Upcoming WHATNOT meeting on 2025-07-31

[cwilso]

Our July 24 meeting was cancelled. The next one is scheduled for July 31, 9am PDT. Note that this is 1 week later in the Americas & Europe friendly time.

People interested in attending the next call please respond here or reach out privately to @cwilso or the editors. We will be tagging issues for the next call again using agenda+ in all WHATWG repositories across issues and pull requests and we would like to invite anyone that can contribute to join us.

[nt1m]

I'd love to see progress on:
#11255
#11345

to unblock shipping of command invokers. (I won't be there to discuss it, but I trust @annevk on these issues)

[annevk]

Attendees: Brian Kardell, Anne Van Kestren, Noam Rosenthal, Luke Warlow, Lea Verou, Mason Freed, Joey Arhar, Dan Clark, Daniil Sakhapov, Benjamin VanderSloot, Domenic Farolino, Kagami Rosylight, Emilio Cobos Álvarez

Carryovers from last time

• Formalize content attribute reflection
• Improve CommandEvent and ToggleEvent source retargeting
• Make command events not composed

New topics:

• Rendering <select> as a listbox is a one-line widget that opens a popup on iOS and Android
• Proposal for Element.currentLang and Element.currentDir
• Carry over sticky activation for same-origin navs and traversals
• Add new strings for notRestoredReason
• Updates on How to handle addEventListener on CSSPseudoElement? · Issue #12163 · w3c/csswg-drafts (Daniil)
• Improve DX of element reference attributes by allowing relative references instead of only ids (Lea / Noam)
• Navigation API precommit handlers (Noam) See also spec PR

Action Items

• Someone should create a new document as this one is getting long and slows down browsers
• Editors (and optionally Keith) should try to review interestfor.

Minutes

Formalize content attribute reflection: there is discussion about ReflectEnum now. Would love feedback. #11455

Improve CommandEvent and ToggleEvent source retargeting: still need feedback from Olli.
Make command events not composed: still need feedback from Olli.
Rendering <select> as a listbox is a one-line widget that opens a popup on iOS and Android: Anne will ping people
Proposal for Element.currentLang and Element.currentDir: discussion on issues and ideas, needs feedback. Worries about reflecting CSS back (would force styles calc). Dir might already be accounted for with matches. Lang is much trickier for matches because it’s open ended. Discussion about deferring direction and focusing on lang.

Skipping “carry over sticky activation for same-origin navs and traversals” as it’s not entirely clear what the ask is, but Olli(?) and Anne should probably review.

Add new strings for notRestoredReason is waiting for Olli.

Updates on How to handle addEventListener on CSSPseudoElement? · Issue #12163 · w3c/csswg-drafts (Daniil): adding a pseudoElement property to events is not working well.

Anne: I think it’s a layering violation because presentation and behavior are supposed to be separate and this intertwines them.

Noam: I think we crossed that bridge ages ago with focus and such.

Anne: I’ll concede there are things on the boundary, but to me that doesn’t mean to throw away the principle entirely.

Daniil: The use case here is CSS carousels, where you want to react to the one the user clicks on.

Luke: I think there’s still discussion as to whether carousels should happen in CSS to begin with.

Lea: I wonder if this is a reason to not use pseudo-elements. If we’re finding all kinds of reasons they should be like regular elements, maybe they should just be regular elements.

Emilio: I was going to voice some of that, but Luke and Lea made good points there. I think for this specific carousel example caring about the click on the button seems a bit weird. Why is a click different from a mousewheel?

Daniil: It’s needed to measure what end users are interested in.

Noam: How does this even work for ::part? And View Transitions? For View Transitions I’m not sure if there’s another architecture that would not use pseudo-elements.

Tab: ?

Mason: It’s a limited set of pseudo-elements. Some of these pseudo-elements are very button-like. So why not support event listeners?

Brian Kardell: Why not start with HTML? Seems more natural. I’d rather not go down this particular road.

Lea: How does it work with the event path? Or querySelector?

Daniil: The latest proposal for event listeners is to fire two events. A separate event for the PseudoElement with an empty event path.

Mason: Daniil, why don’t you write up what you learned today to make sure we’re all on the same page.

Improve DX of element reference attributes by allowing relative references instead of only ids (Lea / Noam)

Lea: we keep getting more of these. Ergonomics don’t feel great as you need to sprinkle unique IDs everywhere. Can we do better? Selectors?

Open question: reuse existing attributes with novel syntax or introduce new attributes?

(There are many open questions, it turns out.)

Navigation API precommit handlers (Noam) See also spec PR. Olli and Anne, please give feedback.