The WHATWG Blog

This Week in HTML 5 – Episode 29

April 8th, 2009 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 big news for the week of March 30^th is the addition of a synchronous database API to the Web Storage spec (which was split out from the HTML 5 spec a few weeks ago). This new API defines a DatabaseSync object whose methods return SQLTransactionSync objects. This directly mirrors the asynchronous database API, which had already defined a Database object whose methods return SQLTransaction objects. [r2958]

Another interesting change this week is r2921, which adds the placeholder attribute to the <textarea> element. I tracked the initial discussion of the placeholder attribute in episode 8 and noted its appearance in HTML 5 in episode 13. Previously you could only use the placeholder attribute on <input type=text>, <input type=email>, <input type=url>, and <input type=password>, but Thomas Broyer pointed out that Google Code (among others) uses placeholder text on <textarea> elements. Such sites could now theoretically migrate their current script-based solutions to HTML 5 markup.

Other interesting changes this week:

• r2928 recommends that browsers should reset the text-indent property when rendering a <textarea> element.
• r2930 notes a strange edge case where paragraphs (<p> elements) can end up overlapping each other if they are used as fallback content within an <object> element.
• r2933 adds event handler DOM attributes like onclick to the WebIDL definition of the document object.
• r2936 allows the spellcheck attribute to be present with no value, as a synonym for spellcheck="true". I first mentioned the spellcheck attribute in episode 23, and again in The Road to HTML 5: spellchecking.
• r2937 allows <textarea wrap=off>.
• r2941 further tweaks the algorithm for parsing legacy color attributes, which is trickier than you might think.
• r2943 allows the width and height attributes of an <img> element to be 0.

Around the web:

• Jacob Seidelin posts a <canvas> cheat sheet.
• Peter-Paul Koch knows way more about dates than you do.
• Eric Meyer uses HTML 5 to present the results of the "A List Apart Survey 2008."
• Alex Nicolaou explains how the new versions of Google Mail and Google Calendar use HTML 5 for offline functionality.
• Jon Tan talks about practical ways to tweak your markup now to migrate to HTML 5 later.
• addfullsize.com is an entire site devoted to adding an attribute to the <img> element.
• Anne van Kesteren thinks URLs are tough, and he's right.

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

Help us review HTML5! ↔ This Week in HTML 5 – Episode 30