MSEdgeExplainers VS WHATWG HTML Standard

The spec is a W3C CSS working group draft: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-anchor-position-1/

It looks like less of a Chrome thing and more of an Edge thing? The Intent to Prototype [1] links to an Edge explainer [2] with Microsoft authors. It doesn't look like anyone has asked Mozilla for a position yet [3] but I expect if they get positive signals from web developers (us!) that will be soon.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/vsPdd...

[2] https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/...

[3] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues?q=anch...

Read the explainer here

You can learn more about Focus Mode in this Edge explainer document.

For a spec about a browser feature, "getting it" can mean a few different things.

1. Understanding the purpose of the feature ("why/when would I use this?")

2. Understanding how to implement the feature

3. Understanding how to use the feature

4. Understanding the feature's "corner cases" (surprising implications, cases where it doesn't do what you'd expect, etc.)

5. Understanding why the feature works the way it does (instead of some other way)

Most of the web specs really only explain how to implement a feature, and even then, they're not great at that, because they do such a poor job at explaining the purpose of the feature.

Assuming that you, like most of us, aren't working on implementing a browser, that means that web specs are mostly unhelpful to you. It's almost completely beyond the purpose of a spec to teach you how to use a feature, what its corner cases would be (which are often unknown at the time a spec was written), and why the specification says what it says.

This is an area where the web spec community has made some improvements in recent years. Nowadays, it's understood that new proposed specifications shouldn't just provide a specification, but also a separate "explainer" document, whose purpose is to communicate #1 (the purpose of the feature), and also persuade the other browser vendors to implement the feature. ("This will be really cool, and here's why…")

At a minimum, specs nowadays often include a non-normative "Motivation" section, as the CSS Nesting spec does. https://www.w3.org/TR/css-nesting-1/ I you'll find that you can "get" that spec much better than you can the CSS OM spec https://www.w3.org/TR/cssom-1/ which is old enough to buy alcohol and doesn't include a "Motivation" section.

You can often find explainer docs linked off of https://chromestatus.com/ e.g. https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/... I think you'll find that explainers are 10000% better for learning features than specs are. (They typically even discuss #3, #4, and #5, as they typically discuss alternative rejected approaches.)

Transparent ads are enabled through ad providers joining the Transparent Ads Provider program. More info on the program and the requirements for providers here - https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/TransparentAds/Program-Overview.md

Not necessarily for a Swift project, but your experience makes me wonder about the current web API for highlighting spans of text.

https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/...

Complicated...

WHAT-WG HTML

There's a long-standing WHATWG feature request open for it here: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/2791

And several userland custom element implementation, like https://www.npmjs.com/package//html-include-element

One of the cool things that you can do with client-side includes and shadow DOM is render the included HTML into a shadow root that has s, so that the child content of the include element is slotted into a shell implemented by the included HTML.

This lets you do things like have the main page be the pre-page content and the included HTML be a heavily cached site-wide shell, and then another per-user include with personalized HTML - all cached appropriately.

The `allow` attribute on iframes is a relatively recent API addition from 2017

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/3287

I think there's a pretty strong argument at this point for this kind of replacing DOM with a response behavior being part of the platform.

I think the first step would be an element that lets you load external content into the page declaratively. There's a spec issue open for this: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/2791

And my custom element implementation of the idea: https://www.npmjs.com/package/html-include-element

Then HTML could support these elements being targets of links.

> Consider https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1866.txt vs https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/

I thought, oh, that's not so bad. Then I realized what I was looking at was a 10 page index.

I'd love to see something like HTMX get standardized, but I'm extremely pessimistic for HTMX's prospects for standardization in HTML.

In talking to a few standards folks about it, they've all said, "oh, yeah, you want declarative AJAX; people have tried and failed to get that standardized for years." Even just trying to get

to target a section of the page that isn't an has been argued about and hashed out for years.<p>Why is that? Well, for example, here's the form you have to fill out to start standardizing a front-end feature. <a href="https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/new?assignees=&labels=addition%2Fproposal%2Cneeds+implementer+interest&projects=&template=1-new-feature.yml">https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/new?assignees=&labels=...</a><p>It asks three main questions:<p>* What problem are you trying to solve?

The issue with a single global event handler is discussed here: https://github.com/WICG/close-watcher#a-single-event

If you use popover="", you get the kind of functionality you're discussing for free. For

, the discussion is in progress and reaching a conclusion: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/9373