Archive for the ‘WHATWG’ Category
Monday, January 25th, 2016
It’s been several months now since maintenance of the HTML Standard moved from a mostly-private Subversion repository to the whatwg/html GitHub repository. This move has been even more successful than we hoped:
- We now have thirty-seven contributors who have landed one or more patches, and have merged over 250 pull requests in total. That’s almost two new contributors each week since the move!
- We’ve worked to curate a list of good first issues to introduce newcomers to the community and the standard, and worked hard to improve the onboarding experience for building the standard.
- With help from the community, the standard's gender pronoun disparity has been significantly improved. (See The happy case of pronouns and HTML.)
- Sponsored by Mozilla, we have applied to Outreachy and Richa Rupela is now helping us write the HTML Standard.
- We have collaborated with TC39—who thankfully moved to GitHub around the same time—to remove some longstanding discrepancies between HTML and ECMAScript.
- We've made many, many small fixes to better match the reality of what is implemented in browsers, mostly in response to feedback from browser developers.
Aside from defining the HTML language, the HTML Standard defines the processing model around script execution, the fundamentals of the web’s security model, the web worker API for parallel script execution, and many more aspects that are core to the web platform. If you are interested in helping out, please reach out on IRC or GitHub.
Posted in WHATWG | Comments Off on HTML Standard now more community-driven
Thursday, October 30th, 2014
We're happy to announce the addition of the Streams Standard to the list of specs maintained by the WHATWG!
Streaming data shows up all over the web platform, and this new spec gives us a set of APIs for creating and interfacing with that data. We hope that streams will be a unifying primitive for I/O, much like promises (the previous spec I worked on) have become for asynchronicity.
The Streams Standard provides a basic set of primitives, namely readable streams, writable streams, and transform streams, which can be created directly by developers and by other parts of the web platform. For example, the Fetch Standard could expose request bodies as a writable stream, or response bodies as a readable stream. More generally, the platform is full of streaming abstractions waiting to be expressed as streams: multimedia streams, file streams, interprocess communication, and more benefit from being able to process data incrementally instead of buffering it all into memory and processing it in one go.
This work, of building streams into the web's APIs, has in many cases already begun. The W3C TCP and UDP Socket API provides an excellent example of a streams-based specification. We're also discussing how to integrate with fetch, service workers, media source extensions, and web audio—with more to come! Meanwhile, all the major browser vendors have expressed strong interest in or even begun implementation of the stream primitives.
Finally, I want to say a word about this spec's development model. The spec has been hosted on GitHub for over a year while it gestated, and has gathered a lively community around it of people willing to help us work through the often-tough design problems. Alongside the spec we have been developing a reference implementation ("polyfill") and a comprehensive test suite. We have a very active issue tracker, and have embraced practices like pull requests, branches, and continuous integration. It's been a fun journey to get the Streams Standard to a point where it's ready to join the august assembly at spec.whatwg.org, and I appreciate the WHATWG community for helping me along the way.
If you're hungry for more streams knowledge, please check out the spec; the introduction and model sections are especially accessible, and there are extensive examples. And while you're reading, feel free to file an issue or open a pull request if something could be improved!
Posted in WHATWG | 1 Comment »
Monday, September 15th, 2014
All whatwg.org and html5.org domains, including subdomains, are now available over TLS. We are also enabling HSTS though this is not done everywhere just yet. If you find Mixed Content issues be sure to let us know or provide a pull request on GitHub.
Update: TLS and HSTS are now deployed everywhere on both domains. We also submitted the domains to the HSTS preload list.
Posted in WHATWG | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2014
The WHATWG is starting down the road of getting patent commitments for its standards. You can be part of this!
First,
create an account with the W3C's community group system.
Then,
join the WHATWG community group.
Then
make the patent commitment by following the instructions on this page (pick the first radio button, then click "Record my choice").
That's all there is to it! Google, Mozilla, and Opera have already signed the patent commitment agreement. Anyone can sign up, but it's even more useful if you are an employee of a big patent-holding company and can convince your company to sign up!
Posted in WHATWG | Comments Off on Make patent commitments for the URL standard
Monday, October 14th, 2013
Today we're happy to add two more specs to the WHATWG stable, Books and Figures! These are specifications focused on CSS features. Books provides ways to turn HTML document into books, either on screen or on paper. Using Books, authors can style cross-references, footnotes, and most other things needed to present books on screen or paper. Figures are also based on traditional publishing — it provides ways to float elements with respect to columns and pages, and describes how to wrap text around them.
Printing was part of the first CSS proposal in 1994, and many of these CSS features have been in use since the first paper book written in HTML and CSS (CSS — Designing for the Web) was published in 2005. Now, a decade later, bestsellers are routinely produced with CSS. There are currently two implementations of these specifications that are able to produce books: AntennaHouse and Prince. We hope that our continued work on these specifications will help existing implementations converge, and also encourage browsers to present web content as pages. Pages can be printed, stored as PDF files, or shown on screens. Many users will prefer pages to scrollbars, and these specifications will help make it happen.
As an example of a feature from Books, consider footnotes. Turning an element into a footnote is easy:
span.footnote { float: footnote }
This can, with a few more styles, be formatted as:
![Body text, with a superscripted footnote saying '[1]' in red, and under the body, a short line delimiting the body from text in a smaller font size, with the same red '[1]' indicating the footnote.](//people.opera.com/howcome/2013/whatwg/books/footnotes.png)
In another example, common newspaper and magazine layouts can be achieved with just a 10-line style sheet. Here's what this could look like:
More screenshots and code examples are available.
Feedback on these specifications, like all our others, is most welcome, either on www-style, on WHATWG's mailing list, or as bugs in the bug database.
The features described by these specifications were previously published as part of a W3C CSS working group document that I wrote. Today we are moving the work to WHATWG, a W3C Community Group.
Posted in WHATWG | 6 Comments »
![Body text, with a superscripted footnote saying '[1]' in red, and under the body, a short line delimiting the body from text in a smaller font size, with the same red '[1]' indicating the footnote.](http://people.opera.com/howcome/2013/whatwg/books/footnotes.png)
