Archive for the ‘Weekly Review’ Category
Monday, March 21st, 2011
Hello folks, and welcome to my first WHATWG Weekly. In case you're wondering where Anne van Kesteren is, you can follow his adventures for the next three months at Anne, Tom, and Peter's Trip Weblog. Last time I looked, the gang is in Colombia. And there was something about beer.
peerConnection, <device>, and video conferencing
The biggest change last week was signaled by an email from WHATWG editor, Ian Hickson.
According to the email, Ian made the following changes to WHATWG HTML specification:
- <device> has been replaced with a Geolocation-style API for requesting
user access to local media devices (such as cameras).
- locally-generated streams can be paused and resumed.
- the ConnectionPeer interface has been replaced with a PeerConnection
interface that interacts directly with ICE and its dependencies.
- PeerConnection has been streamlined (compared to ConnectionPeer), e.g.
there is no longer a feature for direct file transfer or for reliable
text messaging.
- the wire format for the unreliable data channel has been specified.
- the spec has been brought up to date with recent developments in other
Web specs such as File API and WebIDL.
Two other WHATWG email list threads are also related to these new updates: one related to PeerConnection encryption, the other providing feedback on the new additions related to the Video conferencing and peer-to-peer communication section in the spec.
Rich Paste and execCommand
Two other lively discussions happened in the WHATWG email lists this last week. The first is one that started the beginning of March and is about the execCommand spec that Aryeh Gregor is working on.
The second is a new thread that started this week, based on a request for image paste capability. It seems this interest has been triggered by work on a patch for this functionality in WebKit/Chrome.
W3C HTML WG Decisions
The co-chairs over at the W3C HTML WG have been busy this week, publishing three new decisions in addition to starting straw polls for others.
In Issue 101, related to the ASCII Character set reference, the co-chairs decided in favor of the proposal to maintain the link to the free of charge ASCII reference (no spec change).
In Issue 125, related to breaking RFC 2616 compliance with respect to single quotes not needed for legacy content, the co-chairs decided in favor of altering the specification in order to comply with Anne's original proposal.
In Issue 128, related to the figure element within <p>, the co-chairs decided on the no-change proposal, leaving figure to be treated the same as <p> and <aside>.
That's it for this week. If I missed anything, let me know and I'll update this post. Otherwise, see you all next week.
update I missed five other W3C HTML WG co-chair decisions:
In Issue 56 on the alignment between HTML5 and IRI align on URLs, the co-chairs decided on restoring the removed text, which I believe maps to this change proposal.
In Issue 88, on meta/content and allowing multiple languages, the co-chairs decided on making Content-Language non-conforming, which does result in a spec change.
One of my issues bit the dust: In Issue 96, the co-chairs decided on the proposal to keep the progress element. This decision was not exactly a surprise.
In Issue 124 on allowing "nofollow" and "noreferrer" as rel values, the co-chairs decided on the proposal that would disallow these values.
In Issue 127, on whether attributes on <link> and <a> can have different effects, the co-chairs decided on the proposal to optimize the text..
So many issues, so little time.
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Monday, March 14th, 2011
This is my last WHATWG Weekly for a while. Shelley Powers will take over starting next week. Meanwhile my friend (and colleague these days) Karl Dubost has started writing similar summaries for the W3C Blog: Open Web Platform Weekly Summary. Hopefully this is just the beginning.
EventSource, Workers, and Progress Events
The W3C WebApps Working Group published three Last Call Working Drafts: Server-Sent Events (EventSource), Web Workers, and Progress Events. In theory Last Call is the final check before a specification is more or less done. In practice it can still take over seven years. Irrespective of theory and practice, the sooner you submit your comments on a specification the better. Specifications are implemented, then become used, and at some point become immutable in areas you might be displeased with. You want to beat that.
A restrictive datalist, inline lists, cross-origin databases, and drawWindow()
Over on the WHATWG mailing list Markus Ernst brought up restricting the color palette for the <input type=color> control. Using the datalist element you can suggest a palette, but you cannot restrict it any way. This discussion quickly generalized to all new controls as they have a similar limitation. Jonas Sicking pointed out that providing a good user interface might be difficult. I said that we should probably wait a bit until the existing functionality is implemented by most user agents before adding yet more features.
Jukka K. Korpela re-raised the question many have had since they learned HTML: What about paragraphs that contain lists? James Graham pointed out that the section element cannot be used. Markus Ernst suggested we introduce a new inline list element. Probably best to just not worry too much about it and carry on as we have done for the past decade.
Apart from markup, there were a few API requests too. Brett Zamir wants cross-origin databases. Erik Möller (with Opera) asked about making Mozilla’s <canvas>.drawWindow() part of the web platform.
Layout tables
The W3C HTML Working Group decided that when you put role=presentation on a table element it can be used (in a conforming way) for presentational purposes.
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Monday, March 7th, 2011
Much sleep has not been had, so if you read something silly, it might just be me. There’s good news too, Shelley Powers volunteered to start writing the WHATWG Weekly starting March 21. Her main interest is HTML, so you might need to pester her on twitter (@shelleypowers) or email ([email protected]) to get other things covered.
Web Notifications
Robert O'Callahan once wrote a great post on The Essence Of Web Applications. Nonetheless, there are some features desktop applications have that would be quite useful in the web application space. The Web Notifications work is one part of that puzzle, bringing an API to the web to show simple application status messages to the user. This way e.g. Yahoo! Mail can notify you of incoming email even when your browser is running in the background or Yahoo! Mail is not the active tab.
Purging Link Relationships
Per a decision of the W3C HTML WG the up, last, index, first, and their synonym link relationships (values for the rel attribute) have been dropped. Since archives was similar to index that has been removed too for consistency. These relationships were never that useful to begin with so I suppose it is nice that authors no longer have to worry about them. I.e. either worry whether to add them at all or whether they would be appropriate in a certain situation.
Shorts
- Philip Jägenstedt made several small enhancements to the HTML5 Tracker, including better icons for the browsers. Lets us know what you think!
- Tab Atkins would like to reuse
<canvas> for images with structured fallback.
- Dave Kok put forward a detailed proposal for Session Management.
- David Bruant brought a discussion on the interaction of multiple global objects when using ECMAScript to the attention of the WHATWG, which happens to be standardizing some of that.
- Christoph Päper asked whether we should have a new native control for (value, unit) tuples.
- Edward Gerhold joined the quest (pretty sure there is one) to improve the application cache feature.
- Lawrence Rosen presented a license proposal to the HTML WG. Unlike the WHATWG the W3C has a restrictive license for its specifications, but it is considering changing that.
- Since the work on a new cookies specification is practically finished (waiting for the IETF to assign it a RFC number) Adam Barth put forward Origin Cookies. A proposal to solve some of the problems with cookies as they are today.
- Henri Sivonen found joy where most would find despair.
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Monday, February 28th, 2011
We are still looking for a volunteer to write WHATWG Weekly. Otherwise on March 21 and beyond there will not be much to see here. Well, no new WHATWG Weekly.
Big thanks, security model, and editing
We got a big thanks from people at the BBC. Though reading Frame accurate video in HTML5 it seems we owe them for providing valuable feedback! Great to see how many people are paying attention and contributing to what we are trying to build here.
Earlier this week Adam Barth published Principles of the Same-Origin Policy, a document outlining the principles of the Web platform security model. That is, as it has come to be over the years, with many people hacking on it in browsers.
Aryeh Gregor has a new project: HTML Editing Commands. He is working out a more detailed specification for the execCommand() method (and friends). Currently the HTML specification is rather vague on the subject, deferring much to implementations. This specification will eventually help user agents to get closer to each other — also known as interoperability — with regards to editing operations.
W3C HTML WG
Another attempt is made to get the longdesc attribute conforming. Edward O'Connor (since recently with Apple; congrats!) is not convinced there is new information here since we made the decision to kick it out.
A whole bunch of open HTML WG issues (156, 157, 158, 160) were “closed without prejudice” last week. This happens when no change proposals are written in time. The process starts with a bug that is resolved by the editor. If the reporter disagrees with the editor he can escalate the bug into an issue. But if then nobody steps up to do something with the issue nothing will change and the issue is closed without prejudice. After this the issue can only be reconsidered with approval of the WG Chairs. Otherwise it is deferred to the next version of HTML (the W3C uses a snapshot model, the current one is labeled HTML5).
Shorts
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Monday, February 21st, 2011
WHATWG Weekly will go on vacation for three months three weeks from now. However, you can stop that by joining IRC and offering to write it instead. You will be given at least one Internet for each post.
Shorts from the WHATWG mailing list
David Flanagan pointed out that various event handlers are on the HTMLElement interface rather than HTMLMediaElement even though the events are non-bubbling and dispatched solely on HTMLMediaElement. Philip Jägenstedt explained that it makes them more straightforward to implement. Why they are also on Document and Window was not explained.
David Levin suggested we standardize APIs for adding search providers. A way for a site the user is visiting to find out whether it is the default search provider and a way to add itself as search provider. The APIs he suggests we converge on are proprietary APIs from Internet Explorer.
As part of the real-time web APIs the HTML specification defines a StreamRecorder interface so authors can obtain a File out of some streaming media data. Ian Hickson indicated this is still very experimental. We are basically looking for feedback from implementors and authors, as well as standardization of the various protocols and formats, before proceeding with the APIs.
Michael Nordman said he plans on changing Chrome to allow cross-origin caching of secure resources for the application cache feature. The idea is to respect Cache-Control: no-store giving the cross-origin resources control over the situation.
Philip Jägenstedt reported he nuked javascript: URL support from various contexts within Opera and argues for standardizing this more limited behavior.
Jukka K. Korpela provided feedback on the new controls. I remember reading his Guidelines on alt texts in img elements back in the day and realizing that markup is fricking complex. Pretty cool that he is now reviewing our work.
At the W3C
Philip Jägenstedt reported some issues with <video>.readyState on the HTML WG list. On the Webfonts WG list Maciej Stachowiak explained Apple’s position on font linking and embedding.
Over the past week or so I updated DOM Core (formerly Web DOM Core) to include events.
history.pushState()
When more popular sites adopted the #! URL pattern advocacy articles were written, e.g: Breaking the Web with hash-bangs. The WHATWG saw this coming which is why we came up with the history.pushState() API some time ago. It allows resources to manipulate the path of their URL.
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