Last week in WebKit:
background position offset, widows, orphans and Web Inspector icons

This update discusses the 1,522 WebKit changes that landed in the past two weeks, up to revision 137871.

The Toolbar Icons in Web Inspector won’t be shown by default anymore. The gear icon immediately goes to the Settings dialog again. Newly added items to the Network Panel will now be applied to filtering and cookies can be sorted by their size again. The viewport-related warning messages have been cleaned up, a new warning has been added for scripts blocked by @sandbox and messages created by console.time and timeEnd() can now be filtered out.

Support has been added for the “widows”, “orphans” CSS properties, as well as for the “ruby-position” property. The text-orientation property now supports the “sideways-right” value and text decorations will now work correctly when text-combine is being used as well. Furthermore, out-of-range values will now be clamped to values the supported range. Applying SVG filters to elements through the url() syntax will now work even when the filter isn’t available yet, and CSS Exclusions’ shape-inside is now supported for multiple-segment polygons.

Elliot moved generated content in :before and :after CSS pseudo-elements to the DOM, which also means that supporting animations and transitions on them is close. The Shadow DOM’s ShadowRoot constructor is gone, XMLHttpRequests for blob data will now set their Content-Type header accordingly and status events will now be fired for <link rel=prerender> elements. The Web Audio API now supports an offline audio context and the ::cue pseudo-element for video elements now is supported as well.

Support for in-band text tracks is now available on the Mac port, and plumbing has been added to allow deferring displaying of text tracks to the embedder.

Following the final pieces of it’s implementation, Alexis enabled support for the new background-position offset syntax on several platforms before enabling it by default, and removing the feature flag altogether. Meanwhile Tab started on aligning WebKit’s gradient implementation with the specification, towards unprefixing.

As for more experimental features, work on implementing CSS Grid Layout continues with improved parsing and layouting capabilities. Rick started working on supporting -webkit-image-set() on cursors, too.

Other changes which occurred these weeks: