Summit2008/Sessions/Proposals/Web Standards & Strategy

Web Standards and Strategy

Session Leader: Arun Ranganathan

Summary

slides for this session

Just about everything we do at Mozilla culminates in an innovation for the web platform. In particular, I mean capabilities that can influence how web applications are built -- stuff that we add or enhance in the domain of APIs and markup, JavaScript, and security (including security UI considerations). 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. And while that is a privilege, it can also be frustrating, especially if we take a cool idea to a standards body.

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