Last week was the second reformed TAG meeting, this time with new chairs, and hosted by me at Mozilla in London. I felt that overall it went well, though there was quite a bit of repetition too. Getting a shared understanding takes more time than desired. Takeaways:
TC39 (working group for JavaScript) operates using a champion model. Where a few people (the champions) figure out a particular design and then present it to the rest of the group for ratification and integration into JavaScript proper. The idea is for the W3C is to have something similar. The W3C TAG would be responsible for ratifying new web platform capabilities championed by working groups and giving advice as to how they are best integrated in the overall platform. Encourage groups to build on common primitives (futures/promises, streams, …) and provide some amount of guidance when developing new APIs. More importantly, get to the point where the platform exposes the right set of (hardware) abstractions so you can build anything on top of it.
JSIDL is an actual thing now. Rough idea is to remove the abstraction of having IDL values and have JavaScript all the way down (implementations will use C/C++/Rust and that is up to them; it just no longer becomes part of the description of the platform). Simplified and syntax more aligned with JavaScript is also in the works. TC39 is reportedly also on board and will provide primitives in JavaScript proper.
We discussed packaged applications (as seen in Firefox and Chrome OS) and whether they were part of “the web”. I sort of assumed this would be a no-brainer “no”, but apparently not everyone viewed it that way. It seems somewhat inevitable to me that the web platform becomes the OS. That OS should not have a different model from the web platform. It should not require a store or applications reviewed by a central authority and distributed without essential URL architecture. It’s not even clear to me there would be a browser application (the “Awesome Bar” would be a core piece of the OS UI). Getting there from where we are today is tough. We need to solve offline (for real this time) and we need to figure out security (sites should be able to do all that packaged applications can do). There are some interesting longer term questions too. Is it realistic for a Phone application to become provider.com with WebRTC or will it need a dedicated API for the next twenty years?
Also, the W3C TAG is now on GitHub. It took some arguing internally, but this will make us more approachable to the community. We also plan to have a developer meetup of sorts around our meetings (a little more structured than the first one in London) to talk these things through in person. Feel free to drop me a line if something is unclear.