WHATWG Weekly: Week ending May 23
Welcome to my last WHATWG Weekly report.
The week was relatively quiet. Most of the activity centered around the Last Call for HTML5 and other documents at the W3C.
In the WHATWG email list, Kenneth Russell make a request to use CORS for cross-domain image and video requests. CORS is Cross Origin Resource Sharing, and the request was to add an attribute to image, video, and audio elements. Ian Hickson did add this attribute.
Markus Ernst posted a request for a content-style attribute for contenteditable elements, and David Dahl posted a spec and API for an easy to use cryptography API called DOMCrypt. "Easy to use" and "cryptography" are normally terms I don't see being used together in the same sentence.
Narenda Sisodiya posted a demo of a slidecasting technique. Included in a later email was snippets of code in how the demo was created.
In the W3C, the big news was around the poll for the Last Call publication of HTML5 and various other documents. If I understand how the poll process works, a quorum of members was reached, and all documents achieved the necessary Yes votes to proceed.
There are formal objections against two publications: the HTML/XHTML Compatibility Authoring Guidelines Specification, and the HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives guide. The formal objections were that these were guidelines, not technical specifications, and should be published as Notes not Recommendations. However, as noted by Wayne Carr in the poll, a "W3C recommendation is specification or a set of guidelines", in which case guidelines do have a place in the recommendation track.
The Accessibility Task Force did not Formally Object to the publication of the HTML5 Last Call draft, as they stated they would earlier in the week. Instead, the Task Force, and the WAI_PFWG agreed to a conditional support for publication of HTML5. No, I don't know what this means, either, other than no Formal Objection was made to the publication of HTML5.
Next up is the Last Call Review Process. In my opinion, and not reflective of WHATWG, I don't expect the review process to go swimmingly. Using Bugzilla to track Last Call comments seems counter-intuitive, and Bugzilla does have accessibility issues. In addition, the current process makes it extremely difficult to shepherd a tracking issue and change proposal through the process unless you're a member of the group, yet Last Call is supposed to be a time to capture Last Call comments from outside the group.
However, what is, is. This is the process, folks will just have to muddle through.
I do want to note that there are some very thoughtful comments in the HTML WG Last Call poll. If you have a few minutes to spare, I recommend reading through all of them. Somewhat surprised, though, that only about a quarter of the HTML WG members voted.
That's all I have to report. Thanks to the WHATWG folks for giving me the opportunity to participate in the WHATWG weblog and Weekly Reviews.
Thank you for writing the weeklies!