WHATWG Weekly: Unicode for the platform?

In less than a year we reached another arbitrary milestone. HTML is another thousand revisions further, now over 7000 (not quite 9000). This is the WHATWG Weekly.

Over on public-script-coord@w3.org, the mailing list used by TC39 (responsible for JavaScript) and the WebApps WG to coordinate development of JavaScript, IDL, and APIs, Brendan Eich launched a mega thread on full Unicode for ES6. The entire platform is currently build around 16-bit code units, which are not quite sufficient to encompass all code points. Some code points therefore require two code units, but string manipulation, length information, etc. is all in code units, making it difficult to deal with code points that require two (in practice nobody seems to bother much). The idea is to introduce some kind of switch which when used would let you deal with code points exclusively, rather than code units.

HTML did not change much last week as its editor was playing in the snow. The DOM meanwhile now has mutation observers defined, the replacement for mutation events. Adam Klein did all the heavy lifting and yours truly cleaned it up a bit. An introduction to DOM events has been added as well.