Incorporate scroll-to-text into HTML

[bokand]

Hi all,

I'd like to propose merging the scroll-to-text feature into HTML

Explainer
Draft Spec

This has multi-vendor interest/support:

Chrome: Implemented and shipped
Firefox: standards-position: positive
Safari: Experimental implementation WIP

There's still a few spec issues, filed by @annevk and others, left to fix; I'll work those out before I starting on any PRs but I wanted to check in here and see if there's agreement or any concerns/objections.

Thanks!

[Yay295]

What does this have to do with HTML?

[bokand]

Traditional fragment navigation is defined by HTML. Scroll to text is an extension of this behavior; as such, much of the draft spec is monkey patching HTML (with a few additions to DOM and CSSOM-View).

I think the new additions (i.e. non-monkeypatching; e.g. how to parse and process the directive text) probably fits best in HTML but I'm happy to take maintainer advice on where to place things.

[domenic]

This sounds great to me; thanks for working on this!

One thing to be aware of is that nearby portions of the spec are undergoing a rewrite in #6315. However, I don't think it should significantly effect your work, and those of us working on the rewrite will take care of any merge conflicts that come up. Maybe give that a brief skim, to confirm my instincts there.

[Yay295]

Traditional fragment navigation is defined by HTML. Scroll to text is an extension of this behavior; as such, much of the draft spec is monkey patching HTML (with a few additions to DOM and CSSOM-View).

I guess that makes sense. It just seems strange to me that something that changes nothing about HTML would be part of the HTML spec.

[annevk]

It changes how navigation works, including navigation of HTML documents, which is all defined by the HTML Standard. In theory we only get to define how fragments work for text/html, but in practice we also define it for all MIME types that end up rendering as a document at least. Also, as it happens, most things are in scope for the HTML Standard: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#abstract.

(I'm going to mark your comments and this one as resolved. If you'd like to discuss this further please reach out via https://whatwg.org/chat.)

[marcoscaceres]

Is there are PR for this? (asking for the WICG Chairs... just wondering about status as we are itching to migrate out of the WICG)

[bokand]

There's no PR to merge into HTML yet as I'm working out the issues in the WICG spec in-repo first - my plan was to merge once that's in good shape.

I'm actively working on this though and hope to have a PR here in the next ~2-3 weeks

[marcoscaceres]

ok, cool. Appreciate the update @bokand!