Web standards

Anne van Kesteren, annevankesteren.nl

Mozilla Switzerland
  1. Historical context
  2. Standards bodies
  3. Getting involved

2004

Developers debated HTML4 versus XHTML1

W3C worked on XHTML2 and XForms

Implementers were reverse engineering Internet Explorer

Google launched Gmail

W3C held a workshop

The W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents

XML would be the future

The WHATWG community was started

  1. Historical context
  2. Standards bodies
  3. Getting involved

WHATWG, TC39 (Ecma), WebGL (Khronos), IETF, W3C, C/AB

WHATWG

Community for furthering the web through standards

Collaboration on GitHub /whatwg and IRC (#whatwg, Freenode)

CC0 — public domain

Everyone is welcome

Invented living standards

Feature stability is a function of use and interoperability

Unmaintained standards are a security vulnerability

WHATWG embraced standards as a means to an end

The goal is a better web

HTML Standard

The kitchen sink of web standards

URL Standard

new URL("/🍣🍺", "https://example.org/")

Fetch Standard

fetch("/💩", { method:"HEAD" })

Streams Standard

Coupled with Fetch exposes network streams to JavaScript

DOM Standard

node.remove()

More at spec.whatwg.org

JavaScript

TC39

Develops JavaScript (ECMAScript) on GitHub /tc39

WebGL

IETF

HTTPS, HSTS, Cookies, DNS, …

W3C

CSS, CSP, WebRTC, Web Audio, Referrer Policy, …

CA/Browser forum

Manages HTTPS certificate infrastructure

platform.html5.org

  1. Historical context
  2. Standards bodies
  3. Getting involved

Why

Web: cross-company company-independent computing platform

It is a public good

Making a long term impact

How

Get to know the community

Study standards

Baby steps: build trust

Test the Web Forward

Fix "good first bugs"

Thank you

See you on GitHub