This document is intended to be a stronger vision statement for the W3C. This is currently exposed as a work item of the W3C Advisory Board, on the AB wiki. This document is the result of many people's work, notably Chris Wilson, David Singer, Mike Champion, Tantek Çelik, and the rest of the Advisory Board.
The World Wide Web was conceived more than 25 years ago as a tool for sharing information. It has become much more than that; it is a fundamental part of the lives of much of the planet. It provides instant access to information, commerce & shopping, social experiences, civic functions, entertainment, and more.
The W3C has curated the Web platform during two key periods of the Web's development: its invention and bringing it to society; and subsequent stabilization, making it reliable and interoperable across many environments.
It is time to recognize and engage consciously with a third task, on a timeline for the next 10 years. The Web must have a path to continue to grow, while realizing and adjusting for its role in society.
For the first 10 years or so, members of the W3C were working together to invent an open platform that used the internet protocols to share information to all humanity. We figured out what technologies from various existing (often proprietary) systems could be made to work via HTTP, how they might fit together, and which ones really got real world traction. We:
- Chose the best of ideas from early browsers, SGML editors, academic hypertext systems, word-processing products;
- incorporated scripting language support to make it customizable and dynamic;
- incorporated stylesheets to separate content from presentation;
- experimented with ways of integrating Web apps with databases and enterprise applications;
- built a broad community and deep expertise dedicated to ensuring the web is both accessible and international.
By 2005 or so the overall architecture was fairly clear, though curation of the HTML specification had moved to WHATWG. HTTP serving HTML, CSS, DOM, and Javascript became the core technologies for the Web. Other technologies such as XML, RDF, XSLT, Java/VB, and SOAP remain relevant and viable in some (often large) niches and enterprise-scale applications, but have not become part of the core Web platform.
Once the W3C and other open communities had proved the Web's potential, businesses, governments, and users around the world began to depend on it. However, the Web struggled with many of the details:
- under-specified and incompletely-implemented formats and APIs limited interoperability;
- the mobile Web platform took off and created many new technology challenges, but the core web and engines supporting it failed to adapt quickly;
- browser engines and clients evolved rapidly but unevenly;
- entertainment and commerce over-took knowledge creation and sharing as the most common use case for the Web;
- rapid change and business considerations led to confusion about what really was a "standard".
The businesses which depended on the Web generally believed that they spent too much developer time just making their websites work across the range of devices and browsers their customers used. A significant number of major IT, telecom, entertainment, and other businesses have thought it good business to invest in the W3C to help make the Web platform work better. W3C and WHATWG agreed on the curation and publication of HTML.
We have treated the Web as only a force for good; and indeed it has been a major cause of social change. We are proud of the positive changes: e-commerce, publishing, instant access to facts, social engagement, entertainment. It is time to engage with fundamental questions:
- Where are the positive impacts on society incompletely realized, and how can we improve them?
- What negative impacts have we introduced or exacerbated, and how can we lessen them?
The Web's phenomenal success has led to many unintended consequences that are starting to inflict significant pain on society:
- its openness and anonymity enable scams, phishing, and fraud;
- it is too easy to gather personal information, unknown to the users: the business models that support "free" access to web resources mostly depend on collecting detailed personal information on users without their knowledge, performing exploitive surveillance. The wealth of content funded by these models are a public good; the loss of personal privacy and higher barriers to understanding are not.
- by enabling the easy exchange of information around the globe, it has enabled misinformation to flourish and be exploited for political or commercial gain;
- a lack of diversity in those participating in the W3C has undoubtedly led to bias in our specifications.
In addition, the successes of the Web don't ensure that members will keep supporting the W3C to perform its functions. Far from there being a need to convince people of the value of the Web, it has become "too big to fail." The Web is a clear public good, and sometimes suffers from the problem that its maintenance and development are taken as a given, and fewer organizations can economically justify investing their time and expertise in improving the platform for everyone else.
The consortium must become much more conscious of its role, more careful to analyze the unintended effects and consequences of the specifications it publishes, and the technologies they support. We must investigate and address security problems. We must ensure that privacy is universally valued. The W3C has long unevenly participated in places where regulation and technology meet, and our duty to inform public debate and regulation has expanded: we must establish a forum to discuss and publish technical considerations on social issues. The W3C must look more carefully at our contribution to major challenges facing humanity, particularly sustainable development. We must be conscious of our constituencies and their priorities, and we must be explicit about the resulting values and principles. We must continue to expand the accessibility of web content and expand the international reach of the platform.
At the same time, W3C must curate incubation and specification development to meet the needs of rapid technological evolution. With a growing diversity of devices and situations that users access the web for their daily lives, W3C will continue to be the venue where innovators gather to share, critique new ideas, and work towards interoperable solutions users can depend on. The Web platform has become too complex for any individual to grasp fully, or logically analyze, so the omniscient Director model must morph into a scalable decision-making approach.
To do all this, the W3C needs to be a standalone international consortium, no longer hosted by academic institutions, but self-governing and managing its own destiny and infrastructure. We must do this by setting principles and adhering to them: we must return to our core values, and expand on them.
The W3C must rise to the challenge of improving the Web's platform's fundamental integrity, while continuing to expand its scope. We must define, publish and embody in our work the core values of the Web itself, which include:
- the Web is for all humanity;
- there is one world-wide Web;
- the Web is designed for the good of its users;
- the Web must be safe for its users.
The W3C has long been recognized for its own core values that support the values of the Web itself:
- A strong tradition of consensus-building and mutual respect and technical coordination across borders and industries;
- Championing of fundamentals: accessibility, internationalization, security, and privacy;
- A drive for interoperability across vendors and implementations;
- A patent policy that fosters collaboration;
- An openness to exploring and fostering incubation in new areas and industries - providing a platform for discussion and collaboration;
- A reputation and set of relationships with governments and businesses that could make it a credible source of advice.
We must build on these two sets of values and expand them:
- First and most importantly, we must ensure at all times that we are putting the needs of users first: above authors, publishers, implementers, and theoretical purity. We should clearly state our priority of constituencies (building on the excellent work from the TAG's Ethical Web Principles and the HTML Design Principles.
- The W3C's consensus-driven model must continue to engage and provide opportunities to the representatives of organizations and user groups of small to big sizes, from different segments of the industries and different parts of the world. As the Web platform has grown and the core platform implementation diversity has continued to shrink, we must adjust to developing new methods of establishing consensus.
- We must continue to ensure that the Web can work for everyone. We must strive for diversity and inclusion of the participants from different geographical locations, gender identities, accessibility needs, and more.
- We must remain committed to improving security and privacy on the Web, including revisiting the current Web platform and exploring how to responsibly foster better personal privacy. At the same time, we must continue to engage with new capabilities and user scenarios, and foster innovation in how to bring new scenarios to the Web. Ultimately, we must coherently grow the architecture of the Web from the core needs of the platform to specific user-beneficial use cases identified by various Web-related industries, such as telecommunications, publishing, media & entertainment, and financial services.
We must remain committed to developing open and royalty free standards with a high focus on interoperability, social responsibility and collaboration with other standards organizations. This vision of who we are and what our shared organizational values are must move into strategic conversations about who we serve, how we serve them, and with whom we partner.