Chinese Web Interest Group Meets in Hangzhou

The Chinese Web Interest Group gathered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang for its first face to face meeting in 17 November 2018. Our main goal for the meeting was to announce the group and discuss new web standards, ideas, and unique requirements in China.

During the meeting, participants reviewed topics such as WebXR, WebGPU, WebML, WebAssembly, WebRTC, Web Packaging, and Web performance, about what these capabilities can bring to the Web and how we improve them.

WebXR

I presented demos of WebVR and WebXR, and we discussed use cases like shopping and the potential integration with other technologies like WebAssembly.

WebGPU

Belem Zhang (Intel) offered a history of WebGL, and a comparison of WebGL and WebGPU. He presented the current status of the WebGPU spec and implementation, and we discussed various low-level graphics APIs and how WebGPU exposes those APIs to the Web.

Web Neural Network API

Belem presented a list of the current JavaScript machine learning libraries. All of these libraries have performance issues, even with WebAssembly/WebGL.

The work in the Machine Learning for the Web Community Group (WebML CG) will define a Web Neural Network API with hardware acceleration, exposing the low-level machine learning APIs to Web applications. Developers can just use the Web NN API, and are shielded from the underlying technologies. The performance of the new API will be better than the current JavaScript libraries.

WebAssembly

Zuojian Lin (Alibaba) shared some issues in WebAssembly, such as debugging, compilation time, and quality of generated instructions. We also discussed ways to be involved in the WebAssembly standardization and implementation work.

WebRTC

Jianjun Zhu (Intel) shared the progress of the WebRTC specifications, including the WebRTC 1.0, WebRTC NV, and the media capture specs. We also talked about extending WebRTC to enable the use of the QUIC protocol.

Web Packaging

We discussed the signed and bundled HTTP exchanges, how browsers load them, their performance and use cases. There were also a lot of discussions about caching.

Web performance

Qingqian Tao (Baidu) introduced recent development in the Web performance domain, like Long Tasks, Paint Timing, Element Timing, and Device Memory. We discussed how to use these methods to improve the performance of web applications.

Media

Song Xu (Migu) introduced the work in the Media and Entertainment Interest Group. The M&E IG was created in 2011 under the name Web and TV Interest Group, but now has broadened its scope to include media in general-purpose browsers and more media providers. Song presented a list of features that might need standardization, including playback speed control, quality adjustment, cue events, and commentary subtitles (a.k.a. “danmaku” or “bullet hell”) for video streams. The consensus was to create a task force for the incubation of the features.

Next generation mobile web apps

We reviewed various attempts to improve the mobile web app experience, including Progressive Web Apps, Mini Programs, Quick Apps, Weex, Taro, and other similar efforts. There are some very similar but different APIs in these efforts, and we have agreed that the web needs a “lowest common denominator” for these efforts.

Conclusion

We ended the day by summarizing the main points of the meeting and sorting out the topics that needed further discussion. After discussion, participants of the meeting proposed:

• In addition to face-to-face meetings for all members of the group, regular meetings on specific topics will be held for deeper discussion on a certain topic;
• For specific topics that need further discussion, new task forces, such as Media, WebGPU, and Web Packaging, will be set up, led by different organizations, and contribute technical proposals and use cases for these topics;
• Minimize language barrier by encouraging and assisting translations of W3C specifications.

Thanks to all who traveled and participated!

For more info, see also the meeting page, the detailed minutes (Chinese), and the summarized report (Chinese).