Archive for December, 2008
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008
Welcome back to "This Week in HTML 5," where I'll try to summarize the major activity in the ongoing standards process in the WHATWG and W3C HTML Working Group.
The big news this week is a major revamp of table headers, following up from the last major edits last March. Ian summarizes the most recent round of changes:
- Header cells can now themselves have headers.
- I have reversed the way the algorithm is presented, such that it starts from a cell and reports the headers rather than generating the list of headers for each cell on a header-by-header basis.
- If headers="" points to a
<td> element, the association is set up, but I have left this non-conforming to help authors catch mistakes.
- Header cells that are automatically associating do not stop associating when they hit equivalent cells unless they have also hit a
<td> first.
- The
"col" and "row" scope values now act like the implied auto value except that they force the direction.
- Empty header cells don't get automatically associated.
- I have removed the wide header cell heuristic.
- I have made headers="" use the same ID discovery mechanism as
getElementById(), to avoid implementations having to support multiple such mechanisms.
- Finally, I have made the spec define if a header is a column header or a row header in the case where
scope="" is omitted.
- I haven't added summary="" on table; nothing particularly new has been raised on the topic since the last times I looked at this.
Accessibility advocates are disappointed by the continued non-inclusion of the summary attribute. Their reasoning is that "the summary attribute is a very, very practical and useful attribute," despite their own user testing that shows otherwise. As Ian put it, "I am hesitant to include a feature like summary="" when all evidence seems to point to it being widely misused by authors and ignored by the users it intends to help." As with all issues, this is not the final word on the matter, but it's where we stand today.
In other news, r2566 addresses a very subtle issue with fetching images. The problem stems from the following (arguably pointless) markup: <img src=""> A fair number of web pages actually try to declare an image with an empty src attribute. According to the HTTP and URL specifications, this markup means that there is an image at the same address as the HTML document -- a theoretically possible but highly unlikely scenario. Internet Explorer apparently catches this mistake and just silently drops the image. Other browsers do not; they will actually try to fetch the image, which results in a "duplicate" request for the page (once to successfully retrieve the page, and again to unsuccessfully retrieve the image).
Boris Zbarsky, a leading Mozilla developer, states
We (Gecko) have had 28 independent bug reports filed (with people bothering to create an account in the bug database, etc) about the behavior difference from IE here. That's a much larger number of bug reports than we usually get about a given issue. I can't tell you why this pattern is so common (e.g. whether some authoring frameworks produce it in some cases), but it seems that a number of web developers not only produce markup like this but notice the requests in their HTTP logs and file bugs about it.
r2566 addresses the issue by special-casing <img src> to allow browsers to ignore an image if its fetch request would result in fetching exactly the same URL as its HTML document:
When an img is created with a src attribute, and whenever the src attribute is set subsequently, the user agent must fetch the resource specifed by the src attribute's value, unless the user agent cannot support images, or its support for images has been disabled, or the user agent only fetches elements on demand, or the element's src attribute has a value that is an ignored self-reference.
The src attribute's value is an ignored self-reference if its value is the empty string, and the base URI of the element is the same as the document's address.
Other interesting tidbits this week:
- r2568 adds a
storageArea attribute to StorageEvent object. [StorageEvent deficiency]
- r2556 changes the processing model of the
<meta charset> attribute by requiring that it appear in the first 512 bytes of the document. For those of you playing along at home, <meta charset="..."> is the new <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=...">. Both forms are fully supported in all major browsers. [Comparing conformance requirements against real-world docs]
- r2557, r2559, r2560, r2562, r2563, and r2604 add a variety of common markup errors to the list of errors that HTML validators may treat as minor. [Re: comparing conformance requirements against real-world docs]
- r2561 allows the
height and width attributes on <input type="image">, a construct that is already supported by all major browsers. [Re: comparing conformance requirements against real-world docs]
- r2601 adds an example of something that all browsers do anyway -- killing scripts that run too long.
- r2597 removes the notification API, which was kicked around in 2006 but never saw significant interest from either authors or browser vendors. [Notifications API removed]
- r2596 defines
window.close(), window.focus(), and window.blur(). The focus() and blur() methods have historically been used to produce "pop-up" and "pop-under" windows containing advertisements. Most modern browsers now control how and whether scripts can do this, and the HTML 5 specification goes so far as to recommend that "[u]ser agents are encouraged to ignore calls to this blur() method entirely."
- r2552 gives an example of embedding RDF metadata in XHTML. As the spec notes, this is not possible in HTML, although you could always use RDFa.
- r2595 gives an example of marking up a tag cloud.
Tune in next week for another exciting episode of "This Week in HTML 5."
Posted in Weekly Review | 12 Comments »
Thursday, December 18th, 2008
Welcome back to "This Week in HTML 5," where I'll try to summarize the major activity in the ongoing standards process in the WHATWG and W3C HTML Working Group.
The big news this week is r2529, which makes so many changes that I had to ask Ian to explain it to me. This is what he said:
Someone asked for onbeforeunload, so I started fixing it. Then I found that there was some rot in the drywall. So I took down the drywall. Then I found a rat infestation. So I killed all the rats. Then I found that the reason for the rot was a slow leak in the plumbing. So I tried fixing the plumbing, but it turned out the whole building used lead pipes. So I had to redo all the plumbing. But then I found that the town's water system wasn't quite compatible with modern plumbing techniques, and I had to dig up the entire town. And that's basically it.
"Amusing, in a quiet way," said Eeyore, "but not really helpful."
Basically, the way that scripts are defined has changed dramatically. Not in an terribly incompatible way, just a clearer definition that paves the way for better specification of certain properties of script (and noscript). Let's start with the new definition of a script:
A script has:
- A script execution environment
-
The characteristics of the script execution environment depend
on the language, and are not defined by this specification.
In JavaScript, the script execution environment
consists of the interpreter, the stack of execution
contexts, the global code and function code and
the Function objects resulting, and so forth.
- A list of code entry-points
-
Each code entry-point represents a block of executable code
that the script exposes to other scripts and to the user
agent.
Each Function object in a JavaScript
script execution environment has a corresponding code
entry-point, for instance.
The main program code of the script, if any, is the
initial code entry-point. Typically, the code
corresponding to this entry-point is executed immediately after
the script is parsed.
In JavaScript, this corresponds to the
execution context of the global code.
- A relationship with the script's global object
-
An object that provides the APIs that the code can use.
This is typically a Window
object. In JavaScript, this corresponds to the global
object.
When a script's global object is an
empty object, it can't do anything that interacts with the
environment.
- A relationship with the script's browsing context
-
A browsing context that is assigned responsibility
for actions taken by the script.
When a script creates and navigates a new top-level browsing
context, the opener
attribute of the new browsing context's
Window object will be set to the script's
browsing context's Window object.
- A character encoding
-
A character encoding, set when the script is created, used to
encode URLs. If the character encoding is
set from another source, e.g. a document's character
encoding, then the script's character encoding
must follow the source, so that if the source's changes, so does
the script's.
- A base URL
-
A URL, set when the script is created, used to
resolve relative URLs. If the base URL is
set from another source, e.g. a document base URL,
then the script's base URL must follow the source, so
that if the source's changes, so does the script's.
- Membership in a script group
-
A group of one or more scripts that are loaded in the same
context, which are always disabled as a group. Scripts in a script
group all have the same global object and browsing context.
A script group can be frozen. When a script group is
frozen, any code defined in that script group will throw an
exception when invoked. A frozen script group can be
unfrozen, allowing scripts in that script group to run
normally again.
The most interesting part of this new definition is the script group, a new concept which now governs all scripts. When a Document is created, it gets a fresh script group, which contains all the scripts that are defined (or are later created somehow) in the document. When the user navigates away from the document, the entire script group is frozen, and browsers should not execute those scripts anymore. This sounds like an obvious statement if you think of documents as individual browser windows (or tabs), but consider the case of a document with multiple frames, or one with an embedded iframe. Suppose that the user clicks some link within the iframe that only navigates to a new URL within the iframe (i.e. the parent document stays the same). The parent document may have some reference to functions defined in the old iframe. Should it still be able to call these functions? IE says no; other browsers say yes. HTML 5 now says no, because when the iframe navigates to a new URL, the old iframes script group is frozen -- even if there are active references to those scripts (say, from the parent document), browsers shouldn't allow the page to execute them.
The main benefit of this new concept of script groups is that it removes a number of complications faced by the non-IE browsers. For example, it prevents the problem of scripts suddenly discovering that their global object is no longer the object that they think of as the Window object. Script groups are also frozen when calling document.open(). Freezing script groups also defines the point at which timers and other callbacks are reset, which is something that previous versions of HTML had never defined.
And after all of this ripping up and redefining, HTML 5 now defines the onbeforeunload event, which is already supported by major browsers.
Other interesting tidbits this week:
- r2533 adds support for passing structured data between documents with
postMessage(). [structured data discussion]
- r2536 defines the
NameCreator, NameDeleter, NameGetter, NameSetter, IndexGetter, and IndexSetter anonymous methods, which are used by browsers internally to manage lists of named or indexed properties (e.g. form.elements, per-element custom data attributes, or the pixel data of a canvas).
- r2537 explains that you can not click something while you're already in the process of clicking it. (Technically speaking, it makes the
click() method non-reentrant.) [nested click() discussion]
- r2538 clarifies that non-interactive elements that are not usually focusable, but that do currently have focus (via the
tabindex attribute), should simulate onclick events when the user presses ENTER. This may seem like a minor point, but it is important for building keyboard-accessible web applications. [onclick discussion]
- r2539 notes that buttons (and their values) are not submitted with other form data unless they were the button that submitted the form. [button submission discussion]
- Silvia Pfeiffer posts thoughts on video accessibility and links to this collection of video accessibility requirements on the Mozilla wiki.
- Nine years in the making, the second major edition of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is now officially a W3C Recommendation. The guidelines are supplemented by a comprehensive techniques document, for example Using
alt attributes on img elements. HTML 5 also includes a section on using the alt attribute, but in general you should defer to WCAG 2.0 because it was written by experts.
Tune in next week for another exciting episode of "This Week in HTML 5."
Posted in Weekly Review, WHATWG | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
Welcome back to "This Week in HTML 5," where I'll try to summarize the major activity in the ongoing standards process in the WHATWG and W3C HTML Working Group.
The big news this week is the disintegration of HTTP authentication from HTML forms (which was last week's big news). As I predicted, the proposal generated a healthy discussion, but a combination of security concerns and concerns about tight coupling ultimately did in the proposal.
In its place, r2470 includes the following conformance requirement to allow for the possibility of someone specifying such a scheme in the future (hat tip: Robert Sayre):
HTTP 401 responses that do not include a challenge recognised by the user agent must be processed as if they had no challenge, e.g. rendering the entity body as if the response had been 200 OK.
User agents may show the entity body of an HTTP 401 response even when the response do include a recognised challenge, with the option to login being included in a non-modal fashion, to enable the information provided by the server to be used by the user before authenticating. Similarly, user agents should allow the user to authenticate (in a non-modal fashion) against authentication challenges included in other responses such as HTTP 200 OK responses, effectively allowing resources to present HTTP login forms without requiring their use.
Continuing with the web forms work, the <input> element has gained a new type: a color picker, marked up as <input type=color>. Browser vendors are encouraged to integrate this field with platform-native color pickers, as appropriate. As with all new input types, browsers that do not explicitly recognize the new type will default to a simple text field.
The <audio> and <video> API continues to churn rapidly. Implementors should probably ignore it altogether until it's been stable for two consecutive weeks. To wit: r2493 removes the pixelratio attribute, originally proposed to allow authors to override the display of videos known to be encoded with incorrect an aspect ratio. r2498 adds the playing event, fired when playback as started. r2489 drops the HAVE_SOME_DATA readyState. I will try to write up a comprehensive summary of this API once its stabilizes.
Other interesting tidbits this week:
Tune in next week for another exciting episode of "This Week in HTML 5."
Posted in Weekly Review, WHATWG | 1 Comment »