Last week saw the W3C’s Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee meeting in hybrid mode, hosted in Vancouver but also online. Much of the discussion of the Advisory Committee centered around the new legal entity, W3C Inc, which is in the process of replacing the old arrangement with host institutions MIT , ERCIM , Keio University, and Beihang University. The hosts will become partner institutions, and W3C will become its own legal entity with its own board of directors and bylaws. As I write this, the voting for the new board is about to close. We have fantastic slate of candidates, so my feeling is that we will have an active group that has a great amount of experience with the organization.
One of the highlights of the meeting for me was a discussion of sustainability for the web. The Sustainability Community Group is tackling the question of whether we can improve energy usage on the server side, the client side, and in our actions as W3C members. Given the fact that some very energy intensive technologies can be linked to the web, this is crucial work to address climate change.
Another highlight was the Developer Meetup. Seeing the latest incoming proposals for HTML forms from the OpenUI community group was very exciting. The new controls have built-in accessibility and fantastic styling options. Look for more coolness from this group in the future! There was also a talk about focused interoperability efforts across all browsers. The Interop effort will make cross-browser design much easier, and it includes new options like color mixing, subgrids, and container queries. Speaking of container queries, another talk covered that topic, showing how one could create content that adapts to the container in which it sits. Another talk focused on privacy. A new Private Ad Technology Community Group will look into better ways of enabling advertisers to reach buyers without compromising privacy. The slides for all these talks are posted for the public on the meetup site linked above.