Webref

Description

This repository contains machine-readable references of CSS properties, definitions, IDL, and other useful terms that can be automatically extracted from web browser specifications. The contents of the repository are updated automatically every 6 hours (although note information about published /TR/ versions of specifications are updated only once per week).

Specifications covered by this repository are technical Web specifications that are directly implemented or that will be implemented by Web browsers; in other words, those that appear in browser-specs.

The main branch of this repository contains automatically-generated raw extracts from web browser specifications. These extracts come with no guarantee on validity or consistency. For instance, if a specification defines invalid IDL snippets or uses an unknown IDL type, the corresponding IDL extract in this repository will be invalid as well.

The curated branch contains curated extracts. Curated extracts are generated from raw extracts in the ed folder by applying manually-maintained patches to fix invalid content and provide validity and consistency guarantees. The curated branch is updated automatically whenever the main branch is updated, unless patches need to be modified (which requires manual intervention). Curated extracts are published under https://w3c.github.io/webref/ed/.

Additionally, subsets of the curated content get manually reviewed and published as NPM packages on a weekly basis:

@webref/idl contains a curated version of the ed/idl folder.
@webref/css contains a curated version of the ed/css folder.
@webref/elements contains a curated version of the ed/elements folder.

Important: Unless you are ready to deal with invalid content, we recommend that you rely on the content of the curated branch or NPM packages instead of on the raw content in the main branch of this repository.

Available extracts

This repository contains information about latest Editor's Drafts of Web specifications in the ed folder, as well as about the latest published version (for /TR/ specifications) in the tr folder. More often that not, published versions of specifications are much older than their latest Editor's Draft. Data in the tr folder is more invalid/inconsistent than data in the ed folder as a result.

The following subfolders contain individual machine-readable JSON or text files generated from specifications:

ed/css and tr/css: CSS terms (properties, descriptors, value spaces). One file per specification series.
ed/dfns and tr/dfns: <dfn> terms, along with metadata such as linking text, access level, namespace. One file per specification.
ed/elements and tr/elements: Markup elements defined, along with the interface that they implement. One file per specification.
ed/headings and tr/headings: Section headings. One file per specification.
ed/idl and tr/idl: Raw WebIDL index. One file per specification series.
ed/idlparsed and tr/idlparsed: Parsed WebIDL. One file per specification.
ed/ids and tr/ids: Fragments defined in the specification. One file per specification.
ed/links and tr/links: Links to other documents, along with targeted fragments. One file per specification.
ed/refs and tr/refs: Normative and informative references to other specifications. One file per specification.

Individual files are named after the shortname of the specification, or after the shortname of the specification series for CSS definitions and raw IDL files. Individual files are only created when needed, meaning when the specification actually includes relevant terms.

The ed/index.json and tr/index.json files contain the index of specifications that have been crawled, and relative links to individual files that have been created.

This repository uses Reffy, a Web spec exploration tool, to crawl the specifications and generate the data. In particular, the data it contains is the result of running Reffy. The repository does not contain any more data.

Raw WebIDL extracts are used in web-platform-tests, please see their interfaces/README.md for details.

Curation guarantees

Data curation brings the following guarantees.

Web IDL extracts

All IDL files can be parsed by the version of webidl2.js referenced in package.json.
WebIDL2.validate passes with the exception of the "no-nointerfaceobject" rule about [LegacyNoInterfaceObject], which is in wide use.
All types are defined by some specification.
All extended attributes are defined by some specification.
No duplicate top-level definitions or members.
No missing or mismatched types in inheritance chains.
No conflicts when applying mixins and partials.

CSS extracts

All CSS files can be parsed by the version of CSSTree referenced in package.json, with the exception of a handful CSS value definitions that, although valid, are not yet supported by CSSTree.

Elements extracts

All Web IDL interfaces referenced by elements exist in Web IDL extracts.

Potential spec anomalies

This repository used to contain analyses of potential spec anomalies, such as missing references and invalid Web IDL definitions. These analyses are now published in the companion w3c/webref-analysis repository.

How to suggest changes or report an error

Feel free to raise issues in this repository as needed. Note that most issues likely more directly apply to underlying tools:

Errors in the data are most likely caused by bugs or missing features in Reffy, which is the tool that crawls and parses specifications under the hoods. If you spot an error, please report it in Reffy's issue tracker.
If you believe that a spec is missing from the list, please check browser-specs and report it there.

Development notes

GitHub Actions workflows are used to automate most of the tasks in this repo.

Data update

Update ED report - crawls the latest version of Editor's Drafts and updates the contents of the ed folder. Workflow runs every 6 hours. A typical crawl takes about 10mn to complete.
Update TR report - crawls the published version of Editor's Drafts and updates the contents of the tr folder. Workflow runs once per week on Monday. A typical crawl takes about 10mn to complete.
Curate data & Prepare package PRs - runs whenever crawled data gets updated and updates the curated branch accordingly (provided all tests pass). The job also creates pull requests to release new versions of NPM packages when needed. Each pull request details the diff that would be released, and bumps the package version in the relevant packages/xxx/package.json file.
Clean up abandoned files - checks the contents of repository to detect orphan crawl files that are no longer targeted by the latest crawl's result and creates a PR to delete these files from the repository. Runs once per week on Wednesday. The crawl workflows does not delete these files automatically because crawl sometimes fails on a spec due to transient network or spec errors.
Test - runs tests on pull requests.
Clean patches when issues/PR are closed - drops patches that no longer need to apply because underlying issues got fixed. Runs once per week.

Releases to NPM

Publish @webref package if needed - publishes a new version of the @webref/css, @webref/elements or @webref/idl package to NPM, tags the corresponding commits on the main and curated branches, and updates the relevant @webref/xxx@latest tag to point to the right commit on the curated branch. Runs whenever a pre-release PR is merged. Note that the released version is the version that appeared in packages/css/package.json, packages/elements/package.json or packages/idl/package.json before the pre-release PR is merged.
[@webref release: Request review of pre-release PR] - assigns reviewers to NPM package pull requests. Runs once per week.

License

sitedata/webref

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