Monday, 25 January, 2016 UTC
Summary
It’s been several months now since maintenance of the HTML Standard moved from a mostly-private Subversion repository to the whatwg/html GitHub repository. This move has been even more successful than we hoped:
- We now have thirty-seven contributors who have landed one or more patches, and have merged over 250 pull requests in total. That’s almost two new contributors each week since the move!
- We’ve worked to curate a list of good first bugs to introduce newcomers to the community and the standard, and worked hard to improve the onboarding experience for building the standard.
- With help from the community, the standard's gender pronoun disparity has been significantly improved. (See The happy case of pronouns and HTML.)
- Sponsored by Mozilla, we have applied to Outreachy and Richa Rupela is now helping us write the HTML Standard.
- We have collaborated with TC39—who thankfully moved to GitHub around the same time—to remove some longstanding discrepancies between HTML and ECMAScript.
- We've made many, many small fixes to better match the reality of what is implemented in browsers, mostly in response to feedback from browser developers.
Aside from defining the HTML language, the HTML Standard defines the processing model around script execution, the fundamentals of the web’s security model, the web worker API for parallel script execution, and many more aspects that are core to the web platform. If you are interested in helping out, please reach out on IRC or GitHub.