Merging Shadow DOM into DOM spec?

Dear all,

We are looking for guidance on what to do with Shadow DOM...

Our approach thus far has been to maintain it as a separate 
specification. That has proven difficult to maintain, and is in many 
ways just a set of patches to DOM.

With support from the editors of Shadow DOM and DOM 4.1, the chairs' 
proposal is to merge Shadow DOM into the core DOM spec as part of the 
current DOM 4.1 revision [2]. We expect this will put our timeline for 
DOM 4.1 - which is otherwise almost ready for CR - back about a quarter 
of a year, but given the uptake of Shadow DOM that seems reasonable.

As always Candidate Recommendations will be limited to features that we 
expect to show have interoperable implementation, with any doubt meaning 
a feature will be labeled at-risk and may be held off for a later version.

This proposal has the short-term disadvantage that anyone trying to 
implement Shadow DOM *on top of* an existing system, especially a 
browser or similar user agent, will have to look through the entire 
specification change history to be sure they have noted all the things 
they need to implement. We hope to mitigate this problem by continuing 
to publish changelogs that provide an effective quick guide to the 
things that have changed. In any event, it has proven hard to maintain 
the Shadow DOM spec separately, so that the option of just reading that 
spec was illusory in the first place

Merging the specifications also has the medium-term benefit of 
simplifying maintenance - while the discussion and resolution of issues 
continues, that aspect has been falling steadily behind.

We have raised issue 150 [3] on the DOM repo, and would appreciate 
comments there, although you may also choose to reply to this thread.

For the chairs…

[1] https://w3c.github.io/webcomponents/spec/shadow/

[2] https://w3c.github.io/dom/

[3] https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/150

Chaals

Received on Wednesday, 5 July 2017 12:16:15 UTC