The standards team has begun to successfully engage the community in a wider discussion with the standards bodies.

I (Yehuda) have been noticing an increased willingness to consider real-world "author" points of view in discussions. This is both due to a natural concern of the standards groups lately towards being more responsive to the needs of web developers and an increased participation by web developers on the lists (including by members of the Standards Group).

There are also a number of newer members of the standards bodies that are very sympathetic to our needs, and who make their points more forcefully when real-world web authors are around to back them up.

Some specific progress we have made lately:

• Making forward progress on WeakRefs in JavaScript, which would make it possibly to build observer-based systems with less leaks. This is not a big concern with the DOM, as developers are used to explicitly removing DOM nodes, which provides a chokepoint for cleaning up observers, but it is a big concern with the increase of object observers in frameworks like Backbone and in jQuery's own object observers.
• There are open discussions about providing rectangles for transformed elements, which would improve hit detection of transformed elements without the need for custom matrix math, especially important for mobile devices.
• Work continues on improving the cache manifest. See the open ticket for "always up-to-date applications" (https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=14702) opened by Anne of Opera as a result of our participation in the Offline Workshop last month.
• Based on a discussion in the Standards Group, I have opened a request to restore PUT and DELETE to forms in HTML5. As always, it turns out to be more complicated than it looks, but the discussion is going well.

• Web developers (and the standards team) have participated in a number of other discussions. As always, we recommend that people follow the mailing lists reflecting areas of personal concern and participate as desired.