I've been following the WebKit project for 4 months now and I thought it would be interesting to extract cool news of the week here. This is the first post in this series and I hope it will be interesting and live long.
I'm French so my tailor is rich but my English is poor. Please correct me if you find mistakes.
Changes of the week
Everything mentioned below should work with the latest nightly available at the moment (35531).
CSS parser enhancements (35403)
It's always good to improve standards compliance. The menu:
- don't fail when closing braces are not found for a declaration at the end of the file;
- don't accept "!important fail" as valid;
- keep accepting @import when it comes after invalid @ rules;
- don't drop the whole @media block when there's an error before the closing brace;
- some other minor css parsing revisions.
Support for CSS variable declaration blocks (35414)
The CSS WG is working (among other stuff) on CSS variables. To support this effort and try to find the best syntax, there are some tries in WebKit.
So this week, we have support for CSS variable declaration blocks. See the example in a test to see how it works.
Of course, these are experiments and do not represent the final syntax. There are other experimentations going on, like the use of the var keyword.
Support for console.group (35421)
Let's start by saying the Web Inspector (WebKit's equivalent to Firebug basically) is being refreshed. It has almost nothing to do with the one in Safari 3.1. Try it!
One of the novelty is to support the same Console API as Firebug to help web developers work.
This week, WebKit now supports console.group and console.groupEnd. I must point out this work was done by Keishi Hattori, one of the students participating in the Webkit GSoC .
Support for XMLHttpRequestUpload (35435)
Again, a work in progress specification and a testing implementation. The implementation has even more details than the latest spec I could find.
The idea ? Add events to allow better knowledge about the status of the XHR request. This could allow upload forms with progress bars.
The example shows the new available events and properties.
Ability to disable individual CSS properties (35514)
Also in the refresh project of the inspector. A useful functionality to analyse a web page design, try new things, etc.
News of the week
Ariya Hidayat had some fun adding a live tab previews in Arora (a browser based on QtWebKit).
This is everything for this week. Of course, this is just a selection I've made. If you've noticed any other interesting changes, please let me know. Same thing if I got something wrong.