Last week, W3C TPAC 2025 happened. It brought hundreds of people together to work on the W3C's mission of making the web work for everyone, with group meetings and break-outs, and an AC session.
As TPAC unites so many groups and people, any visitor will experience FOMO at one point or another. In my case, it was a dazzling 4 super interesting breakouts scheduled at the same time, overlap between Working Groups and Advisory Board and a bunch of people I meant to chat to. But wow, it was a week!
In this post, I want to reflect on some themes I saw recur, and what stood out to me. To stay within the confidentiality rules, I will keep the following fairly high level and unattributed to specific people or companies.
Web and AI
In a very full breakout on the Open Web we talked about what's changing with generative AI vendors training on web content and then repackaging what they found without consistent backlinks. They don't usually have permission to do this. But do it anyway (I find that rude). Work on robots.txt at IETF will improve opting out, and allegedly some (lawyers of) vendors attend the meetings. “Does this [content theft] threaten the business model of the web?”, was asked, to which a participant replied with “Do all websites have a business model?” No, I'd say—this blog doesn't and neither does my favourite website, Wikipedia. I constantly look at and love websites that people published just because they cared. Regardless of motivation, is what crawlers do really at odds with what we want the open web to be? Or is it just an extremer version of what has always been inherent to the open web?
Apart from that discussion, we talked a bit about generative AI's extreme and multi-faceted climate footprint in the Web Sustainability Interest Group (or SWING—we make the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG)), both on measuring and on how to include it in the WSG.
A number of Working Groups talked about AI-related web technologies at the event. I couldn't attend any of those sessions due to scheduling, but heard a bit about WebML and the Prompt API in the hallways (there's a lot of AI work at W3C) and about the upcoming AI Agents workshop and Web & AI Interest Group at the on-site AC meeting.
Human rights
In September, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published their latest report with recommendations for standards development organisations (SDOs) on how to incorporate human rights. In the “Human Rights & Web Standards?” breakout, we got together to discuss it. I scribed the session, so I did not say much, but what stood out to me was the many opportunities we have around human rights. We're also looking at this in the Advisory Board.
At W3C, there's existing human rights supporting standards, like WCAG—it gets a mention in the introduction of the OHCHR report, and groups like the Equity Community Group. And in particular the TAG has published a number of documents that support human rights, like the Ethical Web Principles, Privacy Principles and the Social Impact Questionnaire. But there are also standards that could end up threatening human rights if they weren't analysed early, and organisations that we could try to get involved to have the human rights perspective represented and questions more likely to be asked. Two challenges in this are lack of expertise and participation gaps, Simone Onofri of W3C explained. The UK government's Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) got a mention.
Policy
That standards and policy can be closely related should not surprise anyone. This came up a lot, including when we talked about versioning of WCAG, dated references from European standards, and what kind of conformance models could best support the goals of legislation.
Very high level, WCAG helps establish what's “accessible” is and WSG, similarly, what's “sustainable”. Either is of course a reduction of reality. A useful reduction, that is meaningful enough for policy. The risk with both is that if requirements are too vague, or the conformance model too loose, that it could become a tool for website owners to pretend they are reaching goals, while they're not. It was interesting to see the overlap between the groups, though some probably mostly in my mind as I happen to participate in both.
Accessibility
On the first two days, not one, not two, but three accessibility focused Working Groups had full day meetings. AG works on accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2 and 3), ARIA does ARIA (obvs), APG and more, and APA, ensures accessibility is considered across spec work at W3C, through research and horizontal review. I had to be mostly in the first group and FOMO'ed my way through with regards to the other two.
There were also a number of accessibility related breakouts, of which I ran one: on evaluating with WCAG-EM. This Evaluation Method is a document from 2014, that Jeroen Hulscher, myself and Steve Faulkner have been updating over the past year, to make it work more broadly (for all “digital products” rather than just “websites”, matching the scope of European legislation), and bring it up to date.
W3C
During the week, one or more members of the Advisory Board attended all of the Working Group meetings. As we're responsible for the W3C Process, a document that guides the effectiveness of W3C standards making and accomplishing the mission, we wanted to hear from people. Not just chairs, but anyone who had something to share. During the “Tell us what's wrong with the Process” breakout, we invited even more feedback. Of course, others have done that before us, the Process has gotten regular updates for years, but we wanted to be even more explicitly open to feedback this week. I wasn't able to make the breakout, but ran the feedback bit of the AGWG meeting. To be continued. (If you read this and want to share Process feedback, feel free to reach out to an AB member or file an issue on GitHub).
Food
TPAC 2025 was in Kobe, Japan. After the meetings, I reckoned it would be rude not to enjoy Japan's culinary offerings. During previous visits, I struggled to find vegetarian food. It worked fine this time, and I loved the award-winning vegan ramen, a life changing grilled onigiri, outstanding veggie tempura, whole roasted carrots, and a specially requested veggie izakaya set menu (thanks to the efforts of Japanese colleagues).
Summing up
This post doesn't really do a whole week of meetings, encounters and food justice. But I'll say that it was a very good week, full of progress for accessibility, human rights, W3C Process and sustainability. Thanks to all at W3C who helped organise this event. It was expertly organised.
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