[houdini] Report on the first Houdini Task Force face-to-face meeting

Dear all,

At the end of last TPAC, several members of the CSS WG gathered
in the lobby of the Marriott for an informal discussion about the
extensibility of CSS.
That discussion eventually triggered the launch of a joint CSSWG-TAG
task force, called Houdini [1] and it held its first face-to-face
meeting 7th and 8th of february in Sydney, Autralia, hosted by Google
right before the regular CSS WG ftf.

The scope of that TF is CSS Extensibility, opening up the "black boxes"
of the Style and Layout Engines in our browsers:

  Box Tree
  Font Metrics
  CSS Event Model
  CSS Object Model
  CSS Parsing
  CSS Property and Value Extensions
  Selector Extensions
  Media Queries Extensions
  Cascade and Inheritance Extensions
  Input Extensions (scrolling, pointers etc.)
  Layout Extensions (r/w extensions to the box tree)
  Paint Extensions
  ...

All the above should allow the creation of extension prototypes in a
much cleaner and more interoperable way that the current zillions of
polyfills the Web is unfortunately full of. As a matter
of fact, the CSS WG discussed for the first time the possibility of
accepting a polyfill as a valid implementation for CR exit criteria.
There is no decision on that front yet, discussion is ongoing.

I found this TF meeting important enough for the future of the Web
Platform (IMHO, this is a major milestone) to send you the current
short report.

Resolutions:

   1. Scope and list of topics approved.
   2. New document: Box Tree API.
   3. New document: CSS Parser API.
   4. New document: CSS Properties and Values Extensions.
   5. New document: CSS Paint Module.
   6. New document: CSS Layout Module.
   7. New document: Font Metrics Extensions Module.
   8. New document: CSS Scroll Extensions.
   9. New document: CSS Async Style with WebApps WG.

You'll find the raw minutes of the meeting at [2] and the TF's mailing-
list is at [3].

The TF plans to meet face-to-face roughly twice a year right before or
after the regular CSS WG ftfs.

[1] https://wiki.css-houdini.org/
[2] https://log.csswg.org/irc.w3.org/houdini/2015-02-06/
     and https://log.csswg.org/irc.w3.org/houdini/2015-02-07/
[3] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-houdini/

</Daniel>
--
W3C CSS Working Group, Co-chairman

Received on Wednesday, 18 February 2015 13:46:11 UTC