Project Houdini

[Patrick Brosset]

While reading through some w3c css mailing lists this morning [1], I
stumbled upon something called the extensible taskforce (extf) which goal
is to make CSS extensible.

It finally got renamed to project Houdini and now has its dedicated wiki
[2].

The goal of this task force is to project much lower level specs for how
stylesheets are parsed and how documents are rendered with CSS.

I think this is very exciting for devtools because when some of the new
APIs will start to become implemented, this will give us many more ways we
can "explain" CSS to devtools users.
We will actually be able to show why a box measures this much for example.

The taskforce also intends to work on exposing more of the low level CSS
parsing logic, which would really be useful to explain what happened when
unknown properties are dropped, but also help us more easily support styles
as-authored in the rule-view.

Anyway, the project seems very young (started last december I think), so
it'll be a while until anything useful to us comes, but it's worth
following that up if you're interested.

[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-wtf/2014Dec/thread.html
[2] https://wiki.css-houdini.org/main

--
Patrick Brosset