Re: Introducing WhatTF

On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 12:37 AM, Robert O'Callahan <robert@ocallahan.org> wrote:
> I don't see an "exact charter" and I don't understand what you mean by the
> "functionality" of the CSS box tree. Can you give some concrete examples of
> what this group might define?
>
> Also it's not clear to me why this should be done outside of the CSSWG.

We'll nail things down more explicitly in the first meeting, but the
idea is that our current approach of delivering a new layout mode
every 5 years or so isn't sustainable; they're too complex and the
whole thing is too slow.  Beyond core "layout modes" (like Flexbox,
etc) there's a lot of other stuff that generally falls under the
rubric of "box-tree manipulation" (like Regions, and the constellation
of functionality surrounding their core concept, like running headers,
footnotes, etc.) which, again, takes a long time to go from "idea" to
"usable on mass-market websites".

While there's still value in finding the highest-impact stuff in this
realm and standardizing it with CSS syntax, we feel that for CSS to
continue to be viable in the future, we need to open up these sorts of
APIs to developers more directly, allowing them to define their own
layout managers/etc with lower-level box-creation/manipulation
primitives.  This TF's goal is to figure out how to do this in a way
that's compatible with the perf concerns of today's and tomorrow's
browsers.

We're doing it as a separate TF rather than in the core CSSWG list to
avoid excess noise; this is a topic that is self-contained, of
interest to enough people, but completely uninteresting to another
group of enough people, that it warrants splitting out into a separate
mailing list that people can opt into.  (I've seen enough eyes glaze
over during F2F meetings when we start discussing Flexbox issues to
know that most people don't care at all about the details of layout
modes. ^_^)

And the name was too damned good of a pun to pass up.  Hixie missed
out on the opportunity to use it when he started WHATWG; we had to
jump on that mailing-list address. ^_^

~TJ

Received on Monday, 8 December 2014 19:27:17 UTC