On 29 Nov 2007, at 10:56, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
We may post more details about some of these soon. I'm curious what is of interest to other WebKit contributors. I'm especially interested in areas where particular organizations or individuals might be interested in directly contributing.
In reply to Maciej's goals email, I thought more about the features I would like to see in WebKit that are not there for one reason or another, and would like to know how best to add these on a conditional basis such that normal users can remain oblivious, and power users can customise them. For example, an API for Safari, NetNewsWire, Sandvox &c. to hook into, or user defaults that apply to all WebKit clients without the app needing to support them explicitly. In the case of the latter, how should the defaults be named? Things I would like to see (new features and high priority bugs) include… • Fixed support for :last-child, :nth-child and related selectors. This is probably the biggest issue. • Support for better typography, including kerning, automatic ligatures, true (AAT/OpenType) Small Caps, font-stretch, &c. (this can be a pref—off by default, if Apple prefers performance to presentation. As I have a fast computer i don't really care about a few milliseconds here or there during layout, i spend much longer reading the text than i spend waiting for it to be drawn. Maybe there should be browser engine tests that examine how easy the screen is to read.) • Support for the <link> navigation elements in HTML headers and an API to be exposed with Safari implementation. • Alternate stylesheets automatically offered with Safari interface for switching between them (will require API for other WebKit clients) • Allow user disabling of horrible/clueless author stylesheets (will require API) • A means by which to inject CSS and JavaScript into sites I visit, and have those modifications remembered across sessions. • A means by which to disable quirks mode for text/html (i would like this to be a persistent pref) • A means by which to disable <marquee>, <applet> or other arbitrary things • Ability to right-click on an element and remove it from flow (probably by adding a display: none attribute; so the DOM tree is intact) • Ability to customise one's HTTP headers manually, especially the Accept-* ones (another persistent pref) • and further, the ability to specify what headers would be automatically sent in response to a 3xx code • When rendering a web page aurally, the page should go through a series of xslt transformations: (HTML to) XHTML to SSML, which would then either be sent to a third party TTS (e.g. swift from cepstral.com) or further transformed to PlainTalk + Applebet and sent to the Speech Manager. And a developer-only feature: • A means by which to manipulate the current media to something other than screen (e.g. for previewing tv, handheld, print, projection) and override various media properties manually (page dimensions, maximum volume) so media queries can be tested against them. - Nicholas.