Author Archive
Friday, July 20th, 2012
In an email to the WHATWG mailing list Ian Hickson explained how the relationship between the WHATWG and W3C effort around HTML has evolved. It is recommended reading if you want to know the details.
In summary, we will remain focused on improving HTML and related technologies to address the needs of users, developers, and user agents. The W3C HTML WG has decided to focus on producing a snapshot: HTML5. We anticipate the net effect to be accelerated development of the HTML Living Standard.
Posted in W3C, WHATWG | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
The WHATWG now has a patent policy, the WHATCG. We will keep using the same mailing list, the same IRC channel, the same web sites, but now sometimes we will publish through the WHATCG as well for patent policy purposes per the W3C Community Final Specification Agreement.
If you could previously not join the WHATWG because no patent policy was in place, now is the time to reconsider. If you are unsure how this applies to you, then it most likely does not.
Posted in W3C, WHATWG | Comments Off on Patent Policy
Wednesday, April 11th, 2012
Ian Hickson made a proposal to unify Web Intents with registerProtocolHandler() and registerContentHandler(). The Encoding Standard now has all its decoders defined. This is the WHATWG Weekly.
The big news this week is the new dialog element. Introduced in revision 7050, along with a new global attribute called inert, a new form element method attribute value "dialog", and a new CSS property anchor-point.
Yours truly updated the Fullscreen Standard just in time for the dialog element. It defines a new CSS ::backdrop pseudo-element as well as a new rendering layer to address the combined use cases of Fullscreen and the dialog element.
Posted in Weekly Review | Comments Off on WHATWG Weekly: Fullscreen dialog
Thursday, March 29th, 2012
The StringEncoding proposal is getting closer to consensus. It now consists of a TextEncoder and a TextDecoder object that can be used both for streaming and non-streaming use cases. This is the WHATWG Weekly.
Some bad news for a change. It may turn out that the web platform will only work on little-endian devices, as the vast majority of devices is little-endian today (computers, phones, …) and code written using ArrayBuffer today assumes little-endian. Boris Zbarsky gives a rundown of options for browsers on big-endian devices. Kenneth Russell thinks the situation can still be saved by universal deployment of DataView and sufficient developer advocacy.
Over the past couple of weeks the canvas element 2D API has gotten some major new features. Ian Hickson wrote a lengthy email detailing the canvas v5 API additions. Path primitives, dashed lines, ellipses, SVG path syntax, text along a path, hit testing, more text metrics, transforming patterns, and a bunch more.
Posted in Weekly Review | Comments Off on WHATWG Weekly: HTML canvas version 5 has arrived
Wednesday, March 14th, 2012
Jonas Sicking proposed an API for decoding ArrayBuffer objects as strings, and encoding strings as ArrayBuffer objects. The thread also touched on a proposal mentioned here earlier, StringEncoding. This is the mid-March WHATWG Weekly.
Revision 7023 added the Path object to HTML for use with the canvas element, and the next revision made it possible to actually use it:
var path = new Path()
path.rect(1,1,10,10)
context.stroke(path)
A new method addPathData() (introduced in revision 7026) can be used to construct canvas paths using SVG path data. Revision 7025 meanwhile added ellipse support to canvas.
Tune in next week for more additions to canvas.
Posted in Weekly Review | 2 Comments »