Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
Ian Hickson announced on the WHATWG and public-html mailing lists that he's written a tool that exposes his list of open issues:
In response to the concerns over the lack of transparency that have
recently been expressed both in these mailing lists and on blog posts, I
have written a tool that exposes the issues I have on my list:
http://www.whatwg.org/issues/
You can even vote for an issue to indicate that it should be made a
priority (to do that, you'll have to have sent an e-mail that ended up
on that list, as I use that as a way to prevent random spammers from
trying to use this web app).
There's also a page that shows the current 20 most-voted-for issues:
http://www.whatwg.org/issues/top
That page also contains some notes on what I'm likely to work on next,
though this information isn't necessarily accurate.
In addition to the above, you can also get a notification of every change
to the spec using one of the following methods:
You can follow this twitter feed (you can even subscribe to this with
your mobile phone so that you get text messages for every checkin):
http://twitter.com/WHATWG
You can subscribe to this mailing list:
http://lists.whatwg.org/listinfo.cgi/commit-watchers-whatwg.org
You can browse recent changes to the spec here:
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker
If anyone wants to volunteer to summarise changes and post announcements,
please just do it! Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness! I'm not
sure what the process is to post to the HTML working group blog, but you
can post to the WHATWG blog just by signing up and writing a blog post
(just tell Lachlan afterwards so he can actually post it, we have that
limited to certain users because spammers were abusing the blog). You can
also post announcements to the WHATWG twitter feed using the form on the
front page of whatwg.org.
Cheers,
Posted in WHATWG | Comments Off on Seeing the open issues
Thursday, May 24th, 2007
Yesterday I held a presentation first for Creuna and then at Geek Meet about how HTML5 can be used today. The presentation was held in Swedish, and thus the slides are also available in Swedish.
The audience was mostly people who work with creating Web sites.
The discussion afterwards was interesting, but it wasn't recorded and I can't recall all the questions, unfortunately. These are the ones I can recall for now however:
- When will HTML5 actually be used by web developers?
- That's up to you.
- When will HTML5 be finished? What is the time line?
- That's up to how fast browser vendors implement it. The W3C HTML WG's roadmap says that HTML5 will advance to Recommendation by 2010, but I don't think it is realistic to think that browser vendors will have implemented everything completely and correctly by then. Around 15 years is more realistic, however that doesn't mean that you will have to wait 15 years until you can use HTML5.
- What is the advantage of using Web Forms 2.0 instead of using HTML4 forms + JavaScript?
- Less work for authors, and a better user experience for users. For instance, using an <input type=email> means that the author doesn't have to write JS to validate that it is a correct email address on the client side, and the user can pick emails from her address book (something that is impossible to implement with JS).
- Can you style the new form controls with CSS?
- They can probably be styled to the same extent that existing form controls can be styled. The icon in the email control is added by Opera when the form control is styled in some way (I just set a white background color to make the icon appear.)
- Can you style or modify the form's error messages?
- I'm not sure if you can style them, however you can change the text with JS or override the error reporting mechanism and use your own custom mechanism with JS.
- Is it true that HTML5 allows <font>?
- No, authors are not allowed to use <font>. However, WYSIWYG editors are allowed to emit <font>. WYSIWYG editors have to identify themselves with a <meta> element. This has received a lot of feedback though and might be changed.
- Do you need to be consistent with the use of /> vs. >?
- No.
- If you don't specify what version of HTML a document is, how can you redefine the behavior of an element later in HTML6?
- You don't. Browsers treat all HTML documents the same way, regardless of what version they declare themselves of being. A good example of this is <plaintext>, which has been deprecated since HTML 1.0, and is still supported in all browsers even if you declare an HTML4 doctype.
- Does HTML5 deprecate anything?
- Nothing is actually deprecated, however some things are forbidden altogether. For example the <u> element is not allowed to be used in conforming HTML5 documents. Browsers will continue to support it, however.
- Can html5lib parse any tag soup?
- Yes.
- Does that mean that you can convert any old HTML document to XML by feeding it through html5lib?
- Yes.
- Can you use the <svg> tag in HTML5?
- No, you can't use namespaces in HTML5. You can however embed SVG in XHTML5, since it's simply XML.
Posted in WHATWG | 2 Comments »
Saturday, April 14th, 2007
“5 > 2”. So now you know.
Posted in WHATWG | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
Let me introduce you to The WHATWG Forums! If you don't feel comfortable with mailing lists but still want to discuss the future of HTML, how to use HTML5, or ask for help, then these forums are for you.
More forums or sub-forums will be added as needed. Contact me (zcorpan) for administrative stuff (becoming moderator, etc).
Enjoy!
Posted in WHATWG | 1 Comment »