Getting on Point

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We’re excited to announce that the Pointer Events specification has become a W3C Recommendation! As we’ve said before, we love Pointer Events because they support all of the common input devices today – mouse, pen/stylus, and fingers – but they’re also designed in such a way that future devices can easily be added, and existing code will automatically support the new device. While reaching Recommendation status is a monumental moment, there’s still much work to do.

Pointer Events aren’t a viable solution until they’re usable in all of the browsers that developers are supporting. While that day may seem far away, the jQuery Foundation is dedicated to getting usable Pointer Events in every developer’s hands as soon as possible. We’re working on PEP, our Pointer Events polyfill that Google transferred from the Polymer project to the jQuery Foundation. PEP will be integrated into projects such as jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, and Dojo. We’re hoping to get out our first release in the next few weeks. If you’re interested in helping out, let us know.

Microsoft is already shipping a full implementation of Pointer Events in IE11 and they had a mostly complete, prefixed implementation in IE10. Mozilla also has a full implementation for Firefox on Windows Metro, though it’s not currently enabled. Both implementation are passing 100% of the W3C Pointer Events test suite. You can follow Mozilla’s progress for all of their supported platforms on https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko/Touch.

Of course, the world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. There’s still no sign that Apple will ever implement Pointer Events. Because of this, Google has decided not to ship Pointer Events in Blink, but rather to try to extend Touch Events to have the power of Pointer Events. The work to extend Touch Events is happening in the Touch Events Community Group to ensure interoperability and standardization. However, there is reasonable concern that adding several extensions to Touch Events will just result in an even more fragmented landscape, eventually worsening the situation rather than improving it. It’s not clear that Apple would implement all of these features anyway, and adding support for hover would require awkward APIs due to the logic that already exists in Touch Events. Even if the power of Pointer Events were added to Touch Events, the awkward event interface isn’t nearly as nice or easy to transition to from Mouse Events.

Despite Google’s current position, they’re willing to continually re-evaluate if shipping Pointer Events will help move the web forward. We’re hopeful that Google will reverse their decision in the future and Apple will eventually be compelled to implement Pointer Events once Safari is the only major browser without support. The Chromium issue for implementing Pointer Events is already in the the 99th percentile of all issues (open and closed) based on number of stars.

As a community, we can shape the future of the web right now. We need to stop letting Apple stifle the work of browser vendors and standards bodies. Too many times, we’ve seen browser vendors with the best intentions fall victim to Apple’s reluctance to work with standards bodies and WebKit’s dominance on mobile devices. We cannot let this continue to happen. The jQuery Foundation is dedicated to driving standards, like Pointer Events, to improve the developer experience and in turn, make the web a better, more accessible place for everyone. Together, we can push the web forward and let standards and better APIs win. We can choose Pointer Events over Touch Events. And we can do it right now, with PEP.

jQuery Foundation 2014 Annual Report

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The jQuery Foundation exists to support web developers in creating web content built on open standards that is accessible to all users. We accomplish this through the development and support of open source software, and collaboration with the development community. The Foundation houses open source projects that are essential to this vision.

What we’ve accomplished

We’ve always been known for our namesake projects and their excellent documentation. In the past year, the jQuery Foundation has continued its quest to ensure that web developers have the tools and information they need to get their jobs done, beyond just jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery Mobile.

The past few months in particular have been incredibly productive. In October, we adopted the jQuery Mousewheel plugin. In December, Google transferred ownership of the Pointer Events Polyfill (PEP) to the jQuery Foundation. Finally, in January, we announced adoption of the Esprima project, a JavaScript parser that is used by dozens of developer tools. We’re working to foster the continued development of all of these projects, and welcome contributions from the community.

In 2014 we started work on the Chassis project to create an open standard for CSS libraries. We’ve had discussions with developers from Topcoat, Zurb Foundation, Filament Group, Cardinal, Famo.us, Yandex, WordPress, Automattic, 10up, 960grid, Unsemantic, jQuery Mobile, jQuery UI, Intel App Framework, Cascade CSS, Portland Webworks, Adobe, Hulu, and Bootstrap. We’re looking for additional contributors and input from the community about what you want in a CSS framework.

Our year by the numbers

Today, the jQuery Foundation hosts 45 open source repositories at GitHub. These include both code and documentation.

If you need evidence that jQuery Foundation projects are used everywhere, look no further than our Content Delivery Network (CDN) powered by MaxCDN. The 290 billion requests in 2014 transferred nearly 11 petabytes of data. That, of course, does not include the requests for locally hosted copies of jQuery and to other CDNs such as Google, Microsoft, or CDNJS. No doubt the overall number of requests is in the trillions.

Even the best code project can be unusable without good documentation. Web developers don’t just tell us our documentation is good, they tell us that it’s excellent. There were 149 million page views of jQuery Foundation documentation in 2014, coming from 230 countries. All of our documentation sites are available on GitHub so that developers can open issues and make pull requests to improve them. Open source isn’t just for code, it works equally well for documentation!

The jQuery Foundation also hosted, licensed, and participated in 10 events around the world during the past year, including jQuery Conferences in San Diego, Chicago, Vienna Austria, Toronto Canada, and Oxford England. These events always include a wide variety of subjects, and are not just about projects hosted by the jQuery Foundation. The common thread in all the conferences is that they cover topics that web developers should learn in order to do their jobs well.

Future plans

This year we will continue to drive standards forward based on the needs of web developers. Our participation in groups such as EcmaScript TC39 and the W3C has given web developers a say in this process that, until recently, was primarily controlled by large for-profit companies and browser makers. We also plan to increase our participation in the Unicode Consortium as we ramp up our investment in Globalize, so that developers can easily make their software usable worldwide.

Our recent adoption of Esprima highlights another area where web developers could use some more help: development tools. The tools landscape for processing JavaScript, CSS, and HTML is incredibly fragmented. There are multiple processes for authoring, creating, modularizing, and consuming JavaScript, none of which have established themselves as a standard. There are more than a dozen package managers, each with its own unique set of advantages and drawbacks. We’d like to work with developers to settle on a smaller set of options that impose fewer burdens on both the producers and consumers of JavaScript libraries.

2014 Financial Information

Thanks to generous contributions from members and sponsors, we were able to fund a variety of activities that gave back to the cause of open source. The majority of our investments were dedicated to fostering development of jQuery Foundation projects and furthering the use of those projects through events and educational opportunities.

2014 Revenue Chart2014 Expenses Chart

Acknowledgments

We’re proud of the accomplishments of the jQuery Foundation, all of which were realized by the continuing hard work of our team members. Many thanks also to the web developers who take the time to report issues, fix documentation, or contribute code patches. By improving jQuery Foundation projects, you’ve improved web development for everyone.

We’re also grateful for our jQuery Foundation members and their support. In the past year, companies such as IBM and Famo.us have joined and provided resources that allow us to accomplish our mission. Let’s all go out and do even more in 2015!

Esprima 2.0 Released

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Last week, the jQuery Foundation announced our adoption of the Esprima project, the widely used JavaScript parser that powers many code analysis tools. Today we’re pleased to announce the release of version 2.0, now available on npm.

Up until now, the official releases of Esprima have only parsed ECMAScript 5 standard syntax. However, the experimental “harmony” branch has been adding ECMAScript 2015 (also popularly known as ES6) features for quite some time. A lot of the work there has been driven by Facebook. Now that the syntax for many ES6 features has stabilized and even shipped on some browsers, there is a need for tools that support the new syntax.

Esprima 2.0 introduces many stable ES6 features brought from the harmony branch, where they’ve been pretty reliable. This new baseline for Esprima makes it possible for tools such as code coverage analysis, style checkers, and linters to start to process the new ES6 syntax.

Since ES5 is likely to be with us for quite a while longer, Esprima 1.x will continue to be maintained for now in order to provide ES5-only parsing. Tools that currently use Esprima 1.x can continue to do so until they are ready and able to process ES6 constructs.

The 2.1 release of Esprima should follow relatively quickly, based on feedback on the stability of the 2.0 release. That means the Esprima team needs feedback from the makers of Esprima-based tools to know whether there are any problems. If you have built an Esprima-based tool and have problems with this release, please report them. (Note that the project is now using GitHub for issues rather than Google Code.)

We’re excited to see where Esprima goes next!