Web Engines Hackfest 2026 Talk Ideas

[Ethan-Arrowood]

The CFP for Web Engines Hackfest 2026 opened up recently and on the 3/6/26 call the group briefly discussed that speaking about the Runtime Keys work could be a good talk idea. Maybe something around how we are leveraging a technical report to define a registry? Could be a great case-study style talk.

I'm happy to collaborate with others on a talk if there is interest.

Lets use this thread to discuss ideas. 🚀

[Ethan-Arrowood]

For those following along, Aki and I submitted:

"How to ship a registry when nobody wants to run one"

Runtime keys are short string identifiers that web server runtimes and tooling already use for conditional exports and runtime detection (for example the exports field in a package.json). But until recently there was no canonical list of runtime keys. Should you use “node” or “nodejs”? This talk covers how the Web Interoperability Technical Committee (WinterCG when it was chartered in w3c, now TC55 within Ecma) ended up creating a registry without actually running a registry. Starting as a generic W3C proposal during the WinterCG days, the team considered many options, from IANA to the OpenJS Foundation. When the community group finally joined Ecma and became a technical committee, they landed on using an Ecma Technical Report as a functional registry. This talk walks through how Technical Reports work, why this format fits a registry better than it looks, and what trade-offs we accepted by mapping registry semantics (immutability, deprecation, conflict avoidance with Browserslist) onto a semi-annual publication cadence.