How to track new features to (WHATWG) HTML Standard

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It's easy enough to see what has changed from one version of W3C's HTML5 standard to the next. I can also see the W3C's standards and drafts. But W3C and WHATWG are not the same and since WHATWG maintains a Living standard which is never finished:

how can I keep track of the diffs in the WHATWG HTML Living Standard?

Let's say I want to:

  • see what new features exist from the last time I reviewed it
  • see what is on the roadmap for inclusion
  • see what has changed/dropped

FYI Tracking the WHATWG/html github repo would yield too much noise, but its all I could find.

specifications standards github html
1 Answers
  • see what new features exist from the last time I reviewed it
  • see what has changed/dropped

https://github.com/whatwg/html/commits/master is your best bet for those. The commit log is meant to be a readable summary of the changes, and commit messages are also reviewed with that in mind.

You can also search for all pull requests that’ve been merged to master since a certain date and that have a particular label1. The normative change label is one way to do that:

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pulls?q=merged:%3E2019-06-20+label:%22normative+change%22

…but that label isn’t applied to additions or removals — and people often forgot to add it — so on its own, it won’t give you a complete picture. So you can also look at the addition/proposal label:

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues?q=merged:%3E2019-06-20+label:addition/proposal

…and the removal/deprecation label:

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues?q=merged:%3E2019-06-20+label:removal/deprecation

There are a bunch of other labels you can search by — including topic:-prefixed labels to narrow down to just changes made to a particular section of the spec; e.g., topic:history:

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues?q=merged:%3E2019-06-20+label:%22topic%3A+history%22

  • see what is on the roadmap for inclusion

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pulls?q=is:pr+is:open+sort:updated-desc is a good view for that.

1 As documented in the answer at https://stackoverflow.com/a/29136870/441757, the GitHub search interface unfortunately doesn’t yet support label searches combined with the OR logical operator. So for now, you’ll need to do multiple searches.

Anne_236070
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