New updates in web standards

This is post about  latest developments at the W3C, including things like CSS Grid Layout, SVG 2, and native lazy loading support.

What is new

There is a major update on CSS Grid Layout. One it’s a new positioning model for grid. The old grid layout model uses properties to indicate the starting row/column and each item’s span. The new model positions every edge of the item to a grid line.

More about css updates: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work

W3C plans to unify testing resources across WGs. W3C test suites are necessary to ensure specifications are implementable, and a spec cannot move forward without enough tests. W3C is becoming systematic about tests and implementing a plan to unify testing resources and methodologies across working groups, which will decrease effort and increase quality across groups, making it faster to test specs and closing the gaps in testing that exist between the boundaries of different WGs. For example, HTML and SVG are technologies that often interact but there are few tests for that kind of interaction. A shared methodology will improve things like that.


Discussion in the W3C bug tracker - about finding a way to opt-in to lazy loading for images. In this context, lazy loading means that the browser should avoid loading images until they are really needed, i.e. not when they are hidden through CSS or out of the current viewport.

Full discussion: https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=17842#c49


FPWD of CSS Overflow -  a new draft, aiming to extend the overflow capabilities of CSS beyond the overflow-x and overflow-y properties. It will allow us to use different mechanisms for overflow beyond scrolling, like pagination. It’s  useful for a number of cases, like designing web pages to mimic documents (e.g. a word processor web app or a document where you want to have consistent pagination in both the screen and print versions).


There is also new WD of Clipboard APIs. The most significant changes in this new WD are that the events that were long supported by IE (beforecut, beforecopy and beforepaste) are now added to the specification.


New working draft of SVG 2 - the next major version of SVG. It includes a ton of new features since SVG 1.1 like improved compositing and blending, non-scaling strokes, improved accessibility through ARIA attributes, and the first beginnings of mesh gradients.


Starting CSS Color Level 4. Tab Atkins of Google recently made an Editor’s Draft for the next Level of CSS Color, including a few nice small usability fixes and features:
-usability fixes like allowing non-integer values for rgb(a)/hsl(a) color components, angles for hues and percentages for opacity values.
-the highly requested 4 and 8 digit hex codes, to allow for transparency
-support for color correction, ICC profiles and Lab colors is also being discussed. If you have an opinion about whether they would or wouldn’t be useful, feel free to weigh in!


New WD of CSS custom properties for cascading variables. Variables in CSS is one of the top requests that the CSS WG gets. The latest Working Draft, published in March, includes a lot of changes, almost in every paragraph. Here are a few:

-the wording has been changed to refer to these as custom properties instead of variables, but the functionality is pretty much the same.
-the var- prefix is now case sensitive and needs to always be in lowercase
-values of these custom properties can now have !important. (this applies to the way the cascade works for these custom properties, not to the declarations where their values are used)
-it was made clear that even if the value is invalid, it should be retained in the CSS object model and read/written by JavaScript.

More about css variables: http://www.w3.org/TR/css-variables/

CSS conditionals go to CR. CSS Conditionals is the document specifying the @supports rule, also known as native Modernizr functionality in CSS stylesheets. In April 4th, this has been published as a Candidate Recommendation, which means it’s mostly done and is now waiting for implementations and tests.


The W3C specification defining localStorage and sessionStorage is Web Storage and it recently reached Proposed Recommendation status, just one step before Recommendation.


CSS Marquee is leaving. CSS Marquee was a draft that predated CSS Animations and attempted to recreate the effect of <marquee> in pure CSS. However, CSS Animations rendered it obsolete a while ago and it hadn’t been worked on for a long time. In a recent CSS WG call, it was decided that the final nail would be put on its coffin: It will be converted to a W3C Note.