There are many exciting projects that we are actively working on in the WebKit source tree. To find out more about each project you can visit that project’s home page. If you are interested in starting a new project in the WebKit tree, contact WebKit.org!
General Projects
Web Site Compatibility
The most important project that we are working on (and the one that receives the most attention) is web site compatibility. Our top priority is ensuring that WebKit works with as many web sites as possible. This is a cross-functional project that touches many areas of the code.
Performance
Our second highest priority after compatibility is performance. Find out about our performance measurement tools and policies here.
Code Cleanup
We have a number of tasks in mind for code cleanup. In addition to reformatting existing code to match our coding style guidelines, we also have plenty of work to do moving WebKit code into WebCore now that both frameworks are open source.
Portability
Making the WebKit code more portable to other platforms is also a priority. We would like to begin integration of ports to other platforms, such as the GTK+ port of WebCore. Find out about our plans here.
Documentation
Want to add documents to the WebKit web site? We’re interested in architecture documents, support charts and any other documents you think will help people trying to use WebKit.
Specific Projects
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding style to Web documents. It is a W3C standard.
DOM (Document Object Model)
The Document Object Model is a platform and language neutral interface that allows code to dynamically access and update the content, structure and style of documents. It is a W3C standard.
HTML/XHTML (HyperText Markup Language)
The HTML project is concerned with the implementation of the HTML and XHTML specifications from the W3C. In addition to the W3C work on HTML and XHTML, we are also interested in the extensions to HTML proposed by the WhatWG in the Web Apps specification.
HTML Editing
The HTML editing project provides rich text editing capabilities both as WebKit API for applications and through support of contentEditable and designMode for use in Web pages.
HTML Forms
The HTML form controls project is about the code to support the form controls that are available in HTML and XHTML. We would like to extend forms to support the work of the WhatWG (in particular the Web Forms specification). We also plan to change how the forms are implemented in order to improve performance and portability of the controls.
JavaScript
JavaScript is the primary scripting language of the Web, and WebKit’s JS engine is one of the fastest out there. Find out about some of the interesting improvements planned for the JavaScript interpreter.
Layout and Rendering
For work on the layout and rendering of XML/HTML+CSS. This includes block and line layout, table layout and extensions like the XUL box layout. This also includes work on rendering and display issues.
MathML is a specification for the inclusion of mathematical expressions in Web documents. Although this is not yet implemented in WebKit, we are keenly interested in developing a fully integrated implementation.
Plug-ins
WebKit supports two types of plug-ins, cross-browser plug-ins using an enhanced form of the Netscape plug-in API and WebKit plug-ins that are designed for use by embedded applications that need to display native OS X content integrated with the Web document.
Printing
Find out about WebKit’s printing architecture here and about planned improvements to make page breaks work more cleanly when splitting up objects like HTML tables.
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
SVG is a standard from the W3C for describing two-dimensional graphics for Web documents. This is not yet implemented in WebKit, but we are very interested in merging KSVG and the KDOM work into our code base to achieve a fully integrated SVG solution. If you want to see Dashboard widgets that use SVG, come on in and help make it happen!
WebKit API
The WebKit embedding API provides clients with a public API for loading, displaying and manipulating Web content. WebKit clients can find out about plans for the API and get involved in the design process.
Web Page Accessibility
WebKit has accessibility features designed to work with the VoiceOver technology of OS X. Get involved and make suggestions for how this support can be improved in future releases. We are also interested in how to generalize our current accessibility support to make it portable to other platforms.
XML (Extensible Markup Language)
XML is the foundation of WebKit’s document object model and in the future will be the preferred format for compound documents that use HTML, SVG and MathML together. This project covers the implementation of XML in WebKit and also other XML-related technologies like XPath.
XSL Transformations provide the ability to take source XML and transform it into text, HTML or XML. This capability is a recent inclusion in WebKit, and there is still lots of interesting work to do in this area.
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