This is the public version of a W3C newsletter that we send to W3C Members and where I share timely and notable highlights and information selected from the busy and prolific work last month at W3C.
This newsletter includes news about the just finished TPAC event, AI @ W3C, progress on Identity and Credentials, further improvements to W3C infrastructure for standardization and more. If you have any questions about any of the below topics, let us know. We remain keenly interested in feedback on whether this format is useful and what you would want to see in future editions of this newsletter.
TPAC 2026
TPAC 2026, W3C’s annual opportunity for the community to come together, just ended in Dublin last Friday. 500+ people joined in person (including 70+ first-time TPAC attendees), 250 participating remotely, in a week that saw 83 group meetings, 92 breakouts spread over 10 hours, 3 mini-workshops, a hackathon, the developer meetup, and a first time introductory session targeted at policy makers.
W3C is proud that this European edition of TPAC received support from the EU-funded StandICT project. My renewed thanks to AWS as Seamróg sponsor for the event, and Igalia and Microsoft as Comhar sponsors – their support was critical in making this new edition of TPAC as productive as I heard from many participants. So much happened and so recently that this newsletter probably surfaces only a fraction of a lot of the important discussions, but I have highlighted below a few I am already aware of.
If you attended TPAC (physically or remotely), please make sure to bring your feedback on the event – it will help us improve, and will provide us important insights on whether and how the new formats of this edition should be proposed again next year. You may also be interested in browsing photos taken during the week.
AI @ W3C
Prominent in many TPAC group meetings and breakouts, a lot of discussions happened last week on the role of W3C in the fast-moving AI ecosystem.
The most significant among those is probably the broad consensus that emerged on the need for and scope of a new Agentic Web Working Group, with good progress made on the draft charter offering to bring the ideas incubated in the WebMCP specification to a new “site capabilities for agents” Recommendation-track deliverable. This follows active progress on the WebMCP specification itself during the TPAC Web Machine Learning Community Group meeting.
Its sister Web Machine Learning Working Group continued its work on the Recommendation-track Web Neural Network (WebNN) API, including exciting reports on implementation and adoption of this enabler of accelerated client-side usage of AI models.
The Web and AI Interest Group discussed the broader topic of W3C’s AI strategy and roadmap, seeded by the report the W3C Strategy Team released on “W3C and the State of the Web in the AI era,” providing a lot of feedback and input to help stir W3C’s technical direction in this space.
Identity and Credentials
W3C’s role in the identity and credential ecosystem was illustrated by the real-world value brought by Verifiable Credential barcodes in mitigating risks in case of identity theft.
The convergence of interests between the fields of authentication, credentials, identity and payments was illustrated by the joint TPAC meeting of the Web Authentication, Federated Identity, Web Payments Working Groups and Web Payment Security Interest Group, as well as by the Web Payments Working Group discussion on digital credentials and the Payment Request API.
Opportunities emerging from federated identity mechanisms with other W3C work on Linked Web Storage, ActivityPub and Decentralized Identifiers, as well as with developments in the ATProto community led to productive joint discussions at a TPAC breakout.
And at the intersection of AI & identity, the draft Agentic Web Working Group charter now explicitly includes identity and delegation in its scope.
W3C Standardization Platform revamp
AI is not just impacting W3C’s technical agenda, it has also increasingly been used to support the creation or adoption of W3C’s deliverables, sometimes creating friction on when and whether that usage is appropriate. To help set clearer expectations, the Team developed a draft AI Policy which was submitted to the Advisory Board for review and discussed during a dedicated TPAC breakout. Once that input has been integrated, the Team expects to get this policy operationalized in the short term.
AI capabilities have also significantly changed expectations around meeting transcriptions and minuting, as a number of situations during TPAC made abundantly clear, and which suggests W3C needs to clarify and probably revisit some of its existing related policies (see for example discussions on recordings and transcripts of meetings).
Beyond AI, the Systems Team recently released activity pages for W3C groups that aggregate information on what is happening in our 46 Working Groups, 12 Interest Groups and 194 Community Groups based among other data points on their GitHub activity, meeting information, technical report publications. The dedicated breakout where the project was presented indicated strong interest from the community on this new feature, as well as ideas for improvements and additional features.
Another breakout discussed alternatives to IRC for real-time chat, at a time where many in the community have indicated W3C’s reliance on IRC represents a barrier to engaged participation. The TPAC discussions identified strong interest in investigating Matrix for that role, uncoupling it from the related but separate discussion on IRC usage for meeting management. The Systems Team will develop and present plans in that direction.
The latest updates to the Community Group specification redesign were also presented and discussed at a TPAC breakout, paving the way for the next phase of deployment for the new look and feel for incubated specifications.
Finally, while a lot of the community discussions nowadays happen through issues and pull requests, W3C mailing lists remain an important tool for communication and community discussions – the recent release of an experimental improved visualization of threads in our archives is meant to make their use closer to what other user interfaces provide. That improvement applies to millions of archived messages, including those from the earliest history of the Web – the recent completion of archives for the www-talk mailing list brings W3C’s support for persistent URLs to gems such as Tim Berners-Lee’s announcement of the release of the WWW software as public domain, one of the foundational moment of what grew into the Web we know today.
Open source program pilot
To support the exploration of the role of W3C for open source, a second pilot project was launched during TPAC for developing and maintaining a WebMCP polyfill.
The overall development of the program is now being managed in a newly launched W3C Open Source Program Community Group – both of these news were discussed at a dedicated TPAC breakout last week.
SVG2
After many years of challenges in getting traction with the maintenance of the widely adopted SVG specification, the recent publication of an updated Candidate Recommendation Snapshot for SVG2 marks a critical milestone in bringing it to the level of interoperability expected for modern Web specifications. The W3C Membership provided support in the Advisory Committee review of its new charter of the SVG Working Group.
In other news
- Web Platform updates: features from W3C specs that became baseline newly available (what work across the latest browser versions) in October: CSS scroll-driven animations
- Specification newly starting their Recommendation track adventure: CSS Animation Triggers, a way to start a CSS animation upon defined triggers.
- Nominations for the election to the Technical Architecture Group (TAG) run until November 10 to fill 5 seats — at a time where the Web is under so many important pressures to evolve, I expect the TAG’s role in helping W3C navigate these changes to become more critical than ever, and I hope our community rises to the challenge of nominating the candidates to fulfill that collective duty.