I was in London this week, and attended the Meet The TAG session in Google campus, closed to the Silicon Roundabout. This was an opportunity to have a conversation happening between the architects of the web and some londonien developers. On stage were present Tim Berners Lee @timberners_lee, Yehuda Katz @wycats, Alex Russel @slightlylate, Dan Appelquist @torgo, Anne van Kesteren @annevk and hidden in the crowd were Jeni Tennison @jeniT, Peter Linss @plinss, Sergey Konstantinov and Henry Thomson.
Anne started with a short presentation of TAG prerogative, in duo with Tim – the old school and the new generation, hand in hand. It was explained that the major difficulty in the TAG task was to synchronize between the different W3C working groups deliverable, making sure appropriate technologies were harmoniously available to web developers. Tim even mentioned that the objective of W3C was to make all platform features available to developers.
Then questions came. Via those questions, some technologies were in the spot. Worth reminding their merit, and making sure you know what it is about :
– Content Security Policy, allowing web apps to control the resources it will access and the protocol that should be used to access it (e.g. HTTPS only). It is now elaborating its version 1.1.
– Web Component is the new thing to talk about, allowing web dev to design any element they have dreamed about. Some people in the room (Jo Rabin @jorabin) not to name him highlighted that this could potentially challenge the semantic web promise, by allowing people to build new elements and calling them with proprietary or exotic names.
– Service Worker was also presented as the next solution for better controlling the application cache.
And guess what …The famous not-DRM-but-smells-like-DRM question was raised by the audience. While the TAG is a technical organization, and does not give any advice on the political questions like Encrypted Media Extension is, the individuals tried to give some arguments for or against that feature.
[user experience] Everyone hates DRM (including me), but everyone uses it, reminds @timberners_lee in #w3ctag — virginie galindo (@poulpita) January 7, 2014
#w3ctag @slightlylate “We all agree that authors should be paid. The going price for words on the internet right now is zero.” — Jeni Tennison (@JeniT) January 7, 2014
#w3ctag @jorabin “The question is how does the system reward those who have made creative endeavours.” — Jeni Tennison (@JeniT) January 7, 2014
Met the TAG. Too much DRM discussion for me. If TAG’s dislike of DRM could abolish it from the world, great. But it can’t. So next Q, please — bruce lawson (@brucel) January 7, 2014
The Q&A session ended, and as promised by Tim Berners Lee, the debate did not happened only on stage but also in the floor, drinking beers all together, in a great open spirit. Congrat’ to the TAG for making this kind of event happening.
Note that others blogged about that event : Jeremy Keith, coming back on the discussion of what are the main principles driving TAG to make W3C spec, good specs http://adactio.com/journal/6629/ and Bruce Lawson, dealing with the general ambiance and talks http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2014/i-met-the-tag-2/. Jo Rabin also create a storify.
Note : picture by Romain Huet
poulpita 