Webmob Wednesday Weekly Wupdate

Hi all!

I want to start sending some updates on the group’s work and some issues to the list on a weekly basis. Given our obsession with the letter ‘W’ I have chosen to send these updates on a Wednesday! If you have any suggestions on new items to add or changes to be made please let me know!

***** W3C Updates *****
TPAC was last week - I hope all of you who attended had a great event. Here were some of the highlights for Webmob:

* Geolocation - Marcos and I (mainly Marcos) presented at the Geolocation WG on the permissions topic. Marcos showed a possible route for permissions management for geolocation, and we will work with the guys from the Geolocation team on perfecting this process. More below.
* Web Apps - Web apps had a few relevant topics to us in their agenda, mainly Push and Service Workers - these were mainly granular topics in how browsers handle push, workers and optimisation. Minutes are here [http://www.w3.org/2014/10/27-webapps-minutes.html#item23].
* Crypto WG - the Crypto WG met on Thursday last week to go through some final edits of their API and to look at the next items they want to work on to be part of their next charter. Some relevant items will hopefully be added to their charter which would be of interest to us including hardware tokens or authentication using devices. Let’s keep an eye on that to see if we can help!
* WebAppSec - similarly webappsec is discussing the items for it’s new charter, and a number of identity-related topics including credential management (https://mikewest.github.io/credentialmanagement/spec/). This group will also keep working on CSP and SRI.
* Breakouts - “What do you want from your mobile carrier” breakout went well - we were aiming for a set of use cases from the developer community of which we could start to investigate but found that the main use case was the need for data to allow browsers and developers to make decisions about content types, what to send over the network or to identify apps which are taking up too much bandwidth (amongst other use cases). We’ll be pulling these use cases together and working on adding them to the Data Info API which was sent to the list earlier this month.

If you have other highlights please let the list know (these are only the ones which I could make it to!).

***** Meetings *****
Our next meeting is on Wednesday 12th November! We’ll be talking about permissions, sharing, and some new topics we discovered at TPAC. If you have a suggestion for an agenda item, please let us know.

Time: 2pm UTC
Dial: +1-617-761-6200 or sip:zakim@voip.w3.org then conference code 932662 ("WEBMOB")


***** Projects *****
Here is a quick update of our projects and some projects relevant to the group.

* Permissions - we’ve been discussing the issues of permissions for a long time now. It’s a big area and can have a lot of repercussions. We have decided to tackle this one by one, starting with Geolocation. The work Marcos did for TPAc showed one solutions for Geolocation - this was a UI solution similar to the method iOS uses. We’ll work with the Geo guys to investigate the right solution (it could be this one or another) over the next few months.
* Sharing - We’re still looking into Sharing URLs, and as you all know we often try to break problems down into smaller problems which helps solving them become easier and more manageable. We’re now focusing on Sharing ‘maps’ URLs. Sharing maps URLs is a key use case and done in a few different ways currently depending on the browser and the operating system. We will begin work on documenting this soon
* Web API Gap & Mobile Web App Standards - Dom is still doing great work maintaining these pieces of work which are a great help to the group and the community! If you want to help him out on this let us know. Repos are linked [https://github.com/w3c-webmob/mobile-web-app-standards] and [https://github.com/w3c-webmob/web-api-gap].
* Data Info API - We’ve started to look at working on the Data Info API with Google and Mozilla! This API will aim to deliver simple information about a user’s data plan back to the user over a secure connection. I understand from the breakout at TPAC that there may be some legal issues with this in the US, I am currently investigating these! In any case we are pushing on, and some operators and I are working on a demo. I have also requested support from GSMA in the operator technology side of this. More news soon!
* Service Worker - We are still working on Service Worker demos! I need to put together a hackathon here in Japan for that, and get working on the demos we put together. We are still reliant on a cache implementation, which I believe still hasn’t happened, but there is a polyfil we can use in the mean time.

***** New Work Coming Up *****
Do you have any new ideas for work for the group? Let us know! Here are some suggestions for resources for new work:

* Relevant Work in WGs - some working groups will have work and specs which will obviously need our help. I have listed some in the sections above, maybe you know of more?
* Web API Gap - As said above Dom looks after the Web API Gap repo [https://github.com/w3c-webmob/web-api-gap]. Given we have this list of API gaps, does anyone feel like they want to work on one of these APIs and document the use cases and requirements for an API on the web? Let us know if this is the case!

Ok, that’s it for this week! Next week will be shorter, as I will be travelling and it won’t be so necessary to dump 6 months of information in one email like this one! If you have more relevant information post it to the list. Thanks all!

Natasha Rooney | Web Technologist | GSMA | nrooney@gsma.com<mailto:nrooney@gsma.com> | +44 (0) 7730 219 765 | @thisNatasha | Skype: nrooney@gsm.org<mailto:nrooney@gsm.org>
Tokyo, Japan


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