browser-specs

Web browser specifications

This repository contains a curated list of technical Web specifications that are directly implemented or that will be implemented by Web browsers.

This list is meant to be an up-to-date input source for projects that run analyses on browser technologies to create reports on test coverage, cross-references, WebIDL, quality, etc.

Table of Contents

• Installation and usage

• Spec selection criteria

Installation and usage

The list is distributed as an NPM package. To incorporate it to your project, run:

npm install browser-specs

You can then retrieve the list from your Node.js program:

const specs = require("browser-specs");
console.log(JSON.stringify(specs, null, 2));

Alternatively, you can fetch index.json or retrieve the list from the web-specs@latest branch, and filter the resulting list to only preserve specs that have "browser" in their categories property.

Spec selection criteria

This repository contains a curated list of technical Web specifications that are deemed relevant for Web browsers. Roughly speaking, this list should match the list of specs that appear in projects such as Web Platform Tests or MDN.

To try to make things more concrete, the following criteria are used to assess whether a spec should a priori appear in the list:

1. The spec is stable or in development. Superseded and abandoned specs will not appear in the list. For instance, the list contains the HTML LS spec, but not HTML 4.01 or HTML 5).
2. The spec is being developed by a well-known standardization or pre-standardization group. Today, this means a W3C Working Group or Community Group, the WHATWG, the IETF, the TC39 group or the Khronos Group.
3. Web browsers expressed some level of support for the spec, e.g. through a public intent to implement.
4. The spec sits at the application layer or is "close to it". For instance, most IETF specs are likely out of scope, but some that are exposed to Web developers are in scope.
5. The spec defines normative content (terms, CSS, IDL), or it contains informative content that other specs often need to refer to (e.g. guidelines from horizontal activities such as accessibility, internationalization, privacy and security).

There are and there will be exceptions to the rule. Besides, some of these criteria remain fuzzy and/or arbitrary, and we expect them to evolve over time, typically driven by needs expressed by projects that may want to use the list.