Rtc webAre you interested in standardizing real-time communications over the Web? Of making sure that audio, video and other forms of collaboration can work from any web browsers? Potentially without any plugins?

That is essentially the mission of the “RTC-Web” initiative, a loose collection of people interested in making all of this work through the IETF and W3C standards processes. The initiative has an overall home at:

http://rtc-web.alvestrand.com/

And works primarily through this mailing list that is open to anyone to join (and yes, I’m on it):

http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/rtc-web

The group has obtained status as an official BOF at the upcoming IETF 80 meeting March 27 – April 1 in Prague and has info about the meeting at these URLs:

http://trac.tools.ietf.org/bof/trac/#RAI
http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/80/rtcweb.html

Note that in IETF lingo the BOF and associated docs are referred to as “RTCWEB” without a hyphen.

I like this description of what the BOF is all about:

Many implementations have been made that use a Web browser to support direct, interactive communications, including voice, video, collaboration, and gaming. In these implementations, the web server acts as the signaling path between these applications, using locally significant identifiers to set up the association. Up till now, such applications have typically required the installation of plugins or non-standard browser extensions. There is a desire to standardize this functionality, so that this type of application can be run in any compatible browser and allow for high-quality real-time communications experiences within the browser.

Unfortunately I won’t personally be in Prague, but I’ll definitely continue to monitor the activity of the group online. If you want to be sure we have open standards that allow real-time communication to work from within web browsers, I’d encourage you to participate in (or at least monitor) the activities of the group, too.

Originally from Voxeo Blogs