Author Archive
Monday, April 28th, 2025
The WHATWG's living standards incorporate new features on an ongoing basis. The default process is to propose an idea on the relevant standard's issue tracker, hash out the details and gather implementer interest, and then work together with the editors to land a pull request.
However, we've found that for larger features, or for community members less experienced with standards contributions, sometimes this lightweight process does not give enough guidance. It can be tricky to attract attention to one's proposal, or to get the clear signals from implementers that are necessary to land changes.
Inspired by other working groups, most notably the TC39 group that defines the JavaScript language, the WHATWG community has established a new, optional Stages process for additions to WHATWG standards. Features can proceed from stage 0, where they just consist of a problem description, through to stage 4, when the feature has fully landed in the relevant living standard. Each stage requires increasing levels of community consensus, including from implementers and from the standard's editors. This gives the proposer, as well as the community, a better idea of a feature's progress towards being considered an accepted part of the web platform.
We've now had the Stages process for over a year. As of today, one proposal, the node.moveBefore() atomic move operation, has advanced to stage 4; one, for the customizable <select> element, has advanced to stage 3; and six others are in stages 2 and 1 combined. These numbers might not seem that high, but remember that the stages process is optional: we've landed many other proposals via the usual pull request process. We're happy with the balance we've achieved so far, with certain complex proposals using the stages process while other proceed directly to a pull request.
For more information on the Stages process, including its motivation, mechanics, and each stage's entrance criteria, see its dedicated page. Readers may also enjoy reading our discussion about how TC39 stages and WHATWG stages differ, in light of the groups' different working modes.
Finally, we'd like to thank Chris Harrelson for proposing the idea of a stages process in the first place, Chris Wilson for writing up the process, and TC39 for providing a useful model to follow.
Posted in WHATWG | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 25th, 2023
Welcome to the newest standard maintained by the WHATWG: the URL Pattern Standard! The URL Pattern Standard gives a generic pattern syntax for matching URLs, and extracting the parts from them. It is inspired by the path-to-regexp library, although it extends beyond paths to encompass all the parts of a URL. You can read more about the API on MDN.
The URL Pattern Standard joins us as a graduation from the WICG, where it was authored by Ben Kelly. As part of the move to becoming a Living Standard, Jeremy Roman and Shunya Shishido are joining Ben as editors to help maintain and evolve the standard.
We see the URL Pattern Standard being adopted in many upcoming proposals, including speculation rules, compression dictionary transport, and service worker static routing. It has also seen adoption with implementations beyond web browsers, such as in Deno, Cloudflare Workers, Next.js Edge Runtime, and Netlify Functions. We are excited to provide a home for this primitive going forward.
Posted in What's Next, WHATWG | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, December 1st, 2021
The last time we introduced a new Living Standard was Infra, in 2016. This year has seen a flurry of activity, with four new standards joining the WHATWG!
The Web IDL Standard defines the interface language and JavaScript mapping for all web platform APIs. It migrated to the WHATWG from its old location, on the personal GitHub page of its original editor Cameron McCormack. Thanks to Cameron for his many years of stewardship, and thanks to the current editors Edgar Chen and Tiancheng "Timothy" Gu for their help in the move!
The Test Utils Standard defines APIs that are not exposed on the open web by default, but are specifically useful in testing web browser functionality. So far it defines the testUtils.gc() method, allowing us to test garbage collection-dependent APIs. James Graham is the editor.
The WebSockets Standard consolidates content that was formerly spread across the HTML Standard and the Fetch Standard. This new home will provide a natural place for standardizing the WebSocketStream API, which integrates WebSockets with streams. Adam Rice is the editor.
Finally, the File System Standard will specify an API for an origin-private filesystem, drawn from part of the existing File System Access specification as well as the AccessHandle proposal. (The portions of the File System API specification for accessing the local file system will remain in incubation, until they gather multi-implementer interest.) Marijn Kruisselbrink will be the editor.
We're happy to see such excitement about working in the WHATWG, and will strive to continue to provide a welcoming community where new features can be developed or existing incubations can graduate. We hope you enjoy these new Living Standards. As always, feel free to join us on GitHub to discuss improvements and additions. And if there are more specifications that would like to become WHATWG Living Standards, please get in touch!
Posted in What's Next, WHATWG | Comments Off on New Living Standards
Thursday, June 21st, 2018
(If you’re interested in the IPR status of WHATWG standards this post is for you; otherwise, feel free to skip.)
One aspect of last year's working mode changes is the periodic publication of a Review Draft for each WHATWG Living Standard, as per the IPR Policy. The WHATWG published an initial five of these just now:
To get notified of future Review Draft publications you need to watch the Living Standard’s corresponding GitHub repository. You’ll find these repositories linked from the top of the standard.
Then you can filter the emails generated by watching this repository by looking for the subject-line prefix “Review Draft Publication:” which the WHATWG will consistently use as per the Maintainer Guidelines.
Watching the repository is the only way to get notified going forward. This blog post serves as an initial announcement and as a way to make everyone familiar with the process going forward.
Thanks for reading through three non-technical posts in a row. It will get technical again soon!
Posted in WHATWG | Comments Off on First set of Review Drafts published
Wednesday, June 28th, 2017
Back in 2011, Ben Schwarz took on the ambitious project of curating an edition of the HTML Standard specifically for web developers. It omitted details aimed specifically at browser vendors, and had several additional features to make the experience more pleasant to read.
Ben did an amazing job maintaining this for many years, but some time ago it fell behind the changes to the HTML Standard. Since the move to make HTML more community-driven, we've been hoping to find a way to synchronize the developer's edition with the mainstream specification. That day has finally arrived!
We've deployed an initial version of the new developer's edition at a new URL, https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/. It's rough around the edges, missing several of the features of the old version. And it needs some curation to omit implementer-specific sections; many have crept in during the downtime. We're tracking these and other issues in the issue tracker. But now, the developer's edition is integrated into our build process and editing workflow, and will forever remain synchronized with the HTML Standard itself.
Hereby we issue a call to the community to help us with the revitalized developer's edition. Two of the biggest areas of potential improvement are helping us properly mark up the source according to the guidelines for what goes in the developer's edition, and contributing to the design of the developer's edition in order to make it more beautiful and usable.
Finally, I want to thank Michael™ Smith for getting this process started, via a series of pull requests to our build tools which did most of the foundational work. And of course Ben Schwarz, without whom none of this would have happened in the first place.
Posted in Tutorials, What's Next | Comments Off on The Developer’s Edition of HTML makes a comeback