Summit2008/Sessions/Proposals/Web Standards & Strategy

Web Standards and Strategy

Session Leader: Arun Ranganathan

Summary

Just about everything we do at Mozilla culminates in an innovation for the web platform. In particular, I mean capabilities -- stuff that we add or enhance in the domain of APIs and markup (think HTML5 and WebAPIs and WHATWG), JavaScript, and security (including security UI considerations). Really, we're quite privileged. Being open source, and being the organization and community that coined the expression open web, an innovation at Mozilla is eventually an innovation for the web platform.

This session will be a discussion of our existing standards activities, what we want to do going forward, and how you can help the web out.

Note that there are already two standards-y talks, including "Device APIs" and "Accessibility" both of which are big enough to warrant their own session :-)

Talking Points

• An overview of the (often weird) Standards Universe and what organizations do and how they work
  • ECMA, W3C, WHATWG, and even OpenAjax Alliance, Khronos, OMA, and new stuff that crops up (e.g. Bondi). Also, the Open Web Foundation announced at OSCON.
• ECMAscript
  • Subtleties in ES3.1 and ES4.0 and what happened at the F2F in Oslo. What's Mozilla's strategy with respect to JavaScript on the Web? Who are the personalities, and what are their interests?
• HTML5, WHATWG, and WebAPI -- a hodge-podge world of intersecting interests
  • Worker Threads
  • Selectors API
  • Cross-Site Access for XMLHttpRequest (and Forms, and XBL, and XSLT...)
    • Recent F2F in Redmon
  • FileUpload API proposals
  • Bunch of other stuff...
• W3C
  • HTML5, CDF, SVG, CSS, Security Context, and GeoLocation
  • What's great, what sucks, and why
• Future looking
  • Canvas3D
• What ELSE should Mozilla be doing?
  • A free for all discussion. Provocative questions include: should we dream big and go it alone (hoping others follow rapidly), or cooperate and keep working in an imperfect standards world? Suggestions for improvements? Also, any candidates for spec. editor handy? What about stuff like Prism?

Equipment Needed

• Projector maybe