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SE Radio 686: François Daoust on W3C
François Daoust, W3C staff member and co-chair of the Web Developer Experience Community Group, discusses the origins of the W3C, the browser standardization process, and how it relates to other organizations like TC39, WHATWG, and IETF. This episode covers a lot of ground, including funding through memberships, royalty-free patent access for implementations, why implementations are built in parallel with the specifications, why requestVideoFrameCallback doesn't have a formal specification, balancing functionality with privacy, working group participants, and how certain organizations have more power.
François explains why the W3C hasn't specified a video or audio codec, and discusses Media Source Extensions, Encrypted Media Extensions and Digital Rights Management (DRM), closed source content decryption modules such as Widevine and PlayReady, which ship with browsers, and informing developers about which features are available in browsers.
Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
François Daoust, W3C staff member and co-chair of the Web Developer Experience Community Group, discusses the origins of the W3C, the browser standardization process, and how it relates to other organizations like TC39, WHATWG, and IETF. This episode covers a lot of ground, including funding through memberships, royalty-free patent access for implementations, why implementations are built in parallel with the specifications, why requestVideoFrameCallback doesn’t have a formal specification, balancing functionality with privacy, working group participants, and how certain organizations have more power. François explains why the W3C hasn’t specified a video or audio codec, and discusses Media Source Extensions, Encrypted Media Extensions and Digital Rights Management (DRM), closed source content decryption modules such as Widevine and PlayReady, which ship with browsers, and informing developers about which features are available in browsers.
Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
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*Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine.
This transcript was automatically generated. To suggest improvements in the text, please contact [email protected] and include the episode number and URL.*
Jeremy Jung 00:00:19 Hey, this is Jeremy Jung for Software Engineering Radio, and today I’m talking to François Daoust. He’s a staff member at the W3C, and we’re going to talk about the W3C and the recommendation process and discuss Francois’s experience with how these features end up in our browsers. So, Francois, welcome to Software Engineering Radio.
François Daoust 00:00:42 Thank you Jeremy, and many thanks for the invitation. I’m really thrilled to be a part of this podcast.
Jeremy Jung 00:00:48 I think many of our listeners will have heard about the W3C, but they may not actually know what it is. So could you start by explaining what it is?
François Daoust 00:00:59 Sure. So W3C stands for the Worldwide Web Consortium. It’s a standardization organization. I guess that’s how people should think about W3C. It was created in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, who is the inventor of the web. Tim Berners-Lee was the director of W3C for a long, long time. He retired not long ago, few years back. And W3C has a number of properties, let’s say. First the goal is to produce royalty free standards, and that’s very important. We want to make sure that the standard that get produced can be used and implemented without having to pay fees to anyone. We do web standards. I didn’t mention it, but it’s from the name standards that you find in your web browsers. But not only that, there are a number of other standards that got W3C including, for example, XML data related standards.
François Daoust 00:01:59 W3C as an organization is a Consortium. The C stands for Consortium. Legally speaking, it’s a 501C3, meaning it’s a US based legal entity, a not-for-profit. And the little three is important because it means it’s public interest. That means we’re a Consortium, that means we have members. But at the same time, the goal, the mission is to the public. So we’re not only just doing what our members want, we’re also making sure that what our members want is aligned with what end users in the end need. And the W3C has a small team, and so I’m part of this team worldwide, 45-55 people, depending on how you count, mostly technical people and some admin as well, overseeing the work that we do at W3C.
Jeremy Jung 00:02:51 And so you mentioned there’s 45-55 people. How is this funded? Is this from governments or commercial companies?
François Daoust 00:03:00 The main source comes from membership fees. So W3C has so members roughly 350 members at W3C. And in order to become a member, an organization needs to pay an annual membership fee. That’s pretty common among standardization organization. And we only have, I guess three levels of membership fees. Well, you may find additional small levels, but three main ones. The goal is to make sure that a big player will not, a big player or large company will not have more rights than anything, anyone else, but we try to make sure that all members have equal rights. It’s not perfect, but that’s how things are set. So that’s the main source of income for the W3C. And then we try to diversify just a little bit to get for example, we go to governments. We may go to governments in the EU. We may take some grant for EU research projects that allow us to study, explore topics. In the US, there used to be some funding coming from the government as well. That’s also a source. But the main one is membership.
Jeremy Jung 00:04:08 And you mentioned that a lot of the W3C’s work is related to web standards. There’s other groups like TC39, which works on the JavaScript spec and the IETF, which I believe worked with your group on WebRTC. I wonder if you could explain W3C’s connection to other groups like that.
François Daoust 00:04:32 Sure. We try to collaborate with a number of other standardization organizations. So in general, everything goes well because you have a clear separation of concerns. So you mentioned TC39. Indeed, they are the ones who standardize JavaScript. Proper name of JavaScript is the mask script. So that’s TC39 is the technical committee at ECMA. And so we have indeed interaction with them because their work directly impact the JavaScript that you’re going to run in your web browser. And we develop a number of JavaScript APIs actually in W3C. So we need to make sure that the way we develop these APIs align with the language itself. With IETF, the boundaries is clear as well. It’s a protocol for our network protocols for the IETF an application level for W3C. That’s usually how the distinction is made.
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