Contributing to Web Standards

Contributing to web standards. Hi, I'm Hemant. I'm a senior manager at PayPal. I'm also a Google developer expert for web and payments technology. You can find me at EdgeStreamMan.com. Ever wonder who decides how the web API works? Why some features take years to ship? How do you suggest a change to the web? If so, this talk is for you. You've come to the right place. I was lucky enough to stand on the shoulders of giants and be part of communities like TC39 and RegMa and Node.js Foundation and some parts of WhatWG. I was happy to contribute and author a few of the proposals. The crux of web standards is curiosity. You kind of raise a question on what challenges do we have? How do we solve them? People propose changes. People discuss the proposal, evaluate the outcomes, implement the changes. I think this can be broadly classified on how web standards works, irrespective of what community it is.

Mastering the web standards. It all starts with web standards being a question mark. What are web standards? How do I contribute? How does web standards work? To understanding what standards are and actively participating in it, finally shaping the futures and then you can master the web standards. Well, as Charlie Chaplin said, life is too very short to be an expert at anything. By mastering, I would say that you understand certain aspects of the web standards in depth so you can contribute well and influence the community.

Web standards synergy. There are multiple tracks within web standards from SVG, web APIs, DOM, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and so on. There are some key organizations that kind of govern the web standards. There can be IEEE, WhatWG, ECMA, Unicode, ISO, IETF, W3C, INA. Let's kind of look into some of these standards and see how they work. The entire web standards spectrum can be classified into protocols, programming standards, accessibility, security, internalization. I think all of these standards would either fall into these categories. Some of them are ensuring seamless communication across the web. Or some of them are working on establishing consistency on coding practices, taking care of accessibility and so on. W3C is World Wide Web Consortium, which is one of the important standard bodies, which owns standards across HTML, CSS, SVG, RER, WCHE, and web APIs. They also have various working groups, interest groups, community groups, business groups, which also involves technical architecture groups, and there are some invited experts. You can see the wonderful timeline here on evaluation of W3C, how it kind of started and where it is today.

WhatWG is another group, which is Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. This group takes care of multiple entities that, as you can see here on the screen. May it be compatibility standards, DOM standards, HTML standards, some of the APIs like full-screen APIs, streams, URL, URL pattern, WebIDL, WebSockets, and so on.

ECMA International is another group where there are multiple standards and these are some of the standards that are spread into web. ECMA 262 is a very famous one, which is also responsible for TC39 and all the ECMA script. It kind of takes care of the core JavaScript standards that kind of defines syntax, semantics, and features of JavaScript, which is an active body. 402 is International API, 404 is JSON data format, and ECMA 5.7 is kind of deprecated, but I just wanted to say that there are a few groups which get deprecated, which was ECMA script for XML.

And we have IETF, that's Internet Engineering Task Force. This includes HTTP, security, real-time data formats and infrastructure. And they have a wonderful channel too with around 5.2K videos where they kind of record not only just the meetings and also probably share a lot of information. It's worth looking into IETF channel. On the Unicode side, we have core standards, encoding forms, emoji standards, technical standards, and technical reports. And IANA is Internet Assigned Number Authority. They take care of DNS root zones, IP address allocation, time zone database, language subtext, and protocol parameter assignments.

There are a few other groups like IANA, that's International Assigned Number Authority. That's the one that we just saw. And then we have ISO, IEC, and OASIS. That's Organization for Advancement of Structured Information Standards. Their role is in kind of developer, broader IT and communication standards that sometimes intersect with Webtechs like PDF and media types.

How open are they? Are they free? How do I contribute? Let's kind of see a quick overview. In terms of standard access, W3C, Web3D, IETF, OSIS, iOS, Ecma, all of them are almost free. iOS is paid. Is membership required? W3C is optional for group and voting. But an annual membership fee is needed if you want the voting privileges from $1.9K to $59K based on the size and region.

For Web3D, membership is required, yes, for full participation. That's around $100K to $15K based on the type of membership that you need. IETF is free, no membership is needed. OSIS is free. Membership is required, yes, to contribute around $1K to $18K plus. For ISO, again, you kind of need membership via national bodies of annual fee varies. For Ecma, if you want voting and input and also want to be part of these meetings, you have around $500K to $15K CHF, not USD in this case.

That's what you're going to pay based on which kind of membership you want. Once you become a member of this committee, you can start participating in their meetings, contributing, proposing, and voting for different proposals. Which group should you join based on your interest? If you are focused on front-end, consider joining W3C or WODWG for front-end development standards. For JavaScript enthusiasts, joining Ecma on TC39 is recommended. Network stack enthusiasts should join IETF for network protocol development. Accessibility advocates can join W3C for accessibility standards. For implementers of standards, the options are varied. The pathway for involvement includes identifying your interest, exploring standards, following proposals, and deepening your understanding of relevant areas.

Common challenges and how to overcome them involve understanding complex jargon and processes within standard bodies. Seek guidance from mentors, start with small contributions, and grasp the problem-solving approach behind proposals. Familiarize yourself with time zone challenges in global meetings, subscribe to mailing lists, and stay updated on proposals through GitHub. Taking initial steps like reviewing GitHub specs, joining W3C committees, contributing test cases, and engaging with standards discussions on platforms like Twitter can kickstart your involvement in standards development. Remember that starting small is valuable, and engagement with the web community is open and encouraged.

Web standards progression can range from quick adoption to prolonged discussions. Embrace the freedom and openness of the web by actively participating in discussions, contributing ideas, and influencing standards development. Remember that impactful changes can stem from small actions, even simple social media posts. Upholding backward compatibility in web standards ensures a seamless evolution of the web environment. Avoiding disruptions and fostering continuous improvements reflect the collaborative and dynamic nature of web standards development.

I need to think and try to solve a proposal from day one. You can start doing small contributions, try to understand how things work and talk to more people and understand what is this thought process behind a proposal? How does one propose, like what is the problem that an individual is trying to solve? That becomes the crucial part for any proposal, right? What is that problem that you are facing in your day-to-day, like, aspects of web?

And sometimes it's also like the time zones and meetings. It's spread across the world, right? So it can't be there in person or in life always for all of the meetings. So you should subscribe to some of the good mailing list. Go and read how the proposals are, what stage they are in, read some GitHub issues and try to kind of get a holistic view of what's happening. Of course, everyone needs to start somewhere and just get started, even if it's a small start, even like reading a readme or making a small fix in one of the documents, that's a great start.

There's some first steps that you can take here is like review some of the GitHub specs, like TC39 or WG and join W3C committee. Contribute some of the test cases for web platform test, improve specs and examples of test, follow standards and discussion on X, Twitter, most of the developers are still around there. Mass it on our relative forums, right? Just start, you don't need permissions, right? Like web is free and open. You can, I've seen a few cases where a simple post on social media turned into a standard within like six months.

There are some cases where years have been passed trying to discuss back and forth because you don't have to end up in a state where you're breaking the web. Web should be backward compatible always. So it's kind of interesting to follow this journey and read relevant forums and get insights. Why does it matter? Like web is public infrastructure, like billions really on open standards and your voice definitely matters. You can shape the future of web. It's just about, in a kind of having a good use case, a good problem to solve, which multiple people using the web are facing.

Features like Async Await, CSS Grid, WebAuth exist because developers advocated for them. And the alt attribute in HTML was added to improve accessibility after kind of discussing with a lot of communities and a lot of feedback. So your voice as a developer, as an individual matters a lot. We have seen people contributing from various spectrums, not only like engineers, but seen a few doctors also contributing to standards. So your voice as a consumer of web, as a developer definitely matters.

An example of how different stages work in this case, TC39, which is a standard body, which takes care of ECMAScript, has various stages here. Stage zero is more of idea open to anyone. Like you have an idea, you could either create an issue, write a blog, or there's a template which you can clone and try to create in a stage zero issue. That's just like an initial stage where you just have an idea. And stage one is like under constructions. Some of the champions are identified, repo is created. Stage two, there's a draft text created with examples. This like designs are refined. And stage 2.7 is something that newly got added, recently got added, which is like the complete spec text suits and validation.

And stage three is like candidate. Recommended for implementation with real world feedback. At this stage, normally they are behind flags and taking a lot of developer feedback. Stage four is kind of completed. Here's the propose ready, and there are two implementations. And most of the browsers and like V8 and all of them will start shipping at this point. So they're behind, out of the flag. So normally all of the standard bodies have certain stages and variations in which they handle the proposals. But this is just like an overview of how it works.

Some of the examples are top level, I-8 which started as stage zero idea. Of course, we know it's all there in modern JS today. I did include promise.any, promise prototype at object has on. I think this is one of the fastest proposals that got to stage four. So there are many such examples out there. Go start reading the proposals, understand what were the challenges that were faced. Each proposal has a repo, and those have issues in them.

So you could go and read and understand what's happening. And that thereby you kind of get a holistic view of how things work here. And once you have an idea, either you become the member or you talk to one of the members and influence the community in the right direction. The future of web standards, like trends seems to be more focused on, of course, privacy, security, and user control, growing importance for performance and energy efficiency, expanding web capabilities, web GPU. Opportunities, more open process and remote participations, and good collaboration between browser vendors, developers, and users.