Thomas Steiner
Thomas Steiner is a proud dad-of-three, a Developer Advocate for the Web at Google Germany GmbH, Hamburg, Germany, and a former Postdoctoral Researcher at the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Lyon, France. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain and two Master of Computer Science degrees, one from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany and the other from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique et de Mathématiques Appliquées de Grenoble (ENSIMAG), France. His main research interests these days are Progressive Web Apps, the Semantic Web, Online Social Networks, Multimedia Semantics, Linked Data, and the architectural style REST. In addition to that, he works on making the Internet a better place, tweets as @tomayac, and blogs at blog.tomayac.com.
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The Capable Web
ACM, Austin, TX, USA
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In this paper, I discuss arguments in favor and in disfavor of building for the Web. I look at three extraordinary examples of apps built for the Web, and analyze reasons their creators provided for doing so. In continuation, I look at the decline of interest in cross-platform app frameworks with the exception of Flutter, which leads me to the two research questions (i) "Why do people not fully bet on PWA" and (ii) "Why is Flutter so popular". My hypothesis for why developers don’t more frequently set on the Web is that in many cases they (or their non-technical reporting lines) don’t realize how powerful it has become. To counter that, I introduce a Web app and a browser extension that demonstrate the Web’s capabilities.
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In this demonstration, we show how special hardware like Nintendo Joy-Con controllers can be made accessible from the Web through the new WebHID API. This novel technology proposal allows developers to write Web drivers in pure JavaScript that talk to Human Interface Device (HID) devices via the HID protocol. One such example of a driver has been realized in the project Joy-Con-WebHID, which allows for fun pastimes like playing the Google Chrome browser's offline dinosaur game by jumping. This works thanks to the accelerometers built into Joy-Con controllers whose signals are read out by the driver and used to control the game character in the browser. A video of the experience is available.
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From Fugu With Love: New Capabilities for the Web
Pete LePage
Thomas Nattestad
Rory McClelland
Alex Russell
Dominick Ng
Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020 (WWW ’20 Companion), April 20–24, 2020, Taipei, Taiwan., ACM, New York, NY, USA
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With this demo, we will show at the example of a greeting card web application how new and upcoming browser capabilities can progressively enhance this application so that it remains useful on all modern browsers, but delivers an advanced experience on browsers that support new web capabilities like native file system access, system clipboard access, contacts retrieval, periodic background sync, screen wake lock, web sharing features, and many more.
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Geolocation is arguably one of the most powerful capabilities of smartphones, and a lot of attention has been paid to native applications that make use of it. The discontinued Google Gears plugin was the first approach to access exact location data on the Web as well, apart from coarse location lookups based on Internet Protocol (IP) addresses; and the plugin led directly to the now widely implemented Geolocation API. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Geolocation API specification defines a standard for accessing location services in the browser via JavaScript. Since the intent to deprecate the use of powerful features over insecure connections and a general demand for increased user privacy, the Geolocation API now requires a secure origin to work. For a long time, developers have also demanded more advanced features like background geolocation tracking and geofencing. The W3C Geolocation and the Devices and Sensors Working Groups, as well as the Web Incubator Community Group (WICG), have addressed these demands with the no longer maintained Geofencing API specification for the former, and, with now (early 2019) resumed efforts, the in-flight Geolocation Sensors specification for the latter two groups. This paper first provides a quick overview of the historical development of geolocation in the browser, and then gives an outlook on current and future efforts, challenges, and use cases.
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What is in a Web View? An Analysis of Progressive Web App Features When the Means of Web Access is not a Web Browser
WWW ’18 Companion, April 23–27, 2018, Lyon, France(2018) (to appear)
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Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are a new class of Web applications, enabled for the most part by the Service Workers APIs. Service Workers allow apps to work offline by intercepting network requests to deliver programmatic or cached responses, Service Workers can receive push notifications and synchronize data in the background even when the app is not running, and—together with Web App Manifests—allow users to install PWAs to their devices’ home screens. Service Workers being a Web standard, support has landed in several stand-alone Android Web browsers—among them (but not limited to) Chrome and its open-source foundation Chromium, Firefox, Edge, Opera, UC Browser, Samsung Internet, and—eagerly awaited—iOS Safari. In this paper, we examine the PWA feature support situation in Web Views, that is, in-app Web experiences that are explicitly not stand-alone browsers. Such in-app browsers can commonly be encountered in chat applications like WeChat or WhatsApp, online social networks like Facebook or Twitter, but also email clients like Gmail, or simply anywhere where Web content is displayed inside native apps. We have developed an open-source application called PWA Feature Detector that allows for easily testing in-app browsers (and naturally stand-alone browsers), and have evaluated the level of support for PWA features on different devices and Web Views. On the one hand, our results show that there are big differences between the various Web View technologies and the browser engines they are based upon, but on the other hand, that for Android the results are independent from the devices’ operating systems, which is good news given the problematic update policy of many device manufacturers. These findings help developers make educated choices when it comes to determining whether a PWA is the right approach given their target users’ means of Web access.
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From Freebase to Wikidata: The Great Migration
Thomas Pellissier Tanon
Denny Vrandečić
Lydia Pintscher
World Wide Web Conference, ACM(2016)
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Collaborative knowledge bases that make their data freely available in a machine-readable form are central for the data strategy of many projects and organizations. The two major collaborative knowledge bases are Wikimedia’s Wikidata and Google’s Freebase. Due to the success of Wikidata, Google decided in 2014 to offer the content of Freebase to the Wikidata community. In this paper, we report on the ongoing transfer efforts and data mapping challenges, and provide an analysis of the effort so far. We describe the Primary Sources Tool, which aims to facilitate this and future data migrations. Throughout the migration, we have gained deep insights into both Wikidata and Freebase, and share and discuss detailed statistics on both knowledge bases.
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Wikipedia Tools for Google Spreadsheets
Wiki Workshop @ WWW(2016)
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In this paper, we introduce the Wikipedia Tools for Google Spreadsheets. Google Spreadsheets is part of a free, Web-based software office suite offered by Google within its Google Docs service. It allows users to create and edit spreadsheets online, while collaborating with other users in realtime. Wikipedia is a free-access, free-content Internet encyclopedia, whose content and data is available, among other means, through an API. With the Wikipedia Tools for Google Spreadsheets, we have created a toolkit that facilitates working with Wikipedia data from within a spreadsheet context. We make these tools available as open-source on GitHub [https://github.com/tomayac/wikipedia-tools-for-google-spreadsheets], released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.
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Patent(2015)
AdAlyze Redux: Post-Click and Post-Conversion Text Feature Attribution for Sponsored Search Ads
WWW '15 Companion Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web, ACM(2015)
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In this paper, we present our ongoing research on an ads quality testing tool that we call AdAlyze Redux. This tool allows advertisers to get individual best practice recommendations based on an expandable set of textual ads features, tailored to exactly the ads in an advertiser's set of accounts. This lets them optimize their ad copies against the common online advertising key performance indicators clickthrough rate and, if available, conversion rate. We choose the Web as the tool's platform and automatically generate the analyses as platform-independent HTML5 slides and full reports.
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