Last week in WebKit:
the move of WTF and responsive CSS images

Mar 26, 2012

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With 901 commits to the various branches on WebKit’s repository, last week brought highlights including the move of WTF and a new CSS property to aid usage of responsive images: image-set().

Following much discussion and preparation, including e-mail threads going back more than a year, Eric Seidel moved the WTF (Web Template Framework) code out of JavaScriptCore. It initially settled there in 2005 as the kxmlcore directory, after which it got renamed to WTF in 2006 as many more useful classes had been included there.

JavaScript files and stylesheets will now be editable by default in Web Inspector’s Resources Panel. Highlighting of SVG root elements with a custom viewbox has been fixed and Source Maps may now be defined inline.

An initial implementation of the image-set() CSS function landed in WebKit, as was proposed for the CSS Images Level 4 module last month. Mixed percentage and absolute combinations for calc() may now be used for masks, background positioning and image sizing, Hyatt is working on the new Multiple Column implementation and fieldsets won’t stretch to minimum intrinsic width anymore if an explicit width has been specified. Besides various other Flexible Box Layout changes, the flexing algorithm got updated.

The crossorigin attribute may now be specified on script elements, causing WebKit to apply the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing policy on script elements as well. Three DOM-mutating JavaScript errors have been updated to align with the DOM4 specification and WebSocket’s Sec-WebSocket-Accept may not occur multiple times anymore.

Other changes which occurred last week:

  • The default WebSocket version to use for WebKit ports has been changed to RFC 6455.
  • While still completely disabled by default, CSS Shaders can now be compiled for Chromium.
  • The style sharing optimization can now be applied to elements with style attributes as well.
  • Support for “magic” iframes within WebKit has been removed.