New version of the Roadmap of Web Applications on Mobile
W3C has published a new version of its Roadmap of Web Applications on Mobile, an overview of the various technologies developed in W3C that increase the capabilities of Web applications, and how they apply more specifically to the mobile context. The contents of the roadmap have been updated to follow the evolution of the Web platform since July 2018. See the Change history for details. This new version highlights exploratory work recently started in the Web Platform Incubator Community Group (WICG) to close the gap with native:
- Autoplay Policy, described in Media
- Background Fetch, described in Application Lifecycle and Network and Communications
- Badging API, described in Application Lifecycle and User Interaction
- Display Locking, described in Performance and Tuning
- Portals, described in Application Lifecycle
- Scroll-linked Animations, described in Graphics and Layout
- WebHID, described in in User Interaction
- Writable Files, described in Data Storage
Browser support for some of the specifications mentioned in the roadmap has improved since publication of the latest version of the roadmap in July 2018. For instance, Media Queries Level 4, described in Device Adaptation is now supported by all main browsers. Picture-in-Picture is now also supported in Firefox mobile, and has experimental support in Safari (see Media). Sponsored by Beihang University, this project is part of a set of roadmaps under development in a GitHub repository to document existing standards, highlight ongoing standardization efforts, point out topics under incubation, and discuss technical gaps that may need to be addressed in the future. New versions will be published on a quarterly basis, or as needed depending on progress of key technologies of the Web platform. We encourage the community to review them and raise comments, or suggest new ones, in the repository’s issue tracker.
