Baseline web features for the win
by Patrick Brosset
A presentation of the WebDX Community Group, highlighting efforts to catalog the web platform as a collection of features that can be integrated into various documentation websites and tools. This approach supports the Baseline concept, which informs web developers about what's available today on the web. In the video, Patrick presents the group, the current state of its work and its impact on MDN, Can I Use, and other places. Patrick concludes with a call to action, inviting people to join the group and contribute to the work.
Video
Transcript
By now, you've probably heard of Baseline.
There are banners on MDN, on the top of Can I Use pages as well.
Web.dev also uses Baseline to blog about new features that are now available across the web platform.
One web agency, Clearleft, has also adopted Baseline to redefine its browser support strategy.
And finally, RUM Archive has launched a tool that helps you discover the percentage of users that you'd be able to target with each version of Baseline.
All of this is made possible by using the Web Features project that's maintained by the WebDX Community Group.
So let's dive in. On the WebDX Community Group, we are on a mission to catalogue the web platform and to help web developers understand what's available.
And one of the ways that we do this is by building a shared description of the interoperable surface of the web platform, and this is known as the Web Features project.
The Web Features project is where we're defining all of the features that are available on the web platform.
For example, CSS Grid is in there, the Fetch API as well, the Web Audio API, and so on.
Obviously, there are hundreds of features on the web, right? And they all come together to help you, web developers, achieve the experiences that you want for your users.
Tools like MDN, Can I use, the browser compatibility data project, etc.
They all document the web platform in one way or another.
And the web features project does not reinvent any of these.
Instead, it brings a shared description and a unique ID for each of these features so that now all of these awesome web data can be put together and cross referenced in useful ways.
Now we can be aligned with a single way to talk about all of these features and we can map it all together to provide useful things for developers such as an overall view of the web platform.
Now, baseline is based on web features and it's a computed summary data for each feature of the web.
It's essentially the missing piece that will help developers understand what's coming to the web platform and what's newly available, and what's widely available for them to use.
Now, baseline is based on the web features project, obviously, which itself is based on the browser-compat-data project, which Open Web Docs, Mozilla, other organizations, as well as plenty of individual contributors help maintain.
And I already mentioned MDN, Can I Use web.dev, RUM Archive and others who already adopted baseline, but there are other projects as well.
For example, we have one widget now that you can use as a web component to display baseline data on your website, if you want.
There's also a new web platform dashboard called webstatus.dev which lists web features as well as their web platform test results for each of them.
And finally, I want to demo a new project called Web Features Explorer, which we, at the WebDX Community Group, started and are really excited about.
So the Web Features Explorer is very much work in progress and we use it mostly to visualize what's inside the web features repository.
But one thing that we're very excited about is that it can act as a release note for the web platform, giving you monthly reports of what became available in that given month on across the web platform.
Again, all of this is very much work in progress.
At the time that I'm recording this video, there are about 400 features in the web-features repository, but we know there are hundreds more to be added.
And this is where you can come in if you're interested in helping us getting there.
You can have an immediate impact on millions of users who rely on critical infrastructure such as MDN or Can I use, for example.
There are many ways that you can help.
You can review PRs, you can file issues, and you can even help create your own features as well by reading our contributors docs. [github.com/web-platform-dx/web-features] And of course, feel free to join us at the WebDX Community group.
We'd be super happy to have you on board.
