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] or post on the WHATWG mailing list or say something on the #whatwg IRC channel on Freenode.

How to edit a spec

We have some documentation on how to write a spec that could help if you want to help out.

Specs to edit

DOM

• A rewrite of DOM2 Traversal.
• A rewrite of DOM2 Range.
  • including much more detail
  • including de-facto features, e.g. createContextualFragment()
• User Interaction Events (onclick, onkeypress, etc).
  • e.g. need to define somewhere that if you cancel mousedown, an element can't get focus
• window.atob
• window.btoa
• XMLSerializer()
• DOMParser()
• An API for cryptography, to generate keys and the like

CSS

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

• CSS Animation
• CSS Gradients
• CSSOM
  • CSSOM needs to define how Link:, <?xml-stylesheet?>, <link rel=stylesheet>, and <style> interact with the fetching algorithm, the event loop, and the parsers from HTML5.
  • CSSOM should have a mechanism for taking elements full-screen
  • it has been proposed that CSSOM have a mechanism for keeping track of when expensive-to-compute areas of the document (e.g. a canvas) are actually being rendered.
    • Add a pair of events that fire when an element is hidden and unhidden
    • Add a pair of events that fire when an element is scrolled into and out of the view
• <?xml-stylesheet?> could do with a rewrite for integration with CSSOM; do 'load' and 'error' events fire on it?

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:

• Encodings: http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Web_Encodings
• 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.)
• JS changes: http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Web_ECMAScript

See also

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

Other stuff

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