Intent to Continue Experimenting: Handwriting Recognition API

[Jiewei Qian]

Contact emails

q...@chromium.org, hong...@chromium.org, mgi...@chromium.org

Explainer

https://github.com/WICG/handwriting-recognition/blob/main/explainer.md

Specification

https://wicg.github.io/handwriting-recognition/

Design docs

https://github.com/WICG/handwriting-recognition/blob/main/explainer.md

Summary

An API for web applications to make use of advanced handwriting recognition services (e.g. those on operating systems) to recognize text from handwriting drawings (inks) in real time. In this context, handwriting drawing means the temporal and positional information used to describe a human handwriting process.

Blink component

Blink>Handwriting

TAG review

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/591

TAG review status

Issues addressed

Link to origin trial feedback summary

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BGd3WiwiqBA1JQaG-r0bc5No0f0KkqW13EhO1YeQocA/edit

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

Different browsers (and operating systems) will expose different underlying implementations and produce different outputs given the same input. We think this is acceptable given the implementation is machine-learning based, and it is not feasible or desirable to precisely specify the expected output for a given input in a standard. In the past, we have taken this approach for the Web Speech and Shape Detection APIs.

Gecko: No signal (https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/507) Feedback requested, no reply yet.

WebKit: No signal (https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2021-March/031762.html) Feedback requested, no reply yet.

Web developers: Positive (https://github.com/WICG/handwriting-recognition/issues/21) Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChromiumDev/status/1428640785810051074

Other signals:

Goals for experimentation

- General API design. Determine if the API design satisfies the App developer's use cases - Specifically, we want to see if the current API design provides sufficient information (in the result) to enable web developers to make use of this feature.

Reason this experiment is being extended

No gap before shipping.

Already LGTMed by blink API owners (chrishtr@) in https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/s3n3bGl6i1M/m/36V-w8-rDAAJ.

Revised timeline: Original origin trial - first milestone: M91 Original origin trial - last milestone: M97 Extended origin trial - last milestone: M98

Ongoing technical constraints

None

Debuggability

N/A. Existing DevTools tooling works for this feature.

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView)?

No

Initially we will implement this feature on Chrome OS, since it has handwriting recognition service ready for use. We will need to do additional work to integrate with other platforms. Handwriting recognition capabilities already exist on all other platforms. We will do other I2E / I2S for implementing this on other platforms, due to the different security and privacy implications.

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

No. Full coverage relies on platform-specific implementation. WPT only tests failure cases.

Flag name

Requires code in //chrome?

False

Tracking bug

https://crbug.com/1207667

Launch bug

https://crbug.com/1206121

Estimated milestones

OriginTrial desktop last	98
OriginTrial desktop first Intent to Ship	91 99

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5263213807534080

Links to previous Intent discussions

Intent to prototype: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/VXUq1UY4m7Y
Intent to Experiment: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/o8RqlFwZItQ/m/vgHLF_pHBQAJ

Intent to Continue Experimenting: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/NALmrt8Qmgg/m/qZ8FsQinAQAJ
Intent to Ship: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/CANFkJJk62d8M8CKYuX9ojJDcFcHrAzq5iiexVh6Pw7rk9XdMFg%40mail.gmail.com

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

[Chris Harrelson]

LGTM

[Jiewei Qian]

Hi Blink Owners,

We are shipping the API in M99, but want to avoid a gap for users yet to update from M98. 

We are asking to extend the OT end date (currently 2022-02-22, one week before M99 release) to 2022-04-15 (two weeks after M100 release), without changing the end milestone.

This should allow enough time for users to update.

The API shipped in M99 is the same as the one under origin trial.

Thanks for considering.

[Daniel Bratell]

One of the reasons that the process dictates a gap is to remove the pressure to ship an imperfect API. For us to consider a gap-less shipping we therefore want to be sure that feedback has been taken into account and incorporated into the API. Can you point to such examples?

/Daniel

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[Glen Robertson]

As discussed in an earlier thread (https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/OXnXteNYQQQ/m/RezhfPeYCAAJ) we have only received OT feedback from 1 developer, but it has been positive. There is also some feedback as issues on github (https://github.com/WICG/handwriting-recognition/issues?q=is%3Aissue). It has all either been addressed or does not require changes to the API.

[Jiewei Qian]

Friendly ping :)

[Chris Harrelson]

LGTM

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