OpenAjax Alliance Runtime Initiative – Voting Results

The OpenAjax Alliance is “an organization of leading vendors, open source projects, and companies using Ajax that are dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable Ajax-based Web technologies.” MoCo is a member, along with a lot of other companies

Their “Runtime Advocacy” taskforce has spent the last six months canvassing opinion on features they think should be added to browsers, and getting votes on which are the most important. The Summary Report was published today. Here are the top ten feature requests, with a quick analysis of where the Mozilla project is on each:

  1. 2D Drawing/Vector Graphics. This is basically a cry for IE to support SVG. They also ask for SVG 1.1 Full support (I’m not sure what our current state is; perhaps roc can comment?) and text support in <canvas>, for which we have an experimental API in Firefox 3.
  2. Better Security for Cross-site Scripts. We’re proposed Site Security Policies (which may undergo a name change) for feedback; bsterne is currently ingesting it all in order to update the proposal. I’ve also proposed Script Keys.
  3. Better APIs about positioning and styling. This seems to be another “please fix IE” request. The only API mentioned, getBoundingClientRect, is in Firefox 3.
  4. HTML DOM Operation Performance In General. It doesn’t say what version of Firefox they tested, but even if it was 3.0 alphas, the performance numbers for this request were done in January, before the Firefox 3 performance push around beta 4. We still smoked IE in every test they did, splitting first place with Safari. If the author of the page (“Cwei”) could redo the tests against 3.0, that would be useful.
  5. Better Support for Rich Text Editing. As the Summary document notes, “various people in the Ajax community want to move desktop-like document editing into the browser. However, the contributors to this feature request did not outline a detailed strategy for how to accomplish this in future browser.” The page has some useful feedback from Frederico Caldeira Knabben (of FCKeditor) on what he found difficult; we should take note of that. Otherwise, define your requirements more specifically :-)
  6. The Two HTTP Connection Limit Issue. Both IE 8 and Firefox 3 have raised the limit here from 2 to 6, which helps. Having the server specify how many connections it would like is an interesting idea; perhaps our network team could comment.
  7. Better UI Layout Support. They want something like XUL hbox and vbox in HTML. David Baron recently reintroduced the CSS flexbox spec on the W3C CSS mailing list.
  8. Native JSON Parsing. Done for Firefox 3 (docs).
  9. Persistent Connections Issue. Increasing the HTTP connection limit helps to avoid lockup in the short term. We also have offline events and state detection. Exactly what to do in the longer term is still being worked out – it may involve the WHATWG WebSockets spec.
  10. Video and Audio. Patch checked in – should be in Firefox 3.1 :-)

3 thoughts on “OpenAjax Alliance Runtime Initiative – Voting Results

  1. Firefox 3 has an experimental text API for canvas, but Firefox trunk has an implementation of the new official HTML5 text API. Yay!

    The main reason we’re not scoring higher on SVG 1.1 is we lack support for SVG fonts — and that’s definitely on the roadmap. Apart from that, SVG 1.1 is very nearly done.

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