In early 2022, WinterCG (the Web-INTEroperable Runtimes Community Group) was established at the W3C. The group was aimed at establishing, in its words, “a ‘minimum common API’ of web APIs that such runtimes should support”, to achieve a greater degree of interoperability across the various server-side environments, as well as interoperability with web browsers. This would greatly help full-stack developers, allowing use of libraries across multiple layers of the stack, and more uniformity across these environments.

The group worked, for example, to tackle difficult differences between environments: the browser has concepts like same-origin, CORS requests and work to hide some things from JavaScript APIs. However, these concepts haven’t historically existed outside the browser. Through their significant efforts, the WinterCG managed to help get several changes landed to specifications that addressed many of these differences.

Community Groups help people organize, but can’t establish standards themselves. As WinterCG has grown, it’s become evident that the work was maturing beyond the confines of what a Community Group would allow. This isn’t uncommon; in fact, W3C community groups are often where early work is incubated before moving into a true standards setting group.

We’re pleased to have been involved in this work since the very beginning, and we are equally pleased that today Ecma International has announced the creation of a new Technical Committee on Web-interoperable Server Runtimes, TC55, a.k.a. WinterTC.

Igalia’s own Andreu Botella and Deno’s Luca Casonato will co-chair TC55, which will initially meet every two weeks and will incubate proposed changes until they’re added to a yearly standard, similarly to how TC39 standards are developed.

We’re looking forward to great developments!

For more information, check out Ecma’s and W3C’s shared official announcement, as well as Deno’s announcement.