Archive for the ‘WHATWG’ Category
Monday, March 24th, 2008
The four hottest topics in the WHATWG Issues List are:
The video codec issue is being actively worked on, but we're not close to a good solution yet (it's mostly an economic and political issue, not a technical one, which is why we don't have any transparency on this issue, sadly). I recently responded to most of the table-related feedback. Web Forms 2 work is waiting for a decision from the W3C's forms task force on whether WF2 will be integrated as-is into HTML5 or whether it will be changed before being merged. The namespace issue is the one I'm working on now.
The first thing I have to do is work out what the problem is! There has been a lot of discussion, but not much of it is focussed on a problem, most of it is focussed on possible solutions. One can't evaluate a solution without knowing what it's trying to solve, though. To this end, I have created a wiki page where I will note down any problem descriptions I can find as I read all 367 of the e-mails in this folder.
Feel free to help! If you want to coordinate, I'm Hixie in #whatwg on Freenode IRC.
Posted in WHATWG | Comments Off on Exploring new vocabularies for HTML
Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
The W3C is having its technical plenary day today, and a number of WHATWG contributors are there. It's hard to participate remotely in this event, but you can watch and listen — the W3C is publishing an audio stream (in Ogg; a Java applet alternative is available too), and has commissioned realtime captioning for the event. There's also W3C IRC channel on the topic on irc.w3.org, port 6665, channel #tp, password beantown * (a single asterisk) (it's not clear why there's a password, just go with it) (no password anymore). You can also chat with WHATWG contributors who are present at the event on our own IRC channel.
The agenda for the day is available from the W3C site. Don't forget to adjust the times from the Boston timezone to your timezone if you want to listen to a particular session.
Posted in W3C, WHATWG | Comments Off on The WHATWG at the W3C technical plenary
Saturday, October 27th, 2007
The WHATWG has how published a snapshot version of the HTML5 spec for review. Ian Hickson wrote to the WHATWG mailing list:
Last November, as part of the feedback on the W3C HTML WG charter, I wrote
an e-mail saying that I thought a realistic timetable would have a
first working draft released in October 2007.
We don't really need archived copies with the way the WHATWG works, since
everything happens in the open with a Subversion interface and everything,
but, I figured that I should "publish" an archived copy anyway, so today I
put out a frozen "call for comments" draft:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/2007-10-26/multipage/
If anyone was hoping for a semi-stable version to start reviewing the
draft, I would say that this is it. We're pretty much feature-complete at
this point, which is to say I don't think we'll be adding any major
features to HTML5 going forward (though of course minor features like
additions to certain APIs are likely to still occur).
There is a public issues list:
http://www.whatwg.org/issues/
...which has about 3700 issues in it. The next order of business is simply
to go through all of those issues. I've been tracking the issue count
since early October, and at the moment the count is reducing at a rate of
about 7 a day, which works out to being about a year and a bit of solid
work, which puts us on track to reach Last Call in 2009, as I predicted in
the aforementioned e-mail.
I'd like to thank everyone here in the WHATWG community for helping make
this work fun and pleasant. It's really nice to be able to work in such a
friendly atmosphere. I hope the coming year will continue the same way!
Cheers,
I'd like to thank Ian for his hard work on editing the spec. Keep it up! 🙂
Posted in WHATWG | Comments Off on Call for Comments
Tuesday, October 9th, 2007
html5lib 0.10 is now available for your HTML-parsing pleasure.
html5lib is an implementation of the HTML 5 parsing algorithm, available in both Python and Ruby flavours. The HTML 5 algorithm is based on reverse engineering the behaviour of popular web browsers and so is compatible with the myriad of broken HTML encountered on the web.
Features in 0.10:
- Parse HTML to a variety of common tree formats including minidom, ElementTree and BeautifulSoup (Python), and hpricot and rexml (Ruby) as well as a custom simpletree format
- Automatic detection of character encoding from
meta elements and using frequency analysis (if chardet is available)
- Sanitization of markup and CSS using a whitelist approach
- Liberal XML parsing
- Conversion of trees to event streams and Genshi-inspired filters for those streams
- Flexible serializers for writing out streams in HTML and XHTML-syntax
- A prototype HTML 5 validator
- A large test suite
Download:
Posted in WHATWG | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007
In his post Parroting Pareto, Jeremy Keith says that HTML5 needs to cover cases that “fall far outside the 80%-90% curve”, in particular accessibility. “By their very nature, accessibility concerns are not going to affect the majority of users. That doesn’t mean they can be dismissed.”
My understanding of applying the 80/20 rule to the design of HTML5 is that the “80” isn’t about 80% of users. It is about (proverbial) 80% of authoring cases. That is, it doesn’t make sense to support (for accessibility or otherwise) things that people would only publish very rarely if engineering support for the rarity would complicate the implementation of the language significantly.
See Hixie’s email to the HTML WG on the topic.
Posted in WHATWG | 4 Comments »