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WHATWG Weekly: TPAC 2011

by Anne van Kesteren in Weekly Review

A long week
Filled with people and meetings
WHATWG Weekly

Last week the W3C held its yearly TPAC conference. See Unorganization for an impression of the event written by me. Karl wrote down some technical details. What follows is my brief technical takeaway.

<time> and again

The time element comes back and its new design will be heavily influenced by the research done on the Time element wiki page. In short, the API will be removed, and support for years, months, birthdays lacking a year, and durations will be added.

The remainder of the discussions in the HTML WG were by and large non-technical (or rabbitholing about the longdesc attribute), leading yours truly to suggest that maybe we should call it a day and move on to the next thing.

Components

Several meetings were had on components (formerly XBL) trying to get a sense of where we should be heading. Although not everyone could be present at every meeting, some progress was made. Components with a public API will likely be required to inherit from a single element type and components will always be bound in an asynchronous manner to ensure developers will not rely on them being synchronously bound.

Mutations

The new mutations model for the web was hashed out among the people working on it and the other day I put the mutations IDL in DOM4 as a start for the new standard.

Living Standards

It was my impression that people operating at various levels of the W3C were more open for change. To improve standards development similarly to what we are trying to do within the WHATWG. It remains to be seen what comes out of it, but it encouraging to see that this is a topic of conversation, with Tim-Berners Lee and Jeff Jaffe (W3C CEO) actively participating.

W3C License

Despite that all the text of the W3C HTML5 is available under a license that permits forking (namely the WHATWG text), the W3C Members keep denying the W3C HTML WGā€™s desire for a license that allows forking. People were puzzled.

ā†”

3 Responses to “WHATWG Weekly: TPAC 2011”

  1. The W3C asked to revert the deletion of <time>. They didn’t agree to any changes to <time>. They suggested that people submit change proposals for any changes.

    The HTML5 editor would not do this, so the W3C instructed Michael Smith to revert the change via CVS.

  2. You are confusing W3C with the HTML WG co-chairs. In addition, you seem to be missing context from what has not appeared on the public record.