HackMDWeb Apps Gathering
The WAG is a small gathering of projects working on secure and private web app formats and environments to collaborate, find common ground, and learn about each other's work.
- where: Europe, possibly Brussels or Amsterdam.
- when: 2024 Q4 (aiming for October), probably over two days
- who: (not the final list by any means, most of these people haven't been asked)
Browser vendors have made dozens of proposals over the past ~25 years to support web apps, but a stupendous amount of work has met with very little success. Over the past few years, several projects have converged on solutions that differ in their technical details but that share a number of fundamentals, notably a commitment to privacy as a key architectural feature for any kind of powerful application based on web technology.
The goal of this meeting is to share where we are and to see if it would make sense for us to join forces on part or all of our work in this area. A shared standard to use this kind of app in arbitrary contexts with strong safety guarantees could prove amazing.
The high level goals include:
- Comparing the approaches, mapping out which decisions we might wish to align on, notably
regarding:
- App format
- Security model and execution context
- Inter-app communication
- Dedicated APIs
- Outlining what we all need to get from browsers and browser engines, e.g. CSP improvements or synthetic origins, and how we coordinate to request those features with greater weight.
- Sharing information about potential funding venues or projects that we could get funded together. There is potential for European funding.
- See if we can encourage greater adoption in more projects and increase our overall profile by working together and aligning our solutions.
