The two-year EU-funded HTML5Apps project proudly looks back to its achievements. The project, ending in September 2015 successfully accelerated the development of standard Web technologies required to make HTML5 apps competitive with native apps, specifically in the areas of Web payments and rich mobile Web APIs.
[The full press release is available in the Press section of this Web site].
HTML5Apps initiated W3C Payments standardization work
Payments have been identified early on as a major gap, and on March 2014, the HTML5Apps project organized a W3C Workshop on Web payments. It immediately gathered a lot of interest from a wide variety of stakeholders, ranging from banks, merchants, payment service providers, mobile operators, and many others. As a result, a W3C Web Payments Interest Group was formed. Chaired by Bloomberg and NACS representatives, the group is composed of 104 participants who have been busy at identifying specific standardization opportunities and building consensus on which of these need to be addressed within W3C.
After gathering industry use cases and requirements to help ensure that the standards developed have the ability to include business-to-business (B2B) payments as well as financial institution-related payments, the group proposed to standardize APIs – supporting functionality such as payment instrument registration, payment initiation, and payment completion – to enable an automated secure foundation for future Web payments capabilities. As a result, W3C is now in the final stages of starting new standards work to make Web payments both easier and more secure.
HTML5Apps publishes mobile Web standardization roadmap
HTML5Apps conducted a series of interviews with European SMEs to investigate their need for fast and easy development of innovative Web-based services. As a result, there is a need and strong support for in-progress standards around offline access, push notifications and access to device APIs. Where specification efforts had not started yet, the project brought them to the W3C Web & Mobile Interest Group to report new standardization opportunities.
“Seeking input directly from European developers and SMEs enabled us to better understand their challenges of using Web apps over proprietary formats,” explains Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, HTML5Apps lead. “As a result, and to facilitate information, coordination and participation from these developers, we maintained a standardization roadmap tracking efforts inside and outside of W3C.”
For the past two years, the HTML5Apps team published, on a quarterly basis, a roadmap entitled “Standards for Web Applications on Mobile”. Acclaimed by Web developers, this document summarizes the various technologies developed in W3C that increase the capabilities of Web applications, and how they apply more specifically to the mobile context. The latest edition of this roadmap was published in August 2015. It notably includes additions related to emerging work such as the proposed charter for a Web Payments Working Group.
This project is funded by the European Union through the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2013-2015) under grant agreement n°611327 - HTML5 Apps.