I will be officially leaving Mozilla on the last day of June. My last working day will be June 16. Perhaps I should say I will be leaving the Mozilla Corporation — MoCo, as it’s known internally. After all, once you’re a Mozillian, you’re always a Mozillian. I was there for a significant part of my life — nine years, most of them great, some tough. I was empowered and supported by leadership to mo

13 November 2017 At a high level, standards organizations operate in similar ways. A standard is produced and implementations follow. Taking a cue from software engineering, WHATWG added active maintenance to the mix by producing Living Standards. The idea being that just like unmaintained software, unmaintained standards lead to security issues and shaky foundations. The W3C worked on test suites

13 October 2016 A couple years ago I wrote Contributing to standards and it is worth noting how everything has gotten so much better since then. Basically all due to GitHub and standards groups such as TC39, WHATWG, and W3C embracing it. You can more easily engage with only those standards you are interested in. You can even subscribe to particular issues that interest you and disregard everything

21 July 2016 The WHATWG Fetch Standard is an essential part of the browser networking subsystem. Basically any API that involves networking (e.g., <img src>, <a href> (through navigation), XMLHttpRequest, @font-face, WebSocket) goes through Fetch. The exception is WebRTC’s RTCDataChannel and perhaps not surprisingly it has a security issue. The fetch() API is also defined in terms of Fetch and the

25 May 2016 There is a pretty good comment on Hacker News (of all places) by nostrademons explaining why the DOM is not slow. Basically, all the DOM mutation operations are pretty trivial. Inserting and removing nodes, moving them around, setting an attribute, etc. It’s layout that takes a while and layout can be synchronously triggered through APIs such as offsetWidth and getComputedStyle(). So y

29 April 2016 Hayato left a rather flattering review comment to my pull request for integrating shadow tree event dispatch into the DOM Standard. It made me reflect upon all the effort that came before us with regards to adding components to DOM and HTML. It has been a nearly two-decade journey to get to a point where all browsers are willing to implement, and then ship. It is not quite a glacial

21 January 2016 The W3C has forked the HTML Standard for the nth time. As always, it is pretty disastrous: Erased all Git history of the document. Did not document how they transformed the document. Issues of mismatches have already been reported and it will likely be a long time, if ever, before all bugs due to this process are uncovered, since it was not open. Did not discuss plans with the wide

29 March 2016 We have reached the point where custom elements and shadow DOM slowly make their way into other standards. The Custom Elements draft has been reformatted as a series of patches by Domenic and I have been migrating parts of the Shadow DOM draft into the DOM Standard and HTML Standard. Once done this should remove a whole bunch of implementation questions that have come up and essentia