Archive for March, 2012
Thursday, March 29th, 2012
The StringEncoding proposal is getting closer to consensus. It now consists of a TextEncoder and a TextDecoder object that can be used both for streaming and non-streaming use cases. This is the WHATWG Weekly.
Some bad news for a change. It may turn out that the web platform will only work on little-endian devices, as the vast majority of devices is little-endian today (computers, phones, …) and code written using ArrayBuffer today assumes little-endian. Boris Zbarsky gives a rundown of options for browsers on big-endian devices. Kenneth Russell thinks the situation can still be saved by universal deployment of DataView and sufficient developer advocacy.
Over the past couple of weeks the canvas element 2D API has gotten some major new features. Ian Hickson wrote a lengthy email detailing the canvas v5 API additions. Path primitives, dashed lines, ellipses, SVG path syntax, text along a path, hit testing, more text metrics, transforming patterns, and a bunch more.
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Wednesday, March 14th, 2012
Jonas Sicking proposed an API for decoding ArrayBuffer objects as strings, and encoding strings as ArrayBuffer objects. The thread also touched on a proposal mentioned here earlier, StringEncoding. This is the mid-March WHATWG Weekly.
Revision 7023 added the Path object to HTML for use with the canvas element, and the next revision made it possible to actually use it:
var path = new Path()
path.rect(1,1,10,10)
context.stroke(path)
A new method addPathData() (introduced in revision 7026) can be used to construct canvas paths using SVG path data. Revision 7025 meanwhile added ellipse support to canvas.
Tune in next week for more additions to canvas.
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Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
Apple's Safari team provided feedback to the Web Notifications Working Group. That group, incidentally, is looking for an active editor to address that and other feedback. Opera Mobile shipped with WebGL support. This is March's first WHATWG Weekly.
Simon Pieters overhauled much of HTML5 differences from HTML4 and the document now provides information on added/changed APIs, differences between HTML and W3C HTML5, content model changes, and more.
Ian Hickson introduced a new URL scheme named http+aes (and also https+aes) in revision 7012 that allows for hosting private data on content distribution networks. Revision 7009 by the way, added the necessary hooks for the DOM mutation observers feature to HTML.
A new "referrer" metadata name for the meta element has been proposed on the WHATWG Wiki. This allows for controlling the Referer header on outgoing links.
Posted in Weekly Review | Comments Off on WHATWG Weekly: http+aes URL scheme, control Referer, …