PROPOSED GPU for the Web Working Group Charter
Warning: This document has no official status. It is a draft charter for discussion within the GPU for the Web groups and the W3C Advisory Committee.
The mission of the GPU for the Web Working Group is to provide an interface between the Web Platform and modern 3D graphics and computation capabilities present on native system platforms.
| Charter Status | See the group status page and detailed change history. |
|---|---|
| Start date | [dd monthname yyyy] (date of the "Call for Participation", when the charter is approved) |
| End date | [dd monthname yyyy] (Start date + 2 years) |
| Chairs |
Kelsey Gilbert (Mozilla) Corentin Wallez (Google) |
| Team Contacts | François Daoust (0.05 FTE) |
| Meeting Schedule |
Teleconferences: weekly or bi-weekly calls, as necessary.
Face-to-face: 3 times per year as necessary, including during W3C's annual Technical Plenary week. |
Motivation and Background
In this document, the term GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit, typically a piece of hardware dedicated to efficiently processing graphics and related features.
GPUs have become essential for drawing complex images efficiently, including for rendering virtual reality and augmented reality scenes in real-time as needed by the WebXR Device API. GPUs are also at the heart of computations that leverage parallelism, such as machine learning inference.
Web applications may leverage GPUs through the WebGL family of APIs, but WebGL does not enable access to more advanced features of GPUs, focuses on drawing images and does not provide first-class support for performing general computations, and is not agnostic of the GPU system API exposed by the underlying operating system.
The overall goal of the GPU for the Web Working Group is to provide a foundation that can be implemented on top of modern GPU system APIs to expose modern GPU functionality on the Web, both for computation and for image rendering.
See also the WebGPU Explainer, maintained by the GPU for the Web Community Group, for additional background, use cases, and design considerations.
Scope
This Working Group will recommend a Web programming interface for graphics and computation that:
- enables rendering of modern graphics to both onscreen and offscreen drawing surfaces
- enables computation tasks to be performed, and the results of such tasks to be retrieved
- This group will also recommend a companion Shading Language that describes the graphics and computation tasks in a format that can be translated or compiled into platform-specific instructions
The API will not be restricted to any particular platform technology. Instead, it will be generic enough to be implemented on top of modern GPU system APIs, such as Microsoft's Direct3D 12, Apple's Metal, and Khronos's Vulkan.
This Working Group will investigate and document threat mitigation strategies for the API, notably to address fingerprinting issues and to prevent unauthorized use of computational resources.
Out of Scope
The scope of work is restricted to the development of a programming interface between the Web Platform and modern 3D graphics and computation capabilities present on native system platforms. The work will not define hardware features or algorithms, and the interface it defines is not intended to be directly exposed by a GPU driver.
Deliverables
Updated document status is available on the group publication status page.
Draft state indicates the state of the deliverable at the time of the charter approval. Expected completion indicates when the deliverable is projected to reach a stable state. The Working Group intends to publish the latest state of their work as Candidate Recommendation (with Snapshots) and does not intend to advance their documents to Recommendation.
Normative Specifications
- WebGPU API
-
An API for performing operations, such as rendering and
computation, on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).
Draft state: Working Draft
Adopted Draft: 31 August 2022
Exclusion Draft: WebGPU 18 May 2021;
associated Call for Exclusion on 2021-05-18 ended on 2021-10-15;
produced under Working Group charter: https://www.w3.org/2020/12/gpu-wg-charter.htmlExpected completion: Q2 2025
- WebGPU Shading Language
-
A Shading Language specification that defines the programmable
interface to the GPU for the Web graphics and computation
pipeline, and that can be translated into the shading languages
of the system APIs WebGPU is implemented upon.
Draft State: Working Draft
Adopted Draft: 31 August 2022
Exclusion Draft: WebGPU Shading Language 18 May 2021;
associated Call for Exclusion on 2021-05-18 ended on 2021-10-15;
produced under Working Group charter: https://www.w3.org/2020/12/gpu-wg-charter.htmlExpected completion: Q2 2025
Other Deliverables
This Working Group will produce conformance test suites and implementation reports for its normative deliverables.
Other non-normative documents may be created, including:
- Reference implementations of the group's deliverables
- Use case and requirement documents
- Explainers, primers and best-practice documents
Success Criteria
There should be testing plans for each specification, starting from the earliest drafts. Normative specification changes are generally expected to have a corresponding set of tests, either in the form of new tests or modifications to existing tests, or must include the rationale for why test updates are not required for the proposed update.
Each specification should contain sections detailing all known security and privacy —including fingerprinting— implications, and suggested mitigation strategies for implementers, web authors, and end users. The group should not publish a specification if acceptable mitigation strategies cannot be found.
Each specification should contain a section on accessibility that describes the benefits and impacts, including ways specification features can be used to address them, and recommendations for maximising accessibility in implementations.
This Working Group expects to follow the TAG Web Platform Design Principles.
All new features should have expressions of interest from at least two potential implementors before being incorporated in the specification.
Coordination
For all specifications, this Working Group will seek horizontal review for accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security with the relevant Working and Interest Groups, and with the TAG. Invitation for review must be issued during each major standards-track document transition, including FPWD. The Working Group is encouraged to engage collaboratively with the horizontal review groups throughout development of each specification. The Working Group is advised to seek a review at least 3 months before first entering CR and is encouraged to proactively notify the horizontal review groups when major changes occur in a specification following a review.
Additional technical coordination with the following Groups will be made, per the W3C Process Document:
W3C Groups
- GPU for the Web Community Group
- The GPU for the Web Community Group developed the specifications adopted by this Working Group. It is expected that the Community Group will continue to work on test suites, tools, white papers and other non normative reports associated with the deliverables of this Working Group.
- Immersive Web Working Group
- The Immersive Web Working Group produces specifications to interact with Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) devices and sensors, and may add a 3D rendering layer based on the WebGPU API.
- Web Applications Working Group
- The Web Applications Working Group (WebApps WG) produces specifications that facilitate the development of client-side web applications.
- Web Application Security Working Group
- This Working Group develops security and policy mechanisms to improve the security of Web Applications, and enable secure cross-site communication.
- Web Assembly Working Group
- This Working Group develops a size- and load-time-efficient format and execution environment, allowing compilation to the web with consistent behavior across a variety of implementations.
- Web Machine Learning Working Group
- This Working Group develops a dedicated low-level Web API for enabling efficient machine learning inference in the browser.
External Organizations
- Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG)
- The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) is a community of people interested in evolving the web through standards and tests.
- Khronos
- The Khronos Organization is a standards body that develops many graphics-related technologies, including OpenGL, Vulkan and SPIR-V.
- Unicode Technical Committee (UTC)
- The Unicode Technical Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of the Unicode Standard, including the Unicode Character Database. This Working Group will coordinate with the UTC where appropriate, notably with regards to supporting Unicode identifiers in the WebGPU Shading Language specification.
Participation
To be successful, this Working Group is expected to have 6 or more active participants for its duration, including representatives from the key implementors of this specification, and active Editors and Test Leads for each specification. The Chairs, specification Editors, and Test Leads are expected to contribute half of a working day per week towards the Working Group. There is no minimum requirement for other Participants.
The group encourages questions, comments and issues on its public mailing lists and document repositories, as described in Communication.
The group also welcomes non-Members to contribute technical submissions for consideration upon their agreement to the terms of the W3C Patent Policy.
Participants in the group are required (by the W3C Process) to follow the W3C Code of Conduct.
Communication
Technical discussions for this Working Group are conducted in public: the meeting minutes from teleconference and face-to-face meetings will be archived for public review, and technical discussions and issue tracking will be conducted in a manner that can be both read and written to by the general public. Working Drafts and Editor's Drafts of specifications will be developed on public repositories and may permit direct public contribution requests. The meetings themselves are not open to public participation, however.
Information about the group (including details about deliverables, issues, actions, status, participants, and meetings) will be available from the GPU for the Web Working Group home page.
Most GPU for the Web Working Group teleconferences will focus on discussion of particular specifications, and will be conducted on an as-needed basis.
This group primarily conducts its technical work in its public repositories. There is also a public mailing list public-gpu@w3.org (archive). The public is invited to contribute to the github repositories and post messages to the list. Regular activity summaries around the github repositories will be provided.
The group may use a Member-confidential mailing list for administrative purposes and, at the discretion of the Chairs and members of the group, for member-only discussions in special cases when a participant requests such a discussion.
Decision Policy
This group will seek to make decisions through consensus and due process, per the W3C Process Document (section 5.2.1, Consensus). Typically, an editor or other participant makes an initial proposal, which is then refined in discussion with members of the group and other reviewers, and consensus emerges with little formal voting being required.
However, if a decision is necessary for timely progress and consensus is not achieved after careful consideration of the range of views presented, the Chairs may call for a group vote and record a decision along with any objections.
To afford asynchronous decisions and organizational deliberation, any resolution (including publication decisions) taken in a face-to-face meeting or teleconference will be considered provisional. A call for consensus (CfC) will be issued for all resolutions (for example, via email, GitHub issue or web-based survey), with a response period from 10 working days, depending on the chair's evaluation of the group consensus on the issue. If no objections are raised by the end of the response period, the resolution will be considered to have consensus as a resolution of the Working Group.
All decisions made by the group should be considered resolved unless and until new information becomes available or unless reopened at the discretion of the Chairs.
This charter is written in accordance with the W3C Process Document (Section 5.2.3, Deciding by Vote), and includes no voting procedures beyond what the Process Document requires.
Patent Policy
This Working Group operates under the W3C Patent Policy (Version of 15 September 2020). To promote the widest adoption of Web standards, W3C seeks to issue Web specifications that can be implemented, according to this policy, on a Royalty-Free basis. For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the licensing information.
Licensing
This Working Group will use the W3C Software and Document license for all its deliverables.
About this Charter
This charter has been created according to section 3.4 of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.
Charter History
The following table lists details of all changes from the initial charter, per the W3C Process Document (section 5.2.3):
| Charter Period | Start Date | End Date | Changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Initial Charter | 20 August 2020 | 31 August 2022 | Initial charter |
| Rechartered | 15 December 2020 | 31 August 2022 | New Patent Policy |
| New co-chair | 07 April 2021 | 31 August 2022 | Jeff Gilbert replaces Dean Jackson as co-chair |
| Co-chair update | 17 February 2022 | 31 August 2022 | Reflect change of firstname for Kelsey Gilbert |
| Charter Extension | 07 September 2022 | 30 November 2022 | None |
| Rechartered | 6 December 2022 | 30 November 2024 |
|
| Rechartered | When approved | 30 November 2026 |
|