Author Archive
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
Apple's Safari team provided feedback to the Web Notifications Working Group. That group, incidentally, is looking for an active editor to address that and other feedback. Opera Mobile shipped with WebGL support. This is March's first WHATWG Weekly.
Simon Pieters overhauled much of HTML5 differences from HTML4 and the document now provides information on added/changed APIs, differences between HTML and W3C HTML5, content model changes, and more.
Ian Hickson introduced a new URL scheme named http+aes (and also https+aes) in revision 7012 that allows for hosting private data on content distribution networks. Revision 7009 by the way, added the necessary hooks for the DOM mutation observers feature to HTML.
A new "referrer" metadata name for the meta element has been proposed on the WHATWG Wiki. This allows for controlling the Referer header on outgoing links.
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Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
A draft for the SPDY protocol has been submitted, the W3C HTML WG mailing list goes crazy over media DRM. This is the WHATWG Weekly.
In response to feedback Adam Barth changed the getRandomValues() method to return the array the method modifies. The method is part of the window.crypto proposal.
Ian Hickson has been busy updating the Canvas Wiki page with proposals for dashed lines, ellipsis, hit regions, using SVG path syntax for paths, and path primitives. Updates to HTML itself seem imminent.
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Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
In less than a year we reached another arbitrary milestone. HTML is another thousand revisions further, now over 7000 (not quite 9000). This is the WHATWG Weekly.
Over on [email protected], the mailing list used by TC39 (responsible for JavaScript) and the WebApps WG to coordinate development of JavaScript, IDL, and APIs, Brendan Eich launched a mega thread on full Unicode for ES6. The entire platform is currently build around 16-bit code units, which are not quite sufficient to encompass all code points. Some code points therefore require two code units, but string manipulation, length information, etc. is all in code units, making it difficult to deal with code points that require two (in practice nobody seems to bother much). The idea is to introduce some kind of switch which when used would let you deal with code points exclusively, rather than code units.
HTML did not change much last week as its editor was playing in the snow. The DOM meanwhile now has mutation observers defined, the replacement for mutation events. Adam Klein did all the heavy lifting and yours truly cleaned it up a bit. An introduction to DOM events has been added as well.
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Wednesday, February 15th, 2012
Quirks Mode has its first public draft and a group working on XML Error Recovery just started. This is the WHATWG Weekly.
Simon Pieters published a first draft of the Quirks Mode Standard. This should help align implementations of quirks mode and reduce the overall number of quirks implementations currently have. In other words, making the quirks that are needed for compatibility with legacy content more interoperable.
In a message to the W3C TAG Jeni Tennison introduced the XML Error Recovery Community Group whose charter is about creating a newish version of XML 1.0 that is fault tolerant. Community Groups are open for everyone to join, so if you want to help out, you can!
That is all, be sure to keep an eye on the HTML5 Tracker for recent changes to HTML!
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Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
Since the last WHATWG Weekly, almost a month ago now, over a hundred changes have been committed to the HTML standard. This is the WHATWG Weekly and it will cover those changes so you don’t have to. Also, remember kids, that fancy email regular expression is non-normative.
translate attribute
To aid translators and automated translation HTML sports a translate since revision 6971. By default everything can be translated. You can override that by setting the translate attribute to the "no" value. This can be used for names, computer code, expressions that only make sense in a given language, etc.
Selector and CSS related changes
In revision 6888 the :valid and :invalid pseudo-classes were made applicable to the form element. This way you can determine whether all controls in a given form are correctly filled in.
Revision 6898 made the wbr element less magical. Well, it defined the element fully in terms of CSS rather than using prose.
A new CSS feature was introduced in revision 6935. The @global at-rule allows for selectors to “escape” scoped stylesheets as it were, by letting them apply to the whole document. It will likely be moved out of HTML and into a CSS once a suitable location has been found.
APIs; teehee!
It turns out that clearTimeout() and clearInterval() can be used interchangeably. Revision 6949 makes sure that new implementors make it work that way too.
Per a request from Adrian Bateman revision 6957 added a fourth argument to the window.onerror callback, providing scripts with the script error column position.
Speaking of scripts, in revision 6964 script elements gained two new events. beforescriptexecute which is dispatched before the script executes and can be cancelled to prevent execution altogether. And afterscriptexecute for when script execution has completed.
Revision 6966 implemented a change that allows browsers to not execute alert(), showModalDialog(), and friends during pagehide, beforeunload, and unload events. This can improve the end user experience.
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