Webapps face to face meeting summary

Hi,

in line with the last item discussed at the meeting (sorry for the
spoiler), I committed to make a rough summary of the meeting
available to go with the raw minutes. The idea is that people who
aren't in the group and weren't there can actually understand what the
minutes mean. So here it is.

More detailed minutes for Thursday[2] and Friday[2] are available

Notes on the topics listed in the minutes:

Thursday
=Dashboard / PubStatus
Webapps maintains a wiki page[4] with the latest "knowledge" about the
specs the group is working on.

In this item we went through a number of specs to look at where they were  
and what we expected to happen. We tried to cover all the specs on our  
deliverable list that weren't specifically somewhere later in the agenda.

Among other items, I (chaals) have taken up editing a URL spec.
(Although the minutes say I will just copy Anne's draft in practice I am
starting from scratch and drawing on the many different specs for URLs/
URIs that have been produced).

=App Manifest
This is a manifest for "packaged" (i.e. an installable zip) or "hosted"
(something like pages with an appcache manifest) apps, that provides
metadata, an icon, etc. It will be moved from the Sysapps group to the web
apps group, who already have it as an explicit charter deliverable. There
is a comparison chart[5] of Manifest formats available (but not 100%
correct - I believe contributions are welcome.

=AppCache
There are two initial proposals for fixing it, one from Mozilla[6], and
one expected from Google based on Navigation Controller[7]. A key question
is whether to have a declarative format (Jonas' proposal has a JSON format
that is more or less declarative, Navigation Controller is just script).

NB Since the meeting we have started to collect use cases[8] in our Wiki

=Indexed DB
Hopefully version 1 will be finished in a few months. It seems the last
point of disagreement was resolved at the meeting, so we expect a new
draft in a couple of weeks that will be more or less the final one.

=DOM3 Events - Status Update
Keyboard events are known to be difficult to standardise. They don't have
enough tests to be confident that they have this part right, and want
more. Maybe they will be ready some time around the end of the year.

=Web Components
There are now 4 specifications that are being developed to allow the
creation of custom elements in HTML (and XHTML). The work is led by Dmitry
Glazkov from Google. There was an introduction to the various specs, where
they fit and where they are up to.

=Web Components Security Model, CORS, CSP
This was a brief discussion with the Web App Security working group, just
describing basic things and meeting the people.

=IME
This specification is meant to allow use cases including writing a custom
IME to replace the system one (like what we do for translate), to make
sure that it is easier to interact cleanly with IME when doing something
like suggest, etc. There was a joint meeting with an accessibility group,
but they were more concerned about building editors (which is very hard)
than actual IME (which is moderately hard, unless you can't interact with
the native one which makes it horribly hard).

=File API
Mozilla has a new proposal[9] (as of the morning of the meeting). FileAPI
has a few outstanding issues, and is likely to try and ship rather than
updating to use futures, ...

=WebIDL
This probably only matters for people writing specs. WebIDL level 1 is
likely to be finished in a few months, with level 2 work ongoing.

Friday
=Testing, Move to Github
The Web needs more tests. There are occasional "Test The Web Forward"
events where people make them. W3C is moving its test infrastructure to
use a single github repository for everything.

=Progress Events
These are used by XHR, the img element, and the Sysapps messaging API. The
spec should be finalised in summer

=XMLHttpRequest
There will be a level 1 specification that describes the interoperable
bits, to be finalized this year. Work will continue on level 2, with CORS,
authentication, etc, aiming to be done by late 2014.

=Coordination (TC39)
There has been a discussion asking for more coordination with TC39 for
things like making sure that when new APIs are developed at W3C (e.g. in
Webapps) there is a notice to them so they can give an early review on
things like whether the API looks like "normal Javascript", not something
mostly designed as if it were in C++ or some other language. The
conclusion was "Please do more coordination".

[1]  http://www.w3.org/wiki/Webapps/April2013Meeting
[2]  http://www.w3.org/2013/04/25-webapps-minutes.html
[3]  http://www.w3.org/2013/04/26-webapps-minutes.html
[4]  http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/wiki/PubStatus
[5]  http://www.w3.org/community/webappstore/wiki/Manifest
[6]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2013JanMar/0977.html
[7]  https://github.com/slightlyoff/NavigationController
[8]  http://www.w3.org/wiki/Webapps/AppCacheUseCases
[9]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2013AprJun/0382.html

I'm interested in whether this was a useful exercise, by the way.

cheers

Chaals


-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
         chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Friday, 10 May 2013 20:57:44 UTC