Archive for the ‘Weekly Review’ Category
Thursday, September 22nd, 2011
In commit 6559 CanvasPixelArray was destroyed in favor of Uint8ClampedArray from the Typed Arrays specification. DOM Core is now known as DOM4. Welcome to another WHATWG Weekly.
Web Intents
On the mailing list of the W3C WebApps WG James Hawkins with Google proposed that the group takes on the work of standardizing Web Intents. Web Intents allows for decentralization of service providers. Instead of "share on Twitter", "share on Facebook", etc. buttons sites can just have "share" button and the user can then select a service provider out of a list of services the user is using. And the way it is designed the type of actions, such as share, is limitless. I guess it remains to be seen how this works out, but it could potentially get us out of the single service provider silos.
There is some discussion going on regarding Web Intents, some technical, but mostly chartering and scope politics. Yawn.
Web Components or XBL
Dominic Cooney with Google reported on an informal Web Components meetup. The gist of it seems to be that the developers from Mozilla/Apple want something slightly different from their Google counterparts. They would prefer to go ahead with a trimmed version of XBL 2.0, having declarative templates, and a way to extend and augment existing elements. The Web Component proponents wanted to start out with a purely imperative model and basically create elements from scratch.
The next steps are not really clear, but this topic will likely come up again at the W3C TPAC meeting beginning of November.
Posted in Weekly Review | Comments Off on WHATWG Weekly: Is XBL still alive? And what are Web Intents?
Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
Just a few quick bullet points this week:
- Specifications now use event constructors rather than
init*Event() methods. See revision 6551 for details.
- Adrian Bateman announced on the WebApps WG mailing list that Microsoft has contributed tests for the WebSocket API, Web Workers, and the Indexed Database API.
- The W3C published a Last Call of Touch Events version 1. You have until October 11 to submit your comments.
- Vincent Scheib announced an update to the Mouse Lock API proposal.
- Brendan Eich gave an update on standardizing ECMAScript in TC39.
Please do not forget that Karl Dubost also writes about activity in the land of standards: Open Web Platform Weekly Summary.
Posted in Weekly Review | Comments Off on WHATWG Weekly: More event constructors, tests, touch events
Thursday, September 8th, 2011
And again the HTML standard was trimmed some more. This time the parsing APIs (innerHTML and friends) were taken out and integrated into DOM Parsing and Serialization. The upside of this is that the APIs now apply more generically and can also be used with MathML and SVG (well, once implementors adopt the changes).
W3C WebApps WG
At the W3C WebApps WG the DOM standard is starting to take shape. Aligning implementations on their implementation of the DOM. Most recently the Range API has been integrated to make it unambiguous how node trees and ranges work together. Read its goals section to get an idea of the scope.
In addition, the Clipboard API, also developed by the W3C WebApps WG, has been updated with a fully defined processing model.
Feedback on all these changes is very much appreciated!
Security
The W3C launched a Web Security Interest Group which you can join by signing up for the public-web-security mailing list.
In addition a Web Application Security Working Group was chartered to work on clickjacking and cross-site scripting defenses.
Posted in Weekly Review | Comments Off on WHATWG Weekly: Parsing APIs
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011
This week the HTML specification gained four new methods and also lost some weight due to higher quality “competing” proposals for editing related APIs.
registerProtocolHandler() and registerContentHandler() gained four complementary methods. isProtocolHandlerRegistered() and isContentHandlerRegistered() to determine whether the user is already using the site in question to handle the specified scheme or media type, and unregisterProtocolHandler() and unregisterContentHandler() to give the site the ability to offer an opt-out user interface.
Editing Exodus
The UndoManager proposal contained in the HTML specification has now been removed in favor of the work Ryosuke Niwa has been doing on UndoManager and DOM Transaction.
The execCommand() method and friends have also been removed from the HTML specification in favor of the work Aryeh Gregor has been doing on HTML Editing APIs.
Editing Meeting
A couple of people from Google and Mozilla came together in Canada to discuss the various challenges authors face with editing on the web and how they can be tackled. Ehsan Akhgari wrote a detailed report Future of editing on the web that is well worth reading.
Posted in Weekly Review | Comments Off on WHATWG Weekly: Rich-Text Editing on the Web
Wednesday, August 24th, 2011
WHATWG Weekly is somewhat irregularly updated as its writer has a somewhat chaotic vacation schedule. The specification meanwhile keeps getting refined, with the latest significant change being a security update to registerProtocolHandler() and registerContentHandler(). These methods provide better platform integration, by letting web pages become responsible for handling e.g. mailto or irc URLs. This security update introduces a whitelist for registerProtocolHandler() along with the ability for everyone to mint their own whitelisted URL schemes that are required to start with web+. registerContentHandler() meanwhile gets a blacklist for the time being as a suitable way to define a whitelist has not been found.
UndoManager and DOM Transaction
Ryosuke Niwa has been working on an API proposal to manage the undo transaction history. This proposal is deemed better than what is currently in the HTML specification and is being sorted out on the WHATWG list. Once this is completed web applications will finally get proper undo/redo behavior.
HTML/XML Task Force
A while ago the W3C TAG set up a Task Force to investigate how HTML and XML can be more closely aligned. A preliminary report is available: HTML/XML Task Force Report.
W3C Community Groups
The W3C set up Community Groups the other day making it easier for people to develop standards at the W3C without all the overhead that previously entailed. Aryeh Gregor already set up the HTML Editing APIs Community Group to work on HTML Editing APIs. Feel free to join the group or start your own!
Component Model Update
Dimitri “good morning” Glazkov posted an update on working out the component model for the web (formerly XBL). To learn more check out the component model page on the WHATWG wiki which contains a good overview of the technology.
Posted in Weekly Review | Comments Off on WHATWG Weekly: UndoManager, HTML/XML, Component Model