It would seem that one of the developers on the Safari project at Apple is publishing a blog to tell people exactly what is going into the WebKit in future releases and even affording people commentary on this.

Personally, I have to admit that I think that Apple is doing this entirely correctly.

First off they release a browser with a bug button so you can submit a page that doesn’t render correctly back to the developers to figure out what’s wrong.

Then, they announce that the app is really just a wrapper for the HTML render engine and that the render engine is a developable API for anyone on the platform.

Now, there’s the blog. So I know that in the new release (1.1) there is:
(1) Better standards support. You’ll find fixes for positioning bugs, overflow bugs, floats, tables, gzip support, generated content using ::before and ::after, DHTML. You name it, we’ve improved it.
(2) Speed. We’re still fast, and we’re only going to get faster.
(3) CSS2 support. In addition to all of the bug fixes to be more standards-compliant, we also added support for CSS2 properties like text-shadow and new display values like inline-block. Try using text-shadow in conjunction with ::selection. It’s cool. 🙂
(3) Safari on Panther supports rgba values in CSS for specifying border, background, foreground and shadow colors.
(4) Support for the CSS3 opacity (using -khtml-opacity) property. Make entire blocks and inlines transparent without resorting to transparent PNGs.
(5) A complete implementation of the XUL box model. Safari on Panther supports the complete XUL box model, including horizontal and vertical boxes, the ability to flex, and the ability to reorder content and reverse content. If you’re building canned content that you control using WebKit, you’ll find a whole new range of layout possibilities at your disposal. Need to create dynamically sized headers and footers and flexible center content? The XUL box model can do that. Need to center an object within the viewport? The XUL box model can do that too.

And better yet forthcoming is:
(1) Support for the title attribute using tooltips
(2) The ability to tab to all controls in a Web page and to manipulate them from the keyboard.
(3) Support for table border collapsing.
(4) Support for the CSS cursor property.
and..small-caps support, fixes for first-letter and text-transform (the ugly doubling text effect is gone), fixes to first-line, and speed improvements to DHTML
and possibly XUL/XAML

Heck, they’ve even announced that they’ve just made the marquee tag work… Well maybe not all good news 😉

The links again are:
HTML Blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/
XML Synd: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/blogger_rss.xml

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