The Open Web Platform (OWP)

a nexus of the shared expectations

milowski@ischool.berkeley.edu

School of Information, UC Berkeley

What is the Open Web Platform (OWP)?

a platform for innovation, consolidation and cost efficiencies focused on those things that happen within, or intersect with, the actions of the Web browser. [1]

shared behavior,
expected by publishers and users of content,
a type of social contract readable by developer and authors alike

100+ specifications and counting [2] and a branding of what we think of as the Web browser.

Endorses the idea that a browser with a human in front of it is not the only user agent of the Web.

History in Context

1989 — the original proposal by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN
1992 — establishes the technical foundation of addressing (URIs), a document format (HTML), and a protocol (HTTP)
1993 — Mosaic browser - cross platform on Windows, Mac and X-Windows
1994 — the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is established
(time passes, companies wrestle over the Web)
2004 — W3C publishes the Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One
2009 — HTML5 effort starts ...
2011 — Open Web Platform branding
2014 — wishing the HTML5 effort would publish a recommendation.

W3C and Recommendations

The W3C is a consortium of vendors,
that publish recommendations,
not standards,
which is a tricky way to circumvent national standards bodies (e.g. ISO),
but we commonly think of them as standards.

Who knows what a W3C "Working Draft", "Candidate Recommendation", "Proposed Recommendation", and "Recommendation" mean?

</p> </div> <div class="slide"> <h1>Let's look at a few...</h1> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html/" target="new">HTML5</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/dom/" target="new">DOM4</a> — wait, what's a <q>Last Call Working Draft</q>?</li> <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/" target="new">SVG</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS/" target="new">CSS</a> — wait, what's a <q>Working Group Note</q>? — or a <q>Working Group</q>?</li> <li>JavaScript? — not a W3C thing</li> </ul> <p>A standards process is not for the uninitiated. You need to spend some time to understand how things work and what is the state of play.</p> </div> <div class="slide"> <h1>Current state of the OWP</h1> <p>It is very hard to differentiate:</p> <ul> <li>what someone says is the way something is suppose to work,</li> <li>from what the standard might say if you read and understood it,</li> <li>from what actually works in practice.</li> </ul> <p>More bits on the OWP:</p> <ul> <li>HTML5 — CR on July 31, 2014</li> <li>various CSS specifications and Web APIs are in flux</li> <li>but the browsers do what they do.</li> <li>a great resource: <a href="http://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/" target="new">Web Design and Applications</a> at the W3C </li> </ul> </div> <div class="slide"> <h1>OWP and this course</h1> <p>We're going to examine the OWP in regards to:</p> <ul> <li>developing applications that use information,</li> <li>as an organizing system,</li> <li>as mechanism for search and retrieval,</li> <li>from a practical <q>what works</q> perspective.</li> </ul> <p>We will:</p> <ul> <li>focus on the browser as a nexus of the OWP,</li> <li>avoid newcomers like "apps",</li> <li>because all things can operate as a user agent of the OWP.</li> </ul> </div> </body> </html>