Read Aggrieved ad tech types decry Google dominance in W3C standards – who writes the rules and for whom? by Thomas Claburn (The Register)
World Wide Web Consortium urged to get its governance act together
Earlier this week, 20 web advertising companies wrote to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s Advisory Board to ask that the standards organization revise its governance process to prevent ad tech giants like Google from running roughshod over the concerns of others with an interest in the web.
Bookmarked Groups Activity Dashboard (w3c.github.io)
The table below summarizes the level of activity from current Community Groups over the previous 12 months as of 2020-07-22. The bar under the names of the groups represent the duration since the creation of the group. The information on related groups / funnel entries is manually managed and likely not exhaustive.
A cool looking little dashboard for a huge number of groups working on the web.
Read I Am Running For The @W3C Advisory Board (@W3CAB) by Tantek ÇelikTantek Çelik (tantek.com)
I am running for the W3C Advisory Board (AB). If you work on or care about open web standards, I am asking you, and in particular your W3C Advisory Committee representative, to vote me for as their #1 vote (due to the way the current W3C STV mechanism is interpreted and implemented by the W3C Team)....
Good luck!

👓 W3C and the WHATWG signed an agreement to collaborate on a single version of HTML and DOM | W3.org

Read W3C and the WHATWG signed an agreement to collaborate on a single version of HTML and DOM by Coralie Mercier (w3.org)
Today W3C and the WHATWG signed an agreement to collaborate on the development of a single version of the HTML and DOM specifications. The Memorandum of Understanding jointly published as the WHATWG/W3C Joint Working Mode gives the specifics of this collaboration. This is the...

📺 cite and blockquote – reloaded | HTML5 Doctor

Read cite and blockquote – reloaded by Steve Faulkner (html5 Doctor)
The definitions of the blockquote and cite elements in the HTML specification have recently been updated. This article explains what the changes mean for developers.
Yes, <cite> and <blockquote> ought to be much easier and more standardized. I’ve got some crazy and extreme examples myself I’m sure. The bigger lurking trap is that cite is really a semantic thing, but the way I see it done more often implemented with CSS is as a typographic element indicating italics.

hat tip: Michael Bishop

👓 Remember WordPress’ Pingbacks? The W3C wants us to use them across the whole web | The Register

Read Remember WordPress' Pingbacks? The W3C wants us to use them across the whole web by Scott Gilbertson (The Register)
'Webmentions' spec promises future linkspam outbreak

Something called Webmentions – which looks remarkably like the old WordPress pingbacks, once popular in the late 2000s – is grinding through the machinery of the mighty, and slow-moving, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

But don’t be deceived. Lurking behind that unassuming name lies something that might eventually offer users a way of ditching not just Facebook and Twitter but also those other massive corporations straddling the web.

An awfully inflamatory headline and opening, but the rest was not so up-in-arms and seemed relatively measured. Was it intended to try to be link bait?

👓 WebAuthn: A Developer’s Guide to What’s on the Horizon | Okta Developer

Read WebAuthn: A Developer's Guide to What's on the Horizon by Aaron Parecki (developer.okta.com)
WebAuthn (the Web Authentication API) allows browsers to make use of hardware authenticators such as the Yubikey or a mobile phone's biometrics like a thumbprint reader or facial recognition.
I’ve been interested to see Aaron’s opinion of this when I saw it come across my radar the other day. Glad to have a simple overview of it’s functionality now, particularly from someone who’s literally written the book on authentication.

👓 The W3C has overruled members’ objections and will publish its DRM for videos | Boing Boing

Read The W3C has overruled members' objections and will publish its DRM for videos (Boing Boing)
It's been nearly four months since the W3C held the most controversial vote in its decades-long history of standards-setting: a vote where accessibility groups, security experts, browser startups, public interest groups, human rights groups, archivists, research institutions and other worthies went up against trillions of dollars' worth of corporate muscle: the world's largest electronics, web, and content companies in a battle for the soul of the open web.

Reply to Web Annotations are Now a W3C Standard, Paving the Way for Decentralized Annotation Infrastructure

Replied to Web Annotations are Now a W3C Standard, Paving the Way for Decentralized Annotation Infrastructure by Sarah Gooding (WordPress Tavern)
Web annotations became a W3C standard last week but the world hardly noticed. For years, most conversations on the web have happened in the form of comments. Annotations are different in that they usually reference specific parts of a document and add context. They are often critical or explanatory in nature.

Hypothesis Aggregator

Be careful with this plugin on newer versions of WordPress >4.7 as the shortcode was throwing a fatal error on pages on which it appeared.

p.s.: First!

Kris Shaffer, the plugin’s author

Here’s his original post announcing the plugin. #

Web annotation seems to promote more critical thinking and collaboration but it’s doubtful that it would ever fully replace commenting systems.

But why not mix annotations and comments together the way some in the IndieWeb have done?! A few people are using the new W3C recommendation spec for Webmention along with fragmentions to send a version of comments-marginalia-annotations to sites that accept them and have the ability to display them!

A good example of this is Kartik Prabhu’s website which does this somewhat like Medium does. One can write their response to a sub-section of his post on their own website, and using webmention (yes, there’s a WordPress plugin for that) send him the response. It then shows up on his site as a quote bubble next to the appropriate section which can then be opened and viewed by future readers.

Example: https://kartikprabhu.com/articles/marginalia

For those interested, Kartik has open sourced some of the code to help accomplish this.

While annotation systems have the ability to overlay one’s site, there’s certainly room for serious abuse as a result. (See an example at https://indieweb.org/annotation#Criticism.) It would be nice if annotation systems were required to use something like webmentions (or even older trackback/pingbacks) to indicate that a site had been mentioned elsewhere, this way, even if the publisher wasn’t responsible for moderating the resulting comments, they could at least be aware of possible attacks on their work/site/page. #

The Web Cryptography API is a W3C Recommendation | W3C News

Bookmarked The Web Cryptography API is a W3C Recommendation (W3C News)
The Web Cryptography Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of the Web Cryptography API. This specification describes a JavaScript API for performing basic cryptographic operations in web applications, such as hashing, signature generation and verification, and encryption and decryption. Additionally, it describes an API for applications to generate and/or manage the keying material necessary to perform these operations. Uses for this API range from user or service authentication, document or code signing, and the confidentiality and integrity of communications.
h/t

A Case for Why Disqus Should Implement Webmentions

Internet-wide @Mentions

There is a relatively new candidate recommendation from the W3C for a game changing social web specification called Webmention which essentially makes it possible to do Twitter-like @mentions (or Medium-style) across the internet from site to site (as opposed to simply within a siloed site/walled garden like Twitter).

Webmentions would allow me to write a comment to someone else’s post on my own Tumblr site, for example, and then with a URL of the site I’m replying to in my post which serves as the @mention, the other site (which could be on WordPress, Drupal, Tumblr, or anything really) which also supports Webmentions could receive my comment and display it in their comment section.

Given the tremendous number of sites (and multi-platform sites) on which Disqus operates, it would be an excellent candidate to support the Webmention spec to allow a huge amount of inter-site activity on the internet. First it could include the snippet of code for allowing the site on which a comment is originally written to send Webmentions and secondly, it could allow for the snippet of code which allows for receiving Webmentions. The current Disqus infrastructure could also serve to reduce spam and display those comments in a pretty way. Naturally Disqus could continue to serve the same social functionality it has in the past.

Aggregating the conversation across the Internet into one place

Making things even more useful, there’s currently a third party free service called Brid.gy which uses open APIs of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, and Flickr to bootstrap them to send these Webmentions or inter-site @mentions. What does this mean? After signing up at Bridgy, it means I could potentially create a post on my Disqus-enabled Tumblr (WordPress, or other powered site), share that post with its URL to Facebook, and any comments or likes made on the Facebook post will be sent as Webmentions to the comments section on my Tumblr site as if they’d been made there natively. (Disqus could add the metadata to indicate the permalink and location of where the comment originated.) This means I can receive comments on my blog/site from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, G+, etc. without a huge amount of overhead, and even better, instead of being spread out in multiple different places, the conversation around my original piece of content could be conglomerated with the original!

Comments could be displayed inline naturally, and likes could be implemented as UI facepile either above or below the typical comment section. By enabling the sending/receiving of Webmentions, Disqus could further corner the market on comments. Even easier for Disqus, a lot of the code has already been written and is open source .

Web 3.0?

I believe that Webmention, when implemented, is going to cause a major sea-change in the way people use the web. Dare I say Web3.0?!