I had the opportunity to both co-chair and present at the W3C’s blockchain workshop at MIT in Boston this week. More than 100 of the best and brightest from the standards and blockchain worlds met to discuss potential Web standards opportunities for blockchain tech.

I have been working toward the establishment of a large-scale, user-sovereign, blockchain identity system for many years, and with an initiative now underway at Microsoft, this event was instrumental in better understanding the views of other organizations we intend to work with in bringing this system to users, companies, and governments across the globe.

There were many areas of standardization discussed that touched on blockchain-based identity systems, but perhaps the most specific, actionable area of standardization the group identified was extension of the existing Web Auth spec to include the APIs, features, and flows necessary to enable blockchain-based identity authentication in browsers. This is something I will begin to explore with other implementers and interested organizations from the W3C workshop who committed to do so with us.

The workshop was a great opportunity to start an important discussion about systems that could move the Web far beyond what it is today. I look forward to reporting back on the progress of our explorations as we move forward!

UPDATE: This post has seen a significant change from the first version of the code. It now relies on a much simpler method: a hidden object element that relays its resize event to your listeners.

DOM Elements! Y U No Resize Event?

During your coding adventures, you may have run into occasions where you wanted to know when an element in your document changed dimensions – basically the window resize event, but on regular elements. Element size changes can occur for many reasons: modifications to CSS width, height, padding, as a response to changes to a parent element’s size, and many more. Before today, you probably thought this was mere unicorn lore, an impossible feat – well buckle up folks, we’re about to throw down the gauntlet.

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A Primer on Overflow and Underflow

To level-set, I’ll define and describe what overflow and underflow are in the context of the web. Overflow is a rather simple concept you’re probably familiar with: when an element’s content takes up more space than it allows, given style or box model constraints, it causes a scrollbar to appear or the content to be cut off from view (if you set overflow: hidden;). Underflow is the less common case you probably don’t think about: an element currently in an overflown state leaves that state as a result of the element growing in size or a reduction of the amount of content within it – visually, the scrollbars disappear and all content is visible within the element. As it turns out, Firefox and WebKit browsers offer events that alert you of changes between these two flow states.

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