Microsoft Edge - 2025 web platform top developer needs

This repository contains the data and scripts that are used to generate the Microsoft Edge - 2025 web platform top developer needs dashboard.

For more information about the dashboard, see these articles on the Microsoft Edge blog:

• Introducing the Edge 2024 web platform top developer needs dashboard
• The Edge 2025 web platform top developer needs dashboard

The rest of this README file explains how to update the dashboard data and site.

Prerequisites

• Install Node.js.
• Install the required dependencies by typing npm install.

Updating the list of features

The features listed on the dashboard are defined in the features.json file.

To update the list of features, make changes to the file. The file contains a JSON array of objects, where each object represents a single feature.

Features are based on the features part of the web-features project. At a minimum, each feature object must contain the following information:

• webFeaturesID: the ID of the feature in the web-features repo.
• rationale: a list of reasons why this feature is important for our dashboard. Each reason is an object with the following string properties { description, link }.
• wpt: a string starting with /results, and including the optional request parameters that's used to retrieve WPT test results on the wpt.fyi site.

If you change the wpt URL after you've already generated the WPT results, set wptOverride:true on the feature object, then run npm run generate and npm run update-wpt again to update the WPT results for this feature. Later, remove the wptOverride field.

For example:

{
  "webFeaturesID": "object-view-box",
  "wpt": "/results/css?q=object%20view%20box",
  "rationale": [
    {
      "description": "The feature is a pre-requisite for the View Transitions API, which is a highly requested feature",
      "link": "https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/7058"
    }
  ]
}

If the feature corresponds to a group of features from the web-features repo, make the following changes:

• name: define a name for the group of features.
• webFeaturesIDs: change this field's type to an array of the IDs of the features in the web-features repo.

For example, the Scrollbar styling group below is a group of three different web-features:

{
  "name": "Scrollbar styling",
  "webFeaturesID": ["scrollbar-color", "scrollbar-gutter", "scrollbar-width"],
  "wpt": "/results/css?q=path%3A%2Fcss%2Fcss-scrollbars%20or%20%28scrollbar-gutter%20and%20path%3A%2Fcss%2Fcss-overflow%29",
  "rationale": [
    {
      "description": "Styling scrollbar ranked #5 in the State of CSS Survey 2023's browser incompatibilities question",
      "link": "https://2023.stateofcss.com/en-US/usage/#css_interoperability_features"
    }
  ]
}

In addition, you can provide the following optional fields:

• id: used to set the anchor link ID for the feature. By default anchor links match web-features IDs. Use id to override the default anchor link ID. This can be useful when updating a feature over time, to avoid breaking existing links.
• name: to override the name coming from the web-features repo.
• description: to override the description coming from the web-features repo.
• spec: to override the spec (or specs) coming from the web-features repo.

Generating the dashboard data

1. Update the dependencies:

   • npm run bump

     This updates to the most recent version of web-features, BCD, and playwright, as well as other dependencies.

2. To update the computed feature data file:

   • npm run generate

   This re-generates site/_data/features.json based on features.json.

3. To retrieve the latest WPT revision for this week:

   • npm run get-wpt-shas

     This adds more entries into the historical-shas.json file, which is needed to retrieve WPT test results.

4. To retrieve the WPT test results:

   • npm run update-wpt

     This fetches the missing WPT results for our features based on the historical-shas.json file, and puts them in site/_data/wpt.json as well as generates front-end files in site/assets/.

5. To build the site

   • npm run build-site

     This generates the dashboard website in the docs directory.

Testing the dashboard

To test the built website before publishing it to the live server, run npm run serve-site and open a browser window to http://localhost:8080/.