Device APIs Working Group

On this page:
Mission | Roadmap | Future Work | Submissions | Participate | Meetings | Minutes | Communications | Documents | History
Nearby:
Information on Implementations | WG Notes and Checklists | DAP wiki | WebApps WG | HTML WG
Administrative:
Draft and Approved Minutes | "My Actions" | "My Questionnaires" | Participants | Patent Policy Status | Open Issues | Open Actions | Public email list | Member email list | LC Tracker

Mission

As defined in its charter, the mission of the Device APIs Working Group is to create client-side APIs that enable the development of Web Applications and Web Widgets that interact with devices services such as Calendar, Contacts, Camera, etc.

Roadmap

As every Working Group, the Device APIs Working Group aims at gathering consensus on its specifications, both within the Working Group and with the community at large, working through an iterative process with implementors to ensure that the specifications are implementable and implemented.

The most recent working draft is highlighted as follows in the table below (it may be a working draft that was updated following a Last Call, for example).

Example of highlighted most-recent version

Recommendation Track Deliverables

NB: the dates marked with a question mark have not been approved by the Working Group yet.

Specification Internal draft Public Working draft Stable draft (Last Call) Implementors feedback (CR) Standard (Rec) Test Suite Notes
Active work
Battery Status API 20 Nov 2012 15 Sep 2011 29 Nov 2011 08 May 2012 approved
HTML Media Capture (HTML form extensions for media capture) 11 Dec 2012 13 Dec 2012 26 Mar 2013 9 May 2013
Media Capture and Streams (programmatic access to media streams, aka getUserMedia) 29 May 2013 16 May 2013 draft Joint deliverable with the Web RTC Working Group through the Media Capture Task Force
MediaStream Recording (recording camera/microphone's streams) 7 May2013 5 Feb 2013 Joint deliverable with the Web RTC Working Group through the Media Capture Task Force
MediaStream Image Capture (taking still images from a camera streams) 3 Jul 2013 9 Jul 2013 Joint deliverable with the Web RTC Working Group through the Media Capture Task Force
Network Information API 28 Nov 2012 29 Nov 2012
Ambient Light Events 6 May 2013 2 August 2012 13 Dec 2012 draft
Proximity Events 6 May 2013 12 July 2012 6 Dec 2012 draft
Vibration API 6 May 2013 17 Nov 2011 23 May 2013 23 July 2013 approved (but not complete)
Network Service Discovery (HTTP-based services advertised via common discovery protocols within the current network.) 4 Oct 2012 04 Apr 2013  
Other
Menu API
Permissions for Device API Access 30 Sep 2010 5 Oct 2010

Informative documents

Specification Internal draft W3C Working Group Note Notes
MediaStream Capture Scenarios 04 Jan 2013 6 Mar 2012 Joint deliverable with the Web RTC Working Group through the Media Capture Task Force
Device API Access Control Use Cases and Requirements 16 Mar 2011 17 March 2011
Privacy Requirements 23 Jun 2010 29 Jun 2010
Web Application Privacy Best Practices 28 Jun 2012 3 July 2012
Web Intents (service discovery and light-weight RPC mechanism for web apps) 4 Sep 2012 23 May 2013 Work happens in the Web Intents task force

Exploratory work

Specification Internal draft Note
Privacy Ruleset 6 Oct 2010
Ambient Temperature Events 16 Jul 2012
Ambient Humidity Events 13 Jul 2012
Atmospheric Pressure Events 13 Jul 2012

See also the list of the Device APIs published Technical Reports.

As part of its technical work, the group ensures that its APIs are reviewed according to a checklist of good practices for APIs.

The history and past revisions of the documents drafts are available in the W3C public CVS server.

We use a Mercurial repository on dvcs.w3.org, clonable with hg clone http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/dap, to manage our test suites, whose latest versions are available on W3C Test Server, w3c-test.org (more info).

The Working Group has currently shelved the following work items, waiting for a better overall approach to emerge:

The Working Group is not planning to work on the following items:

APIs that have been suggested as worth consideration for the group but not currently prioritised (and therefore not up for discussion) are kept in the FutureWork page on the group's wiki.

See also coordination points with the Web Applications Working Group.

Media Capture Task Force

This is a joint activity of the Device APIs Working Group and the Web Real-Time Communications Working Group. The work on the media capture API getUserMedia is done on the publicly archived mailing list: <public-media-capture@w3.org>. Additional information is available on the Media Capture Wiki.

Web Intents Task Force

This is a joint activity of the Device APIs Working Group and the Web Applications Working Group. The aim is to review the Web Intents proposal and to see whether it can be adapted to support additional use cases for service discovery, e.g. those of the Web & TV Interest Group. The work on Web Intents is done in the Web Intents task force on the publicly archived mailing list: <public-web-intents@w3.org>. Additional information is available on the Web Intents Wiki.

Participate

If you are employed by a W3C Member and want to join this group, please ask your Advisory Committee Representative to nominate you to the group as explained in the relevant instructions.

If you are not employed by W3C Member and have specific expertise to bring to this group, the said instructions explain how to get Invited Expert status.

See the list of current participants.

Meetings

Weekly 90 minute teleconference Wednesdays, at 10am US Eastern Time on Zakim teleconference bridge: +1.617.761.6200 (VoIP: sip:zakim@voip.w3.org) code 3279 IRC channel #dap on irc.w3.org port 6665 (Web IRC client).

Please note that attendance of DAP WG teleconferences is restricted to registered WG participants and persons invited by the chairs.

On each call please register attendance in IRC using

Present+ firstName_lastName

and please update the information on which caller you are. For example, if you are noted as +1-781-555-aaaa, use

zakim, aaaa is yourHandle

if you are ??P5 then use

zakim, ??P5 is yourHandle

You can obtain agenda and bridge information with /Topic at any time from within IRC.

We're tracking issues and action items using Tracker. You may see your actions using MyTracker.

Upon completing actions, please move them to the Pending status, and inform the WG with a summary of the action results, (including ACTION-# in the body of the message so it is linked to the action record). Text lists of pending actions and open actions are also available.

Face to face meetings

None currently scheduled.

Minutes

Minutes are taken in rotation, please consult the list of scribes for further details.

Minutes are posted to the public list and once approved are linked from the meetings page, which also includes links to draft minutes.

Communications

The main communication channel for this group is the publicly archived mailing list <public-device-apis@w3.org>.

Member-confidential messages and logistical discussions can be addressed to the member-only archived mailing list <member-device-apis@w3.org>

Documents

Here are some documents of interest to participants in the WG:

Patent Policy

This group operates under the W3C Patent Policy - see its Patent Policy status for more details.

History

The Working Group was first chartered in July 2009 as the “Device APIs & Policy Working Group”, as a follow-up to the workshop on Security for Access to Device APIs from the Web held in December 2008, and then rechartered in August 2011 under the name “Device APIs Working Group”.

The group used to work on the following documents, but their development has been stopped:

The following were submitted as starting points for this group's deliverables:

Also relevant are the following:

The following documents are obsolete and should not be referenced:

Specification Internal draft Public Working draft Stable draft (Last Call) Implementors feedback (CR) Standard (Rec) Test Suite Notes
APIs Design Patterns 05 Jul 2011