Hi. I’m Tess, a standards engineer on the WebKit team at Apple.
I believe in the Web, both as a vibrant, modern platform and as an enduring artifact of human civilization. It’s our responsibility as folks working on Web standards & technologies to ensure both the Web’s continued relevance as a platform for content deployment and application development, as well as its long-term architectural soundness and independence from any tech fads or trends of the moment. The TAG is uniquely situated to pursue both of these ends and it needs active participation from a broad and diverse set of engineers.
My commitment to fight for the long term viability and flourishing of the Web began right out of college, when I was lucky to be one of the first few engineers working on the Wikipedia project. After that and prior to joining Apple I worked at big companies and small companies; as a freelancer, consultant, and employee; on publicly-available web applications and on intranet tools; as a programmer and as a sysadmin; and on backend and frontend stacks. I’ve been both the web application engineer frustrated with browser compatibility bugs and lack of interop, and the browser engineer frustrated with the often perplexing compatibility constraints the Web imposes on us.
I’ve been participating in various Web standards efforts since 2005, and since 2011 I’ve represented Apple in a wide variety of working groups, including most of the groups working on the core, foundational parts of the platform (HTML , CSS, WebPlat, etc.)
I’ve also contributed to various standards efforts at the WHATWG. I believe it’s critical for the long-term viability of the Web for the W3C and the WHATWG to work more closely together. I remain committed to fostering a productive working relationship that is best for the wider Web community and industry, and works for both SDOs.
Web technologies aren’t just for the Web. They’re widely deployed in a variety of specialized domains, and it’s important for the TAG to help people working in such domains best take advantage of the web’s strengths when doing so. One example of this is the world of publishing. I participated in the EPUB 3 effort at IDPF for several years, and I’m very excited to help Publishing@W3C bring packaged, paged Web content to its full potential.