Web Education Community Group At The W3C
Leen Shonerd
The OWEA XG is currently working on a whitepaper describing the needs, opportunities, resources, structure, and relationships necessary for a successful ongoing development and deployment of a Web development education curriculum.
After a couple months of work, we are now happy to announce the formation of theWeb-interoperable Runtimes Community Group (WinterCG). The goal of this newW3C community group is to promote runtimes supporting a comprehensive unifiedAPI surface that JavaScript developers can rely on regardless of the runtimethey are using: be it browsers, servers, embedded applications, or edgeruntimes. The members of the group want to provide a space to better coordinatebetween browser vendors and other implementors on how web platform APIs can bebest implemented and used outside of browsers.
More specifically, we want to document how runtime implementations diverge fromeach other, and figure out how we can make them more interoperable. We also wantto involve the broader web spec community in this process, and provide feedbackto spec editors on how specs could be adjusted to better serve a wider range ofusers across more runtime implementations.
The WinterCG is not a new standards organization. As such we are notgoing to publish new standards that compete with work from of the existing webstandards community. Rather we want to work with spec editors to improve theexisting standards in venues like WHATWG and W3C.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international communitywhere member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public worktogether to develop Web standards. Pearson is a member organization ofthe W3C with a company representative on the W3C Advisory Committee.Pearson also has staff that serve in a variety of capacities on W3CWorking Groups, Community Groups, and Interest Groups.
The Accessibility Team for Assessments understands the importance ofhaving a voice at the table in organizations that developinternational standards and guidance for the development of accessiblewebsites and applications. We have embedded staff within various W3CWAI working groups and task forces. Our team is contributing to thisglobal community by supporting the development of sound standards,guidance, and techniques. Our involvement in W3C standards bodiesgives us unique exposure to emerging innovations and developments inthe fields of accessibility and assistive technology. The knowledgeand skills we gain through this work informs the advice and guidancewe are able to provide to Pearson development teams. It allows us tosupport Pearson personnel with the most relevant and up-to-dateinformation about accessibility requirements.
If you'd like to participate in some of these groups, or at least watch, learn, get up to speed, you can almost always do so by lurking on the public IRC channels and mailing lists that the groups use. Many (most?) standards mailing lists can often be overwhelming in quantity, depth so start with IRC as that's often lighter-weight and easier to watch for quick bits of info/knowledge.
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has Working Groups (WGs), Interest Groups (IGs), and Community Groups (CGs). See below for details and please add any/all of such groups here in alphabetical order by working group name.
The W3C and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (or WHATWG) have long pioneered the efforts to develop standardized APIs and features for the web as a development environment. APIs such as fetch(), ReadableStream and WritableStream, URL, URLPattern, TextEncoder, and more have become ubiquitous and valuable components of modern web development. However, the charters of these existing groups have always been explicitly limited to considering only the specific needs of web browsers, resulting in the development of standards that are not readily optimized for any environment that does not look exactly like a web browser. A good example of this effect is that some non-browser implementations of the Streams standard are an order of magnitude slower than the equivalent Node.js streams and Deno reader implementations due largely to how the API is specified in the standard.
The naming of this group is something that took us a while to settle on because it is critical to understanding the goals the group is trying to achieve (and what it is not). The key element is the phrase "web-interoperable".
The Web-interoperable Runtimes Community Group is just getting started, and we have a number of ambitious goals. Participation is open to everyone, and all work will be done in the open via GitHub at We are actively seeking collaboration with the W3C, the WHATWG, and the JavaScript community at large to ensure that web features are available, work consistently, and meet the requirements of all web developers working anywhere across the stack.
The interest cohort id represents the interest group that the user is assigned to by the cohort assignment algorithm. The total number of groups should not exceed 2^32, and each group can mapped to a 32 bit integer. The interest cohort id can be invalid, which means no group is assigned.
WAI is an initiative of W3C that develops web accessibility standards and creates support materials for ongoing learning and community knowledge sharing. This allows users and organizations to better understand web accessibility and implement best practices.
ICT covers a broad spectrum of hardware, systems, and software such as all phones, video players, television, internet and intranet, webinars and virtual conferencing, operating systems, files, and more. Section 508 compliance information and details.UAAGWhat is UAAG? The User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) documents are developed and maintained by the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. This web accessibility group works within W3C and WAI.
The community was founded in 1994 at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in collaboration with CERN. At the time of this post, W3C has 475 member companies and organizations and exists as a consortium between 4 academic institutions: MIT (USA), ERCIM (France), KEIO University (Japan) and Beihang University (China).
TC39 (Technical Committee 39) is the committee that evolves JavaScript. Like the other groups listed here, its members are companies which include most of the major browser makers. The committee has regular meetings which are attended by delegates sent from the member organizations and also by invited experts. The TC39 operates on achieving consensus, as with many of the other groups, and the agreements made often lead to obligations for its members (in terms of future features that member organizations will need to implement). The TC39 process includes accelerating proposals through a set of stages, the progression of a proposal from one stage to the next must be approved by the committee.
As the organization grew and the browser wars ended, the project began to shift focus. The group began working with browser makers on improving their standards support, consulting software makers that created tooling for website creation and educating web designers and developers on the importance of web standards. The last of these points, resulted in the creation of the InterAct web curriculum framework which is now maintained by W3C.
This past year, Samsung Internet people came together to participate in TPAC. We also sponsored diversity scholarships which are intended to bring people from under-represented groups to TPAC and to the Web Standards community.
Initially, I was worried that my presence stuck out as much as the gigantic bear statue outside the venue; but no-one in the room paid any mind to my arrival and so the discussion continued. The group was about to move onto receiving an update on the work being done by the Silver Task Force; a community group that is trying to make the accessibility standards themselves more accessible.
One of the nice things about TPAC (for those not chairing a working group or in some sort of leading role) was the ability to dip in and out of sessions. In amongst the things I attended over the few days I was at TPAC, there was a session from the Web Incubator community group (WICG), a developer meet-up with talks from prominent community members and demonstrations of new web technologies, and a Diversity and Inclusion for W3C meeting. An extra added bonus of going to TPAC with the Samsung Internet team was that we got to meet up with people from our team based in Korea, as well as other Samsung team members from the USA.
We look forward to collaborating with other W3C members on building the future of the Web. In addition to the groups listed above, in the coming months we will be attending several W3C Workshops such as Strong Authentication and Identity and Web Standardization for Graph Data.
The group will hold a W3C Games Community Group Summit in San Francisco, on 3 November 2011, from 10AM to 1PM, hosted by Zynga. This event, open to anyone, follows the New Game Conference, to be held on 1-2 November. It will be the occasion to refine the scope of the group, nominate a chair, agree on a general roadmap for the group and a list of expected deliverables, and kick-off discussions on additional technical topics, as done in Warsaw. Hope to see you there!
Group related form fields together.
In HTML, wrap groups of checkboxes or radio buttons in a fieldset element, and wrap the question or prompt that applies to them all in a legend element. For more information, see the UW Accessible Technology page Creating Accessible Forms.
Choose media players that support accessibility.
When choosing a media player, ask questions like: Does this player support closed captions? Does it support description? Can it be operated without a mouse? Are buttons and controls accessible to screen reader users? Able Player is a free player created with accessibility in mind by the University of Washington, with help from the open source community.