Software

The mission of the Web Payments Working Group is to make payments easier and more secure on the Web. The group seeks to:

• streamline checkout by making it easier for users to return stored credentials and other information, and by creating a consistent experience across Web sites, browsers, and operating systems. These improvements should help reduce the percentage of transactions abandoned prior to completion ("shopping cart abandonment") by improving consumer confidence in the payment experience;
• improve payment security by fostering digital payment method innovation on the Web;
• simplify and lower the cost of creating effective Web checkout experiences;

Under its charter, the Working Group defines Recommendations that allow for a payment to be initiated within a Web site or application.

The Working Group will continue to advance these existing specifications to Recommendation:

• Payment Request API, which standardizes an API to allow merchants (i.e., Web sites selling physical or digital goods) to utilize one or more payment methods with minimal integration. User agents (e.g., browsers) facilitate the payment flow between merchant and user, mediating the user experience and providing consistency between different merchants and providers.
• Payment Method Identifiers, which defines the validation and (where applicable) registration of identifiers used for matching purposes by other W3C payments specifications.
• Payment Handler API, which defines capabilities that enable Web applications to handle payment requests. The specification defines how payment apps register their capabilities with the user agent, how the user agent communicates with them, and what information is exchanged.
• Payment Method Manifest, which allows the curators of a defined payment method or owners of a proprietary payment method to authorize (via a manifest file) which payment apps may be used to fulfill the payment method. The scope of this work extends to all types of payment apps, including native mobile apps and Web apps.

The Working Group will continue to develop the following payment method specification, intended to become a Working Group Note:

• Basic Card Payment, which specifies request and response data for making simple card payments with Payment Request API.

The Working Group will also look at enabling re-use of the Payment Request API data model in out-of-browser payments. One approach may be to define the model in a binding- and encoding-neutral way. For early work on this topic, see HTTP Messages 1.0.

The mission of the Web Performance Working Group is to provide methods to measure aspects of application performance of user agent features and APIs.
 
Web developers are building sophisticated applications where application performance is a critical feature. Web developers want the ability to observe the performance characteristics of their applications, and they want the ability to write more efficient applications, using well-defined interoperable methods. Their methods must be both secure and privacy-enabling by design, using well-defined interoperable methods that conform to the current Web browser security model.
 
The Web Performance Working Group's scope of work includes user agent features and APIs to observe and improve aspects of application performance, such as measuring network and rendering performance, responsiveness and interactivity, memory and CPU use, application failures, and similar APIs and infrastructure to enable measurement and delivery of better user experience. Such deliverables will apply to desktop and mobile browsers and other non-browser environments where appropriate, and will be consistent with Web technologies designed in other working groups including HTML, CSS, Web Application Security, Web Platform, Device and Sensors, and SVG.
 
In addition to developing Recommendation Track documents, the Web Performance Working Group may provide review of specifications from other Working Groups.

The mission of the Web Real-Time Communications Working Group is to define client-side APIs to enable Real-Time Communications in Web browsers. These APIs should enable building applications that can be run inside a browser, requiring no extra downloads or plugins, that allow communication between parties using audio, video and supplementary real-time communication, without having to use intervening servers.
 
Enabling real-time communications between Web browsers require the following client-side technologies to be available:

• API functions to explore device capabilities, e.g. camera, microphone, speakers,
• API functions to capture media from local devices (e.g. camera and microphone, but also output devices such as a screen),
• API functions for encoding and other processing of those media streams,
• API functions for accessing the data in these media streams,
• API functions for transferring data between peers,
• API functions for establishing direct peer-to-peer connections, including firewall/NAT traversal,
• API functions for decoding and processing (including echo canceling, stream synchronization and a number of other functions) of those streams at the incoming end,
• Delivery to the user of those media streams via local screens and audio output devices (partially covered with HTML5).

The working group will address issues related to using these functions in various contexts on the Web platform, such as:

• Traditional Web pages
• Web Workers of various types
• Iframes, with appropriate access controls
• Applications that span multiple pages
• Pages, workers and frames specifying content security policies or other security mechanisms that should impact the use of these APIs

The mission of the WebAssembly Working Group is to standardize a size- and load-time-efficient format and execution environment, allowing compilation to the web with consistent behavior across a variety of implementations.
 
The scope of the WebAssembly Working Group comprises addressing the need for native-performance code on the Web in applications ranging from 3D games to speech recognition to codecs—and in any other contexts in which a common mechanism for enabling high-performance code is relevant—by providing a standardized portable, size-, and load-time-efficient format and execution environment that attempts to maximize performance and interoperate gracefully with JavaScript and the Web, while ensuring security and consistent behavior across a variety of implementations.
 
Since the inception of the Web, various technologies have been developed to allow “native” applications on the Web. Techniques such as user consent with digital signatures and Virtual Machines with different capabilities than JavaScript failed to be robust in the face of increasingly high security requirements. Later efforts like Native Client, which featured robust security, failed to achieve cross-browser adoption. Cross-compilation to JavaScript using Emscripten, especially using the machine-optimization subset called asm.js, achieved some degree of success. However, consistent cross-browser performance, shared memory threads, and other machine features have proved elusive.
 
The WebAssembly format and execution environment address the shortcomings of those previous efforts.