Archive for the ‘Weekly Review’ Category
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.
Posted in Weekly Review | 3 Comments »
Monday, January 9th, 2012
Happy new year everyone! We made great progress in standardizing the platform in 2011 and plan to continue doing just that with your help. You can join our mailing list to discuss issues with web development or join IRC if you prefer more lively interaction.
I will be taking the remainder of the month off and as nobody has volunteered thus far, WHATWG Weekly is unlikely to be updated in January. All the more reason to follow email and IRC.
Since last time the toBlob() method of the canvas element has been updated in revisions 6879 and 6880 to make sure it honors the same-origin policy (for exposure of image data) and handles the empty grid.
In the land of ECMAScript a proposal was made to avoid versioning by David Herman, which if successful will keep ECMAScript simple and more in line with other languages used on the web.
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Wednesday, December 21st, 2011
You might have missed this. Because of this lengthy thread on throwing for atob() space characters will no longer cause the method to throw from revision>6874 onwards. This is the WHATWG Weekly, with some standards related updates just before the world slacks off to feast and watch reindeer on Google Earth.
Shadow DOM
Dimitri Glazkov (from good morning, WHATWG!) published Shadow DOM. A while earlier he also published, together with Dominic Cooney, Web Components Explained. The general idea is to be able to change the behavior and style of elements without changing their intrinsic semantics. A very basic example would be adding a bunch of children to a certain element to have more styling hooks (since this is the shadow DOM the children will not appear as actual children in the normal DOM, but can be styled).
Encoding Standard
Two weeklies ago you were informed about the encoding problem we have on the platform. While HTML already took quite a few steps to tighten up things (discouraging support for UTF-7, UTF-32, etc. defining encoding label matching more accurately), more were needed. Especially when it comes to actually decoding and encoding with legacy encodings. The Encoding Standard aims to tackle these issues and your input is much appreciated. Especially with regards to the implementation details of multi-octet encodings.
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