Specs/todo

There are many specifications that need editors. This page lists some of the more important ones. If you want to volunteer to edit one of these specs, contact [email protected], post on the WHATWG mailing list or say something on IRC.

See also: Specs with editors, Howto spec.

Platform

• A specification that defines how XML maps to DOM Core. (I think this should be in DOM Parsing and Serialization. Well really in XML.)
• X-Frames-Options (seems this is going into CSP)
• multipart/form-data
• HTTP (error handling in particular)
• APNG (other image formats too maybe?)
• HTML editing: the spec is quite mature, but needs more work

APIs

• User Interaction Events (onclick, onkeypress, etc).
  • e.g. need to define somewhere that if you cancel mousedown, an element can't get focus
  • setCapture / releaseCapture [1]
  • selectstart (WebKit/IE)
• An API for cryptography, to generate keys and the like
• The console.* API. [2] [3] [4]
• Undomanager: http://rniwa.com/editing/undomanager.html and http://rniwa.com/editing/undomanager-usecases.html
• DOM XPath

CSS

There are many specifications for extending CSS that are in need of editors. The most important ones are:

• Table Layout
  • http://dbaron.org/css/intrinsic/
  • http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-tables-algorithms/Overview.src.htm
• Replaced Content
  • http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-content/ (Do we still want this or is the component model sufficient?)
• an imperative model of box-tree construction
• hit testing per http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2010Aug/0407.html

Registries

Currently, the state of registries on the Web (and indeed for the Internet in general) is a disaster. At a minimum, the following registries need dramatically updating:

• MIME types
• Schemes

It's possible that the right solution is to change approach altogether (e.g. moving more to a wiki model of registries).

See also: Registries

MISC

• an API to do syntax highlighting on <textarea>, <pre>, and contenteditable sections would be highly popular with Web developers (ack Ryan Johnson). (This would probably best be done as some sort of output filter at the CSS level, rather than anything HTML-specific.)
• Animated GIFs need a spec that, in particular, specifies how to handle timings (not all browsers honour all values, so we should specify what needs to be honoured exactly)
  • GIF87a: Text (Stanford) / Text (W3C)
  • GIF89a: Text / HTML
  • What's in a GIF
  • GIF Application Extension: NETSCAPE2.0
  • Gifology: Understanding GIF Files & GIF Animation
  • All About GIF89a
• Client-side HTTP implementation requirements specification ("option 3" in http://www.w3.org/mid/[email protected])
• innerText and outerText, if browsers don't remove them entirely

Other stuff

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Oct/0127.html has a description of some sections that needed editing in 2008 and how much work they would be.

Some notes from the HTML5 spec about things that need doing:

• support access Array element via () instead of [] (IEism) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289876
• Need to say that NodeList's items are enumerable, so that... for (var x in myNodeList) { } ...works. (ack Dethe Elza)
• a way to show icons for file types e.g. http://www.gadgetopia.com/2004/05/04/FileIconTag.html (this should probably be a function for the 'content', 'background-image' and 'list-style-image' properties in CSS)
  • Maybe something like moz-icon://? http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2010JanMar/0255.html, http://draft-icon-uri-scheme.googlecode.com/hg/draft-lafayette-icon-uri-scheme-00.html