Arve Bersvendsen

Widgets, F2F and XTech

Next week, the Web Application Formats Working group is meeting in Dublin, Ireland for a face-to-face session where we will be tackling quite a few issues:

• Processing Model
• Security Model (I have some input prepared for this, since Opera defines a rather extensive security model for widgets
• A proposal for handling internationalization and localization for widgets - this stuff is hard, and to paraphrase Consultant Barbie: I18N is hard, let’s go shopping
• Digital signatures for widgets
• Automatic updates for widgets
• Default widget icon
• Tagging and classification for widgets

This week, Marcos has been visiting the Opera headquarters, for a three day sit-down and preparation session where we have handled some of the issues, and made good headway, both in terms of the Packaging and Configuration - in particular I18N, we’ve also done quite a bit of real hard work on APIs and events, which we’ll publish soon. Not to say that we’re out of challenges.

Please note that the agenda items listed above are not a final list of what we’ll be spending the better part of two days talking about. As noted above, WAF has a public mailing list on which you can propose input.

We’ll attempt to keep you updated at what we’re doing during the meeting through Twitter.

On a similar note, I am also going to XTech 2008, and will be presenting a session called Going full circle: Giving Web Applications and Widgets access to device and user data. If you want to know where widgets differ from offline web applications, my talk should at least give you a few pointers. As for talks, I’ll also see if I can get a slot for the 20:20 lightning talks