For the last two years, I have been serving on the W3C Technical Architecture Group, which is responsible for stewardship of the architecture of the World Wide Web. I’d like to be re-elected to that position, and you can help!

The Web is an indelible part of modern life, and more than that, it’s provided me with the basis for my entire career. I have worked as a freelance web developer, owned a web development agency, worked in house at two large publishers with web teams, and now I work for Fastly, helping to build the infrastructure that serves websites quickly and securely.

One job I’ve never done is to work on browsers. I’ve never been a contributor to Chromium, Mozilla or Webkit, and I’ve no wish to do that. For me, the exciting part of the Web is the innovation that developers can do when you give us the right tools and expose the right capabilities in the platform.

Right now, the TAG has excellent representation from implementors, with over half the group having hands-on experience building browsers or working within browser teams, at Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Samsung and Opera. We also benefit from having two policy experts who are able to frame the technology changes we are making within a wider sociological context, considering issues of privacy and consent which are vital when you’re building tech that almost instantly rolls out to three billion people and transcends national boundaries.

That said, the most important constituency for the TAG is surely web developers. We use this stuff, to build other stuff, which real users then benefit from. It’s developers who need to understand and integrate new platform features into their sites and apps. And the TAG doesn’t have enough of them.

Two years of work

Over the two years I’ve been on the TAG, what have I done? I’ve been the lead author of two out of the three findings TAG has issued during my term in office: Distributed and Syndicated content and Polyfills and the evolution of the Web. I was a contributor to the third, The evergreen Web, which was led by Hadley.

I’ve led the TAG review of many of the technologies that have come to us: Web Locks, Accept-CH, Preload, Server-Timing, Signature-based loading restrictions, Budget API, Web Payment Manifest, Scroll Anchoring, Origin Policy, Wake Lock, Notifications and Clear-Site-Data.

As the rest of the group will probably attest, I’m also an agitator for process improvements within the TAG, which have contributed to more efficient use of our time at face to face meetings and a higher work rate.

What’s to come

I’m excited about web packaging, and especially feature policy and origin policy, which bring potential for huge gains in the security, performance and elegance of the web. We’ve talked about “secure and fast by default” for a long time, but backwards compatibility has made it hard to achieve in practice. We’re finally turning the corner on this and I’d like to help that happen.

What can I do

Are you an employee of a company that is a member of the W3C? If so, find out who your “AC rep” is, and ask them to vote for me. If not, why not just tweet your support with something like:

I support re-electing @triblondon to the @w3ctag because [SOMETHING]

Usually, the turnout for TAG elections is extremely small, so your help can make a huge difference. Thanks!