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It's easy enough to see what has changed from one version of W3C's HTML5 standard to the next. I can also see the W3C's standards and drafts. But W3C and WHATWG are not the same and since WHATWG maintains a Living standard which is never finished:

how can I keep track of the diffs in the WHATWG HTML Living Standard?

Let's say I want to:

  • see what new features exist from the last time I reviewed it
  • see what is on the roadmap for inclusion
  • see what has changed/dropped

FYI Tracking the WHATWG/html github repo would yield too much noise, but its all I could find.

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  • see what new features exist from the last time I reviewed it
  • see what has changed/dropped

https://github.com/whatwg/html/commits is your best bet for those. The commit log is meant to be a readable summary of the changes, and commit messages are also reviewed with that in mind.

You can also search for all pull requests that’ve been merged to master since a certain date and that have a particular label1. The normative change label is one way to do that:

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pulls?q=merged:%3E2019-06-20+label:%22normative+change%22

…but that label isn’t applied to additions or removals — and people often forgot to add it — so on its own, it won’t give you a complete picture. So you can also look at the addition/proposal label:

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues?q=merged:%3E2019-06-20+label:addition/proposal

…and the removal/deprecation label:

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues?q=merged:%3E2019-06-20+label:removal/deprecation

There are a bunch of other labels you can search by — including topic:-prefixed labels to narrow down to just changes made to a particular section of the spec; e.g., topic:history:

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues?q=merged:%3E2019-06-20+label:%22topic%3A+history%22

  • see what is on the roadmap for inclusion

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pulls?q=is:pr+is:open+sort:updated-desc is a good view for that.

1 As documented in the answer at https://stackoverflow.com/a/29136870/441757, the GitHub search interface unfortunately doesn’t yet support label searches combined with the `OR` logical operator. So for now, you’ll need to do multiple searches.
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    it's unfortunate that reading the commit log remains the only reliable way to review the HTML LS change history, because at over eleven thousand commits it is truly unwieldy to review, made all the worse since significant changes to substance can only be distinguished from the myriad of whitespace/grammar nitpicks, editorial comments, link fixing, internal document scaffolding and so forth, by actually reading every commit. The merged-PR query is probably the nearest useful proxy, and we just have to cross our fingers and hope it catches most, but remains a poor substitute for written history.
    – inopinatus
    Commented Sep 5, 2022 at 5:05
  • There aren't that many new commits each month and you can skip over those prefixed with Editorial: or Meta:. Looking at github.com/whatwg/html/commits it doesn't really seem too bad to me to scan through. On the first page I can reach early September. And summarizing that would end up requiring leaving out details which might be significant to some people, so it's not that straightforward to come up with a replacement (or to find people willing to do that work).
    – Anne
    Commented Oct 24, 2022 at 8:07
  • 1
    I don't disagree: summarizing into release notes would be nontrivial effort. However, it's certainly within the capability of the major tech firms that govern WHATWG and benefit directly from that control. Given the depth of developer advocacy competence in that group, the omission seems to me more like a choice.
    – inopinatus
    Commented Oct 30, 2022 at 23:20

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