Author Archive
Monday, February 7th, 2011
Two weeks ago I reported that Philip Jägenstedt wrote a proposal to ignore the Content-Type header for video resources and last week that made it into the HTML standard. Video formats were already being sniffed if the Content-Type had an appropriate value. Now that process is simplified.
The server-sent events feature was also simplified. 2xx — except 200 — HTTP response codes no longer have any special semantics.
Meanwhile Web Workers gained the online and offline events turning its navigator.onLine into something useful. And the window.onerror feature will also be invoked for compile-time errors. Aryeh Gregor’s work on window.atob() and window.btoa() — methods for base 64 encoding and decoding — made it into the HTML standard.
The Wider Web
Ian Hickson dedicated a blog entry to a change to the HTML standard with regards to script execution order. Suffice to say that inserting scripts dynamically is hairy, but at least it is well defined now.
Robert O'Callahan wrote Distinguishing "Embeddable" Versus "Readable" Web Resources Considered Harmful to which I replied with Breaking Web Platform Consistency Considered Harmful. Loading external resources is a complicated topic and I would like to avoid changing strategy there. Ian Hickson captures it quite well in a comment: I think the consistency argument has to be given a lot of weight, because otherwise each generation of Web standards people will bring with it a whole new set of API styles, and we’ll end up with a platform that is nigh on impossible to intuitively understand.
Related to loading policies a post by Mike Cardwell on abusing HTTP status codes to expose private information garnered quite a bit of attention last week. Simon Pieters suggested that my From-Origin proposal would be able to tackle that issue. It is quite a severe privacy problem that we should study carefully.
If you are interested in what editors of the CSS Working Group are working on there is now @csscommits where updates of CSS specifications are announced.
“Distributed Extensibility”
The Chairs of the W3C HTML Working Group finally announced the decision on ISSUE-41. HTML will not have XML-style namespaces. HTML has numerous extension points already and it is unclear whether namespaces are a good idea. It is nice that the W3C and WHATWG are in agreement on this, insofar they are actually separate.
I should point out that this decision can still be appealed if new information is brought forward. This discussion has been going on for a decade so hopefully we covered it, but you never know.
On the List
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Monday, January 31st, 2011
Another week, another WHATWG Weekly. While the change of name continues to excite the wider world — be sure to read HTML5 vs. HTML by Jeffrey Zeldman for some perspective — standards development marches on.
Media Type Sniffing
At the start of the week Adam Barth gave “whatwgians” a heads up on an update to the Media Type Sniffing specification, published by the IETF Web Security (websec) WG. It now includes rules for handling WebP, Ogg, WAVE, and WebM resources that lack a media type. This work was originally part of the HTML specification and as it progressed found a home at the IETF. The reason sniffing is being documented is that browsers are required to do it if they want to handle legacy content. On top of that, if their sniffing algorithms differ it is bad for security, as explained by the Secure Content Sniffing For Web Browsers paper.
As fonts are being uniformly sniffed by browsers as well due to the lack of registered media types for them I asked for the font sniffing rules to be included in Media Type Sniffing.
Real-Time Web
Patrik Persson with Ericsson Research reported they have been exploring peer-to-peer conversational video based on several APIs from the HTML specification. This is where the web platform is still lacking compared to plugins, but it is starting to look like that will change. Sorting out the details however will likely take time as browsers do not have camera integration so far and have no UDP or peer-to-peer network stack.
The network part is also still an unknown. There is no agreed upon standard protocol yet for this type of functionality. The RTC-Web effort plans to change that though.
hgroup
Various people are unsatisfied with the design of the hgroup element and wish for it to be changed. Some want it to be removed until more research is done. And they may be right. There is some anecdotal evidence that the element is difficult for people to grasp — Bruce Lawson discussed it with developers and Lars Gunther experimented on students. There are a few bugs opened on it and Steve Faulkner is trying to get the HTML WG to do a poll.
Change Proposals
The W3C HTML WG currently has three issues open on the processing details of meta elements with their http-equiv attribute set to "content-type" (125, 126, and 148). Change proposals were written for all of these last week.
Kenny Lu, assisted by Henri Sivonen, is trying to get the u element conforming by writing a Change Proposal for issue 144. Furthermore he believes u as well as b and i should be marked presentational. On the HTML WG mailing list Ian Hickson argued that if we return b and i to be presentational elements in HTML and introduce u as a presentational element, we should bring all presentational elements back. Preferring consistency over design-by-committee.
Shorts
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Monday, January 24th, 2011
I think my summary last week worked out so here is the next. We changed the names of one of the standards we are working on and per Parkinson’s Law of Triviality this generated enormous amounts of feedback. Everything from “Love it!” to “Terrible.” Try to keep in mind that:
- Developers want features from browsers, not the next version of some standard.
canvas and <!doctype html> are used today.
- Browsers implement features, not whole standards. And when they implement a feature they want to implement whatever is latest. (They are not going to implement a specific release of a standard when a later draft version contains known fixes to make e.g.
bbc.co.uk working.)
- Validators (these days) want to support roughly what the union of browsers implement so authors get the most useful feedback.
The FAQ has been updated with questions raised after the announcement and you are always welcome on IRC to discuss matters. Not to worry, most time zones are covered.
In WHATWG-land
On the mailing list a long thread started on implementations using a lot of bandwidth in their implementations of video. The basic problem is that when the user pauses the video the implementation continuous to retrieve data. This is a tricky problem as this is very helpful to the user — when not paying for bandwidth — but not necessarily for the application developer who is always paying for bandwidth.
Jeremy Orlow forwarded an email from the Chromium project about streaming Blob objects. A use case would be sending continuous data from the server and feeding it into an audio element as well as storing that data locally.
Quite a few more items were discussed:
At the W3C
As you might know various W3C Working Groups work together with the WHATWG on specifications. That lots of people are part of both organizations makes this quite easy. The W3C still uses a snapshot model and as a result the HTML WG is working towards Last Call. A deadline was set and since end last year all new issues will automatically become Last Call comments. Older issues are being settled with Change Proposals. A Change Proposal Status overview is available and quite a few were created just last week:
There are no boundaries to what can be considered an issue unfortunately and therefore sometimes petty editorial matters end up taking a lot of time. E.g. what links the Status section can contain and what exactly can be said in the Acknowledgments section. It makes people rant, but to no avail so far.
Any changes made as a result of an accepted Change Proposal are also reflected in the WHATWG standard by the way as the source document for the specifications is identical.
Fighting XSS
Over in [email protected] Adam Barth has a proposal for XSS mitigation in browsers. Basically trying to find a simple measure that could help authors fight cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.
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Sunday, January 16th, 2011
Inspired by my friend Peter who writes summaries about the ongoing progress with WebKit I thought I should try writing such a summary about the WHATWG. If this works out you might see another one. Obviously a lot has been happening thus far so to not make this ridiculously hard I will restrict myself to everything that happened fairly recently.
Aryeh Gregor took it upon himself to write a specification for window.btoa and window.atob. These methods originate with Gecko and have been adopted by other browsers since, but have never been formally specified. This also explains why implementations are different. If you want to help out standardizing something take a look at companion specifications on the WHATWG Wiki.
The device element (see What’s Next in HTML, episode 1) continues to be discussed on the mailing list (subscribe). Though from sharing a video/audio stream the focus in the discussion has shifted towards allowing applications to interact with non-typical hardware and the implications to security thereof. Consider attaching certain sensors to your computer or maybe your model train set and wanting to interact with it directly from a web application without having to install plugins of any kind.
Web Workers and the DOM was discussed to quite some extent on the mailing list. Evidently developers want more out of Web Workers and are running into limitations. Web Workers do not have access to a DOM, because existing DOM implementations are not thread-safe. Various threads on the mailing list are about overcoming this hindrance.
Silvia Pfeiffer who apparently has been contracting for Google recently (congrats!) wrote a lengthy email: Google Feedback on the HTML5 media a11y specifications. I.e. feedback on WebVTT — the WHATWG way of doing captions — and the new track element. Mark Watson with Netflix wonders how captioning will work in an adaptive streaming context.
It does not stop here. Really:
Have a good week!
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Monday, October 27th, 2008
The bay area meetup will be Tuesday 7PM (October 28) at St Stephen's Green in Mountain View. If you have any further questions feel free to ask them in a comment here or on IRC.
To be perfectly clear, the meeting is open to everyone who wants to come. All that is required is that you actually show up at the pub. See you there!
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