Open Web Platform Weekly Summary - 2013-03-18 - 2013-03-24

This is our weekly Openweb Platform Summary from March 18, 2013 to March 24, 2013. You can read again the last week blog post. Your comments are helpful.

[CSS] Smooth Scrolling

Sometimes Web designers wish to be able to create a smooth scrolling effect when adjusting the scroll position of a page. Tab Atkins (and someone else at Google) is proposing to modify scrollTo and scrollBy functions in CSSOM View to take a third parameter: an optional "smooth" string. If omitted, the scroll is instant. Boris Bzarsky (Mozilla) is explaining the current behavior in Mozilla. Simon Pieters (Opera) is wondering if there should be way to control the time dependency of the scrolling.It could become also a good opportunity for users to have more control on it and deactivate it through user stylesheets. Read the full thread.

[CSS] :first-child without parent

CSS world is sometimes harsh. A :first-child can never match a root element because it has no parent element and so is not the child of any elements. Read the full thread. The issue comes with DocumentFragment what should happen in this case. Boris Bzarsky and Tab Atkins outlined some possibilities.

[CSS] Orientation of input type="range"

When using <input type="range">, it might be useful to have it vertical or horizontal. Jonathan Watt was working on its support inside Mozilla and asking if there should be a property inside CSS for it. It seems that a specific attribute orientation is an intermediate solution in the meantime.

[CSS] min-width and max-width as pseudo-classes

Do we need :min-width/:max-width pseudo-classes for CSS layouts? A blog post is explaining the issues related to Responsive Web design per elements and layout resizing when in a different context than the main document. This started a gigantic thread on CSS list with very interesting concrete cases.

[WebApps] Appcache, some use cases

Charles McCathieNeville (Yandex) has posted use cases related to appcache.

[HTML] video playlist

How would you implement the playlist in HTML?

[HTML] longdesc is back

If you have been living under a rock, you might not know, but longdesc attribute is in the process of being back in HTML5. Not yet done. There are still a few issues to solve before.