Anne van Kesteren

Standards on GitHub

A couple years ago I wrote Contributing to standards and it is worth noting how everything has gotten so much better since then. Basically all due to GitHub and standards groups such as TC39, WHATWG, and W3C embracing it. You can more easily engage with only those standards you are interested in. You can even subscribe to particular issues that interest you and disregard everything else. If you contrast that with mailing lists where you likely get email about dozens of standards and many issues across them, it’s not hard to see how the move to GitHub has democratized standards development. You will get much further with a lot less lost time.

Thanks to pull requests changing standards is easier too. Drive-by-grammar-fixes are a thing now and “good first bug” issue labels help you get started with contributing. Not all groups have adopted one-repository-per-standard yet which can make it a little trickier to contribute to CSS for instance, but hopefully they’ll get there too.

(See also: my reminder on the WHATWG blog that WHATWG standards are developed on GitHub.)