Thanks to Ben Schwarz the WHATWG now hosts an edition of the HTML standard specifically tailored for web developers: HTML5 for Web Developers. It is identical to the HTML standard, but information specific to implementors and not relevant to web developers has been removed. It also uses some CSS to make it look pretty. We hope you like it!
Much sleep has not been had, so if you read something silly, it might just be me. There’s good news too, Shelley Powers volunteered to start writing the WHATWG Weekly starting March 21. Her main interest is HTML, so you might need to pester her on twitter (@shelleypowers) or email ([email protected]) to get other things covered.
Robert O'Callahan once wrote a great post on The Essence Of Web Applications. Nonetheless, there are some features desktop applications have that would be quite useful in the web application space. The Web Notifications work is one part of that puzzle, bringing an API to the web to show simple application status messages to the user. This way e.g. Yahoo! Mail can notify you of incoming email even when your browser is running in the background or Yahoo! Mail is not the active tab.
Per a decision of the W3C HTML WG the up, last, index, first, and their synonym link relationships (values for the rel attribute) have been dropped. Since archives was similar to index that has been removed too for consistency. These relationships were never that useful to begin with so I suppose it is nice that authors no longer have to worry about them. I.e. either worry whether to add them at all or whether they would be appropriate in a certain situation.
<canvas> for images with structured fallback.We are still looking for a volunteer to write WHATWG Weekly. Otherwise on March 21 and beyond there will not be much to see here. Well, no new WHATWG Weekly.
We got a big thanks from people at the BBC. Though reading Frame accurate video in HTML5 it seems we owe them for providing valuable feedback! Great to see how many people are paying attention and contributing to what we are trying to build here.
Earlier this week Adam Barth published Principles of the Same-Origin Policy, a document outlining the principles of the Web platform security model. That is, as it has come to be over the years, with many people hacking on it in browsers.
Aryeh Gregor has a new project: HTML Editing Commands. He is working out a more detailed specification for the execCommand() method (and friends). Currently the HTML specification is rather vague on the subject, deferring much to implementations. This specification will eventually help user agents to get closer to each other — also known as interoperability — with regards to editing operations.
Another attempt is made to get the longdesc attribute conforming. Edward O'Connor (since recently with Apple; congrats!) is not convinced there is new information here since we made the decision to kick it out.
A whole bunch of open HTML WG issues (156, 157, 158, 160) were “closed without prejudice” last week. This happens when no change proposals are written in time. The process starts with a bug that is resolved by the editor. If the reporter disagrees with the editor he can escalate the bug into an issue. But if then nobody steps up to do something with the issue nothing will change and the issue is closed without prejudice. After this the issue can only be reconsidered with approval of the WG Chairs. Otherwise it is deferred to the next version of HTML (the W3C uses a snapshot model, the current one is labeled HTML5).
hgroup.
banner element to include potentially unsafe advertisements into a page. Tab Atkins pointed out that the <iframe sandbox> feature is designed for that.value IDL attribute of a control interacts with manipulating its value through an input method editor (IME; used for entering complex characters).innerHTML for DocumentFragment objects. It was pointed out further in the thread that insertAdjacentHTML() already serves that purpose.WHATWG Weekly will go on vacation for three months three weeks from now. However, you can stop that by joining IRC and offering to write it instead. You will be given at least one Internet for each post.
David Flanagan pointed out that various event handlers are on the HTMLElement interface rather than HTMLMediaElement even though the events are non-bubbling and dispatched solely on HTMLMediaElement. Philip Jägenstedt explained that it makes them more straightforward to implement. Why they are also on Document and Window was not explained.
David Levin suggested we standardize APIs for adding search providers. A way for a site the user is visiting to find out whether it is the default search provider and a way to add itself as search provider. The APIs he suggests we converge on are proprietary APIs from Internet Explorer.
As part of the real-time web APIs the HTML specification defines a StreamRecorder interface so authors can obtain a File out of some streaming media data. Ian Hickson indicated this is still very experimental. We are basically looking for feedback from implementors and authors, as well as standardization of the various protocols and formats, before proceeding with the APIs.
Michael Nordman said he plans on changing Chrome to allow cross-origin caching of secure resources for the application cache feature. The idea is to respect Cache-Control: no-store giving the cross-origin resources control over the situation.
Philip Jägenstedt reported he nuked javascript: URL support from various contexts within Opera and argues for standardizing this more limited behavior.
Jukka K. Korpela provided feedback on the new controls. I remember reading his Guidelines on alt texts in img elements back in the day and realizing that markup is fricking complex. Pretty cool that he is now reviewing our work.
Philip Jägenstedt reported some issues with <video>.readyState on the HTML WG list. On the Webfonts WG list Maciej Stachowiak explained Apple’s position on font linking and embedding.
Over the past week or so I updated DOM Core (formerly Web DOM Core) to include events.
history.pushState()When more popular sites adopted the #! URL pattern advocacy articles were written, e.g: Breaking the Web with hash-bangs. The WHATWG saw this coming which is why we came up with the history.pushState() API some time ago. It allows resources to manipulate the path of their URL.
Probably the most interesting proposal last week was an email by Silvia Pfeiffer on a Multitrack Media API. Specifically, how to synchronize media resources for the purposes of e.g. sign language and independent audio description tracks. Jeroen Wijering suggested this should be handled in a manifest, outside of HTML.
Interesting implementation-wise, Emiliano Martinez Luque announced he wrote a Microdata library for PHP.
Two weeks ago Frank Olivier from Microsoft wrote a Change Proposal for playbackRate that I missed. Namely that user agents can ignore it being set if they cannot change the speed at which the media resource plays.
Related to change proposals the W3C HTML WG now has a straw poll going on as to whether WAI-ARIA should be allowed to override native HTML semantics.
<meta name=application-name> ought to be generalized.