The mission of the Second Screen Community Group (CG) is to explore, incubate, and define interfaces that enable new form factors and usages for multi-display and multi-window computing user experiences on the Web.
The scope of work for this Community Group extends beyond the current scope of the Second Screen Working Group (WG). Given wider support and adequate stability, we plan to migrate the proposals generated in this Community Group to an appropriate W3C Working Group for further contributions and formal standardization.
webscreens/Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these
conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
This proposal aims to give web developers information about the set of connected physical displays, and considers additional display properties that may be useful beyond the current Screen interface.
The ability to open and move windows across the full set of connected displays is unstandardized and the current behavior is inconsistent between implementers. This proposal aims to give web developers standard means to manage their web content in modern windowing environments.
Please join me in welcoming these new computing user experience enablers into this group.
At TPAC 2013, the Second Screen Community Group was created to incubate an idea of making secondary screens first-class citizens on the Web. The Community Group produced an early version of the Presentation API specification that was used as a starting point for the Second Screen Working Group‘s formal standards work that commenced in 2014. The API that started its life in this Community Group is now implemented in a major browser and is advanced on the Recommendation Track.
Encouraged by the great feedback from the wider community, this Community Group was rechartered in September 2016 to do further exploratory work. Specifically, the group was chartered to incubate and develop specifications of network protocols that implement the Presentation API and the Remote Playback API. The renewed mission of this Community Group is to enable protocol-level interoperability, encourage more implementations, and to establish complementary specifications.
Join the Community Group to shape the future of the web-connected screens around you!
The Second Screen Presentation Working Group was chartered a couple of months ago at W3C, thanks to the support of W3C members, especially those participating in this Community Group. As described in its charter, the mission of the Working Group is to take the Presentation API specification along the Recommendation track up to its final publication as a Web standard.
To ease the transition and provide a concrete starting point for the Working Group, the Community Group published an updated version of the Presentation API as final report yesterday. This report includes the outcomes of recent discussions within the Community Group while the Working Group was being created.
The Community Group will now cease its work on the Presentation API specification and let the Working Group take it from there. Please note that the Community Group remains active though! It will typically explore potential future work items that are not yet in scope of the Working Group.
Dominik, Anssi, Louay and I have been working on a series of demos to experiment with the Presentation API and hopefully iron out edge cases in the API early on.
Demos that have been assembled so far:
The initial video sharing demo that lets one present a video on a second screen using an HTML video player.
The <video> sharing demo that investigates using the HTMLMediaElement interface to control a video presented on a second screen.
The HTML Slidy remote demo that takes the URL of a slide show made with HTML Slidy and presents it on a second screen, turning the first screen into a slide show remote.
The Fraunhofer FOKUS’ Competence Center Future Applications and Media (FAME) has also been working on a number of implementations of the Presentation API as part of FAMIUM, an end-to-end prototype implementation for early technology evaluation and interoperability testing introduced by FAME.
Different types of second screens are supported depending on the demo considered, using custom version of Web browsers, browser extensions, etc. All demos fallback to opening the content in a separate browser window.
We will try to keep these demos aligned with the evolutions of the Presentation API, and complete the Presentation API demos page with additional ones over time. Feel free to share demos or suggestions on the group’s mailing-list!
Using the binaries from the page, or building your own version of Chromium with the provided patches applied, you can get an impression of what using Presentation API might look like and the sort of new usage scenarios that it enables. It’s also possible to experiment and build your own examples.
webscreens/
