The WHATWG Blog — This Week in HTML 5

This Week in HTML 5 – Episode 2

August 14th, 2008 by Mark Pilgrim, Google in Weekly Review

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 biggest news this week is revision 2020, which standardizes the navigator object:

The navigator attribute of the Window interface must return an instance of the Navigator interface, which represents the identity and state of the user agent (the client), and allows Web pages to register themselves as potential protocol and content handlers.

Currently, HTML 5 defines four properties and two methods:

appName
appVersion
platform
userAgent
registerProtocolHandler
registerContentHandler

This is only a subset of navigator properties and methods that browsers already support. See Navigator Object on Google Doctype for complete browser compatibility information.

Next up: Content-Language. No, not the HTTP header, not even the <html lang> attribute, but the <meta> tag! As reported by Henri Sivonen,

It seems that some authoring tools and authors use <meta http-equiv='content-language' content='languagetag'> instead of <html lang='languagetag'>.

This led to revision 2057, which defines the <meta> http-equiv="Content-Language"> directive and its relationship with lang, xml:lang, and the Content-Language HTTP header.

In the continuing saga of the alt attribute, the new syntax for alternate text of auto-generated images (which I covered in last week's episode) has generated some followup discussion. Philip Taylor is concerned that it will increase complexity for authoring tools; others feel the complexity is worth the cost. James Graham suggested a no-text-equivalent attribute; similar proposals have been discussed before and rejected.

Switching to the new Web Workers specification (which I also covered last week), Aaron Boodman (one of the developers of Google Gears) posted his initial feedback. This kicked off a long discussion and led to the creation of the Worker object.

Other interesting changes this week:

Revision 2034 and revision 2035 define the outerHTML property, and revision 2040 defines the insertAdjacentHTML method. Both properties originally appeared in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 (outerHTML on MSDN, insertAdjacentHTML on MSDN).
Revision 2044 disallows scripts executing while an alert is displayed.
Revision 2046 requires that <script src="javascript:"> not execute script (reported by Simon Pieters)
Revision 2063 allows an HTML document to declare xml:lang if and only if it also declares lang, to ease migration between HTML and XHTML. The language values must be identical. (Reported by Simon Pieters.)
Revision 2064 defines the behavior when calling document.open("text/plain"). Re: type parameter of Document.open() (detailed review of the DOM) documents the incompatibilities in existing browsers.
Revision 2066 defines the order for getElementsByName() (reported by Maciej Stachowiak)
Revision 2068 defines window.frameElement
Revision 2069: don't require Document.location to do anything when the Document isn't in a Window (reported by Anne van Kesteren)

Administrivia: "This Week in HTML 5" now has its own feed.

Tune in next week for another exciting episode of "This Week in HTML 5."

HTML5 Live DOM Viewer—Now in Your Browser ↔ This Week in HTML 5 – Episode 3

This Week in HTML 5 – Episode 2

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