Charter for Native Apps

Dear CG members,
Yes, this is big email, but it's important!  
   
At the W3C TPAC F2F meeting it was agreed that future W3C widgets work would be undertaken in this CG (excluding Widgets API, Widget URI, and Widget Updates, which will be a joint deliverable with the WebApps WG: the current home of widgets).  

There was also consensus at the Workshop on the Future of Offline Webapps that it would be good to tackle immediate issues with widgets here also (particularly some of the things Apache Callback has identified in their paper presented at the workshop [2]). The other group that spun off from the workshop was [3] (Fixing Appcache CG).  

There is also other communities that are currently relying on the Widgets work to finish (e.g., WAC) and upcoming high-profile projects that require completion of the underlying Widget platform. For example, this week, Scott Wilson emailed in requirements for Inter-Widget Communication, which a number of interested parties would like to standardize.  

In order to facilitate the above, we need to do 2 things:  

1. Agree on a Charter (and hopefully a set of deliverables).  
2. Pick a Chair (someone made me chair without asking - thanks! -  but I want us to have a vote)

So, I imagine you are thinking…:
  
 1. Why do we need a charter? Because we need to set the scope of what we are going to do. And because without a clear indication of the IPR commitments we are requiring from members, a lot of companies won't join the group (I've already received emails about this!).

 2. Will this be the Widgets Working Group? No. We can define our own scope, but Widgets will be in scope because they need a home (and widgets go wherever I go).  
  
 3. Can we work on other stuff? Yes. But based on concrete use cases, requirements, and obvious immediate need… and member participation (yes! that mean you).

Charter Proposal (lifted from the Game's CG charter :)):
[[
This group is chartered to specify technologies that allow packaged Web applications to be run locally, deployed on servers, and be transformed into other proprietary formats so that they may be run on different platforms. The members will do that by:

* Creating and maintaining specifications and test suites relevant to "packaged web apps" (e.g., the W3C Widget Family of Specifications).
* Gathering use cases and requirements from vendors relying on these technologies.
* Suggesting refinements or fixes to existing specifications to better meet the needs of these applications.  
* Evangelizing specifications to vendors and development communities.
* Documenting how to best use open web standards to build "native web apps"
* Documenting best practices and, where possible, make tools available to developers




The Native Apps community group will develop specifications, and thus, there will be Essential Claims under the W3C Contributor License Agreement or Final Specification Agreement.
]]

In the first sentence, read:

"This group is chartered to specify technologies that allow packaged Web applications to be run locally":  
   this means file://, widget://, content:// … so Opera, WAC, CallBack, etc.   

 "deployed on servers": this means Apache Wookie, Open Social Gadgets.   

 "and be transformed into other proprietary formats so that they may be run on different platforms": this means CallBack and (hopefully we can reach out to) the Appcelerator crew.   

Please feel free to suggest new text or fix any mistake above.  

Eventually, we want to end up with something that looks like this (but not as wordy): http://www.w3.org/2010/webapps/charter/

I will start a new thread for the Chair position.   

Kind regards,
Marcos  

--  
Marcos Caceres
[1] http://www.w3.org/2011/web-apps-ws/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2011/web-apps-ws/papers/Nitobi.pdf
[3] http://www.w3.org/community/fixing-appcache/

Received on Friday, 18 November 2011 17:34:43 UTC