WHATWG Weekly: Device we hardly knew ye
Hello folks, and welcome to my first WHATWG Weekly. In case you're wondering where Anne van Kesteren is, you can follow his adventures for the next three months at Anne, Tom, and Peter's Trip Weblog. Last time I looked, the gang is in Colombia. And there was something about beer.
peerConnection, <device>, and video conferencing
The biggest change last week was signaled by an email from WHATWG editor, Ian Hickson.
According to the email, Ian made the following changes to WHATWG HTML specification:
- <device> has been replaced with a Geolocation-style API for requesting user access to local media devices (such as cameras).
- locally-generated streams can be paused and resumed.
- the ConnectionPeer interface has been replaced with a PeerConnection interface that interacts directly with ICE and its dependencies.
- PeerConnection has been streamlined (compared to ConnectionPeer), e.g. there is no longer a feature for direct file transfer or for reliable text messaging.
- the wire format for the unreliable data channel has been specified.
- the spec has been brought up to date with recent developments in other Web specs such as File API and WebIDL.
Two other WHATWG email list threads are also related to these new updates: one related to PeerConnection encryption, the other providing feedback on the new additions related to the Video conferencing and peer-to-peer communication section in the spec.
Rich Paste and execCommand
Two other lively discussions happened in the WHATWG email lists this last week. The first is one that started the beginning of March and is about the execCommand spec that Aryeh Gregor is working on.
The second is a new thread that started this week, based on a request for image paste capability. It seems this interest has been triggered by work on a patch for this functionality in WebKit/Chrome.
W3C HTML WG Decisions
The co-chairs over at the W3C HTML WG have been busy this week, publishing three new decisions in addition to starting straw polls for others.
In Issue 101, related to the ASCII Character set reference, the co-chairs decided in favor of the proposal to maintain the link to the free of charge ASCII reference (no spec change).
In Issue 125, related to breaking RFC 2616 compliance with respect to single quotes not needed for legacy content, the co-chairs decided in favor of altering the specification in order to comply with Anne's original proposal.
In Issue 128, related to the figure element within <p>, the co-chairs decided on the no-change proposal, leaving figure to be treated the same as <p> and <aside>.
That's it for this week. If I missed anything, let me know and I'll update this post. Otherwise, see you all next week.
update I missed five other W3C HTML WG co-chair decisions:
In Issue 56 on the alignment between HTML5 and IRI align on URLs, the co-chairs decided on restoring the removed text, which I believe maps to this change proposal.
In Issue 88, on meta/content and allowing multiple languages, the co-chairs decided on making Content-Language non-conforming, which does result in a spec change.
One of my issues bit the dust: In Issue 96, the co-chairs decided on the proposal to keep the progress element. This decision was not exactly a surprise.
In Issue 124 on allowing "nofollow" and "noreferrer" as rel values, the co-chairs decided on the proposal that would disallow these values.
In Issue 127, on whether attributes on <link> and <a> can have different effects, the co-chairs decided on the proposal to optimize the text..
So many issues, so little time.
Correction: The prevailing change proposal for ISSUE-125 was Anne’s Change the note after “algorithm for extracting an encoding from a Content-Type” to not mention HTTP as HTTP is not affected by this algorithm.
(To avoid confusion, it would be most helpful if the prevailing proposals was directly linked from the decision, I’ve sometimes had problems parsing them as well.)
Thanks, I corrected. You’re right, it would be helpful if they linked which proposal they accepted in the decision.
I also added three HTML WG co-chair decisions I had missed.
And two more decisions. I swear, I don’t know how I missed these. Must have been tired, trawling through all the bug reports.
Thanks Shelley! I was just getting very antsy about the status of <device> and it was pretty tricky to track down all the conversations. Hugely useful. 😀