhem Rouel and Gerald Oskoboiny (W3C Systems team), from Bert Bos and Tanya Mandal (W3C MarComm team), from Léonie Watson and fantasai (W3C Advisory Board but also long-time participants in other W3C work groups), and more or less directly from Véronique Lapierre, Rachel Andrew and Jen Simmons (from the Web and W3C community and W3C work groups).