🔖TAG: Principles for the Web

Virtual TPAC- October 2020

Daniel Appelquist  @torgo | @torgo@mastodon.social

https://w3.org/tag/ | https://tag.w3.org/ (Current Work)

What is the TAG?

Special group in W3C chartered to:

• document and build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary;
• resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG;
• help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C.

 6 elected, 3 appointed,
1 permanent chair (Tim),
1 staff contact

Current work of the TAG

• Pondering deep questions about the web
• Writing stuff: findings, design principles, etc..
• Design reviews
• Joint work with other groups
• Play a role in cross-organization liaisons
• (Developer community engagement)

How do we TAG during a pandemic?

The TAG continues its cadence of 4 video calls per week
(three "breakouts" and one "plenary")

We have shifted to a "virtual face-to-face" with a 4-day schedule comprised of 18 breakout sessions across 3 time zone groups

We use a combination of Jitsi.org and WhereBy (WebRTC-based services) for all our video calls, CryptPad for minutes and Slack

Design Reviews

The TAG's “Heartbeat” 💓

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

Requesting a TAG Review

Open an issue with us on GitHub:

Early design review, Specification Review or
Dispute Resolutiuon

Please request reviews at the design phase.

Read our Design Principles.

Write an Explainer.

Make sure you have an explainer

https://tag.w3.org/workmode/

Make sure you articulate the user need.

Whats an Explainer?

• A living document that describes the current state of your proposed web platform feature, or collection of features.
• Help facilitate multi-stakeholder discussion and consensus-building
• Starts with the user-facing problem that this specification addresses
• Intended audience: other web technologists who may not be familiar with the problem space you're addressing (i.e. not just the TAG)

https://w3ctag.github.io/explainers

Where can you find the current work of the TAG?

Visit our page at https://tag.w3.org

Visit our meetings repo:
https://github.com/w3ctag/meetings

(all minutes linked from agendas)

Client-side API Design Principles
Web Platform Design Principles
 

https://w3ctag.github.io/design-principles/

What Differentiates the Web from other Platforms and Systems?

How can we best design new technologies for
the Web? 

Topic Areas

• Principles behind design of Web APIs
• API Design Across Languages
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• JavaScript Language
• JavaScript API Surface Concerns
• Event Design
• Types and Units
• OS and Device Wrapper APIs
• Other API Design Considerations
• Writing good specifications
• Naming principles

Put user needs first

https://w3ctag.github.io/design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies

It should be safe to visit a web page https://w3ctag.github.io/design-principles/#safe-to-browse

Thank you.

https://tag.w3.org/

We're on github: https://github.com/w3ctag

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