Lola: I'd like to follow this.

Brian: Is it OK if we review this, because I think this is not hard to get your head around. I'd appreciate Mike's input on this one. This started with the deprecation (attempt) of XSLT by Chrome in WHATNOT. All of the engines agreed that they'd like to get rid of it. It is problematic. Someone opened a thing suggesting W3C should obsolete XSLT. Then there's the question of lots and lots of other things that that opens. Then Danbri wrote in and suggested that we have difficulty defining this because there's a long tail of other stuff that's valid, and reliant on things like RDF triples and semantic web ideas, even if not done in RDF, and there are semantic things that are used outside of the browser. We need to come to how we reason about them.

... Relevant to my interest in the UA Finding, and the current CRA standards that are being built that talk about different kinds of user agent, and what has to be supported. The question is how do we do that, and what would we do? Yves and I spoke a bit about this last week. We condensed it into a tiny space that I think fits nicely.

... The MiniApps and other WGs are coalescing with WebViews. The concept of 'Embedded Web' is emerging. Can we paint some advice around this?

Lola: Sarven, Yves, and I also discussed this a little bit in a round-about way last week. It'd be good to hear how others want to respond to Brian's comments. I have a question: Jeffrey: you are working on the Web Platform Architecture doc.

Jeffrey: Aspirational, but yes.

Lola: How does that fit in to this? And the UAs Finding. Is there space to define this in that Web Architecture document?

Jeffrey: Yes. This touches on a question that Dan Appelquist posted recently - 'what is the web?' There are 3 categories:

• The web (linked resources)
• Web browsers (UAs for visiting a subset of those resources)
• Web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS, XML, ...) which are used to build those resources but they can also be used in other non-linked areas

We should probably write this down.

Brian: I think that document is going to be hard to write already.

Jeffrey: Maybe start with a Finding. Or individual findings on the sub-pieces.

Brian: +1

Lola: Do we want to start breaking this down into what Findings we'd need.

Jeffrey: This issue may be a reaosnable base for a Finding. We don't need to figure out the architecture of the architecture before we start this.

Brian: There are interesting related questions around security. XSLT has a lot of nice characteristics for offline. Putting it in the browser brings characteristics that may be negative.

Jeffrey: The XSLT security issues were totally solvable. But it didn't have the adoption to justify that.

Brian: But it wasn't done.

Jeffrey: It was put in when a C implementation was reasonable. But not enough adoption to justify moving on. Nor to justify implementing versions 2 and 3 in the browser.

Brian: There is some debate over this; a Finding could help.

Jeffrey: We should split this Finding from detailed questions of XSLT. E.g. there was no reason to deprecate versions 2 and 3.

Brian: It helps to have a thing that helps you to ask questions.

Jeffrey: There's a lot of XML formats that are not browsable in web browsers, but are perhaps part of the Web. XML is based on something that came out of the Web, so they're the Web technologies category.

Yves: There's a difference between the web platform, which is everything browser-related, and the web, which is everything linked. A browser can't process everything that is linked, or has linking capabilities. That's the crux of the definition. I think there's something like that in The Architecutre of the Web.

Mike: Would Atom be one of those?

Jeffrey: Yes in my opinion.

Lola: Next steps on this? We're going to write a preliminary Finding based on this issue here?

Brian: I'll continue to work on it.

Lola: If you want to discuss things in these meetings, keep the agenda label.

Brian: I've continued to have some discussions on this and had a look at the W3C's current catalog of WGs and things, to see if I can figure that out. No updates yet.

Yves: There was a comment from Heather talking about layering things. I'm not sure the originally proposed layers match the definition that we had, but worth exploring.

Brian: Beyond architecture, I think this is relevant to W3C itself (thinking as an AC rep) - it's a little bit like 'Why are we here? Why are we doing this work in this venue, and in this way? Who is "we"?' - but I don't have anything meaninful at this time.

Hadley: Would love to discuss this with them.

… There’s this long-standing disagreement between browser people and semantic web people on if the web = the browser, if RDF is part of the web, etc. Comes up regularly.

Marcos: haha, turns out the Semantic Web people were right... because AI loves to consume that data 🤣

Luke: Does this include stuff like XLST 3, MathML, etc.? Also, web views, …

Hadley: Yes, this is all in scope.

Marcos: Browser perspective, web has the Same Origin Policy security model. Anything that can’t enforce that, is not the web platform. The platform is built around the privacy and security principles. CORS, realms, … Behaviour changes if you don’t have origins. Specifying for anything else is possible but not helpful. Think AI browsers. Suddenly the inferencing is an interesting thing, AI is good at that stuff and consuming those ontologies, and the semantic web data is interesting and widely useful.

(On AI etc.)

Lola: I read Torgo's post. It's helpful to a certain extent. Distinction ... "what the web is" is more obvious, but distinction between "web" and "web platform".

Luke: Question is, can we define this? I mentioned some of this last week. Has there been thinking about web-interoperable runtimes? Node, Deno, Bun: where do they fit in? Web has the origin model. Deno might have more of that. Has a permission model. Think it has origins. Doesn't have CORS. Interesting to touch on them. Maybe just to say they're out of scope.

Jeffrey: I think the distinction between the "web" and the "web platform" is that the "platfom" is the software and the API s that the content can use.

Lola: Sounds reasonable, but want to think more.

Brian: Context was XSLT, which raises XPath, X*. What about EPub? Linked Data? 96 closed WGs, where a lot of them are about RDF or Semantic Web or X. Services. Today there are 8-10 open ones about things that aren't in browsers. RDF, SPRQL, Canonicalization. Stuff that's in between, or we don't know yet. Attribution is in the browser but also needs a service. Key to this question. Are there labels we can put around those things to help us discuss them. Don't be offensive, but say something useful. For the W3C, it's important to come to grips with this. The W3C itself seems to have deprioritized them. Biggest thing the W3C has, budget-wise, is Team Contacts. 25% of budget? None of those groups have a Team Contact. That's why this is interesting. Verifiable Credentials? Social Web isn't in the browser. Servo has an experiment building AT Protocol into the browser.

Mike: I'm thinking about it, after the reading, is aligned with what Jeffrey said, which doesn't get to what Brian's saying about what makes the cut. Mental model is that the Web is a deployment of the Web Platform on the internet. Matches models of set-top models, Netflix working on "their" web platform. Has URLs but not on the internet. Doesn't address Brian's point about "what is the web platform?" Seems like the W3C has a role to play. Someone has to steward the definition of Web Platform for it to be useful on the non-Internet deployments

Jeffrey: Yeah. I think that Brian has a deeper question there: what should the W3C work on? That isn't necessarily answered by, "what is the web/web-platform?" We should maybe elaborate what we want to use this question to do--rather than just the philosophical value of the question.

Brian: 100%. I'm relaying the question from Dan. It was asked in the context of some people asking to deprecate XSLT. People said it's "part of the web platform". Is it? Maybe helpful to articulate this. There's some distinction. Maybe not part of the Web Platform. Maybe we need more terms.

Lola: Quesiton you're getting at ... 2 questions: "What should the W3C consider to be the Web Platform?", vs "What is the web vs web platform?" Your question is suited for the Technical Strategy Task Force.

Lola: Drop this from the agenda?

Brian: I'll keep pondering, and will bring it back if I come up with something. Other people could work on it.

Lola: Bring this to the wider W3C?

Lola The last update was on Slack--Brian is having Dan Applequist on his podcast

Brian: Previously, we decided to hold off on publishign a finding. I recorded the podcast with Dan this mornig. I'll be writing a blog post with my own thoughts and return here.

Brian: I've recorded a podcast episode with Torgo about this and shared this with AC and posted a blog post. I'm not seeing discussion happening so maybe we shouldn't burn time on that. Maybe other TAG members can review as I still think it's important.

Matthew: Global Digital Collaboration conference is happening with a mix of W3C, Regulators, etc Having a definition of "web" would be useful input, going to become more important with CRA. Maybe we should give AC a nudge.

Yves: It's still worth doing, the TAG produced things that are initially seen as not useful but later become useful. This is useful to help contextualise what work gets developed in W3C, the document could be useful.

Brian: Okay, please read blog post and listen to discussion to hear my current thinking and let me know what you agree/disagree with and we can see how we may want to shape something. There's utility to me in trying to define/popularise new terminonlogy.

Yves: I still think this is worth doing. Not sure what Brian's current line of thinking is.

Marcos: I'm worried this is going to eat up a whole bunch of the TAG's time. I think it's important; needs to be done eventually, but is it a priority relative to the other stuff we have at the moment?

Heather: what about a timeboxed conversation at the face-to-face?

Marcos: +1

Heather: I'll add it to the GitHub issue for the face-to-face.

Yves: I think last we discussed this, we arranged to put it on the f2f agenda, and revisit there.

Heather: Yes, it's on the agenda.