An awesome week is coming to the end and I’d like to thanks the sponsors for helping us to make possible that such an amazing group of hackers could work together to improve the web. We focused on some of the consolidated web engines but also about the most promising ones and, of course, hacking on them producing a good amount of patches.
The talks were great, and even better the breakout sessions about many hot topics for the future of the web engines.
Because of the work I’ve been doing lately, I was specially involved in the CSS Features session, which among other things, it complemented the talk Sergio Villar gave us about the Grid Layout implementation we are doing at Igalia in collaboration with Bloomberg. I introduced as well the work I’ve been doing on the implementation of the Box Alignment specification in both Blink and WebKit web engines; we evaluated how it would impact other layout models, like MathML, CSS Regions, CSS Flexible Box, to ease the logic of blocks and content alignment. We also discussed about the future of CSS regarding new layout models, which is a bit uncertain; there is actually an interesting discussion inside the W3C about this topic, so we will see how it evolves. We talked about graphics and CSS and the SVG specification (the 2.0 version is being defined) which will have an important role in the future, as I could personally notice during the last CSSConfEU conference in Berlin; it was also an important topic in other conferences along this year.
This week was a nice opportunity to discuss with other web core hackers the issues I’ve found to properly implement the CSS Box Alignment specification in WebKit, see discussion in the bugzilla for details. We have concluded that is not an easy problem that should be discussed in the mailing list, as it would imply assuming a performance overhead in CSS parsing. The ‘auto’ value defined by the spec for all the Box Alignment properties, to be resolved during the cascade depending on the type of elements, is affecting the current implementation of Flexible Box and MathML so we will have to find a solution.
I also produced a bunch of patches for WebKit to improve the way we were managing margins and float elements, properly identifying the elements creating a new formatting context and applying some refactoring to make the code clearer; these improvements fixed several issues in Grid Layout as well. Besides, borders, margin and padding was finally adapted in Grid Layout to the different writing-modes, which was a patch I’ve been working for some weeks already and had the opportunity to complete during this hackfest.
I think that’s all for now, hope to see you all in the next Web Engines Hackfest 2015.
