The WHATWG Blog

Please leave your sense of logic at the door, thanks!

Archive for January, 2017

Improving interoperability

Monday, January 30th, 2017

The goal of the WHATWG’s Living Standards is to achieve interoperable implementations. With an ever-evolving web platform, we want changes to our standards to reach all implementations quickly and reliably, but from time to time there have been mishaps:

Three months ago, we changed the process for the HTML Standard to encourage writing tests and filing browser bugs for normative changes. (Normative means that implementations are affected.) This was the first step on a path towards improving interoperability and shortening the feedback cycle, and it has thus far exceeded our own expectations:

As an example, see Remove "compatibility caseless" matching where 3 of the 4 browser bugs are now fixed, or Add <script nomodule> to prevent script evaluation where all vendors have indicated support, and WebKit has a patch to implement the proposed feature and are contributing their tests to web-platform-tests—even before the standard’s pull request has landed.

Note in particular that this has not amounted to WHATWG maintainers writing all new tests. Rather, we are a community of maintainers, implementers and other contributors, where tests can be written to investigate current behavior before even discussing a change to the standard, or where the most eager implementer writes tests alongside the implementation.

We have been using this process successfully for other WHATWG standards too, such as Fetch, URL, and Streams. And today, we are elevating this process to all WHATWG standards, as now documented in the WHATWG contributor guidelines.

Posted in WHATWG | Comments Off on Improving interoperability