W3C Web Platform Working Group

Web Platform Working Group

What are APIs?

Application Programming Interfaces

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a software interface that exposes access to some internal functionality of a piece of software for use by programmers, to get access to specific information, to trigger special behavior, or to perform some other action. The APIs that the WebApps WG develops are typically client-side script APIs, for use in browsers and similar user agents (as opposed to server-side APIs, for example).

The W3C Web Platform Working Group is chartered to continue the development of the HTML language, providing specifications that enable improved client-side application development on the Web, including application programming interfaces (APIs) for client-side development and markup vocabularies for describing and controlling client-side application behavior.

This group works in public, with details in the WG's Work Mode document and the WG's Github.

A detailed list of this group's publications and their status.

The W3C Team Contact for the Web Platform Working Group is Yves Lafon and Xiaoqian Wu. The Co-Chairs of the Working Group are Adrian Bateman, Léonie Watson, Art Barstow and Charles McCathieNevile.