I was chatting with Tierney from Microsoft yesterday and thought I'd bring y'all together to chat. They are very active in the OpenJS foundation and generally interested in web standards and Stories.
One thing I've been thinking for a while is that it would actually be possible to standardize Web Stories in the W3C sense. Concretely speaking this would effectively mean to define a new doctype that would change browser behavior such that
- No vertical scrolling is possible
- JS would probably needed to be turned off (maybe analytics could be solved by allowing a worklet to subscribe to events but not change the DOM)
- OMG, maybe we need to do analytics-worklet independent of this :)
- There would be an element for the slides in a story and the browser would handle navigation between them via tab
- Anchor elements would get the 1.5 tab behavior
- There would be an attachment element for swipe up
- etc.
Reasons why I have been reluctant to look deeper into standardization:
- Last time (about a year ago) I talked to standards-folks about this they weren't interested.
- This would be a very big standard and there is little precedence for such application-specific doc types (Maybe WAP).
- Related to the last bullet, one can argue that since Web Stories work perfectly fine relying on the extensible web, making a higher-level standard is not needed.
- Since UX for Stories is still evolving (Jon and I just talked about how anchors should really work and lots of UX research needs to be done) it might be too early to go into the relatively slow standardization process. OTOH, maybe these details actually could be left up to the implementation.