Archive for the ‘WHATWG’ Category
Friday, October 17th, 2008
Next week is the W3C Technical Plenary in Mandelieu, France. Several WHATWG contributors will be hanging out there attending W3C Working Group meetings (CSS, WebApps, HTML) and the Technical Plenary Day. Longtime WHATWG contributor and Validator.nu hacker Henri Sivonen will feature on a panel discussing the future of XML. Silvia Pfeiffer, who has contributed to discussions on video in HTML, will give a lightning talk titled "Beyond HTML5 video". If you happen to be near Mandelieu next week let us know so we can meet up! (E.g., by leaving a comment here, joining our IRC channel or by sending an e-mail to e.g. Ian, Henri, Ben, Lachlan, or Anne (me).)
The week after that several WHATWG contributors are hoping to meet up in a bar in Mountain View, close to San Francisco. Michael Carter (Web Sockets fame) is organizing that through the WHATWG specifications mailing list. It will likely be Tuesday October 28 at 7PM. More details will be announced later. If you want to come please let Michael Carter know. Leaving a comment on this blog entry is probably good enough.
Posted in WHATWG | 3 Comments »
Friday, September 26th, 2008
I gave a talk at Google on Monday demonstrating the various features of HTML5 that are implemented in browsers today. The video is now on YouTube, so now you too can watch and laugh at my lame presentation skills!
The segments of this talk are as follows. Some of the demos are available online for you to play with and are linked to from the following list:
- Introduction
-
<video> (00:35)
-
postMessage() (05:40)
-
localStorage (15:20)
-
sessionStorage (21:00)
- Drag and Drop API (29:05)
-
onhashchange (37:30)
- Form Controls (40:50)
-
<canvas> (56:55)
- Validation (1:07:20)
- Questions and Answers (1:09:35)
If you're very interested in watching my typos, the high quality version of the video on the YouTube site is clear enough to see the text being typed. More details about the demos can be found on the corresponding demo page.
Posted in Browser API, Browsers, Conformance Checking, DOM, Elements, Events, Forms, Multimedia, Syntax, WHATWG | 7 Comments »
Friday, September 12th, 2008
There has been a certain amount of controversy over the supposed date of 2022 for HTML 5 to be "finished". It is somewhat important to realise the significance that should be attached to this date:
None at all
OK, strictly speaking that's not quite true, but it's a pretty good approximation to the truth. What really matters is when browsers ship HTML5 features. Given that's already happening, there is really no cause for alarm. By 2022 we hope to have a full testsuite and two full implementations but then we also expect to see products shipping with features from HTML 6.
Posted in Processing Model, WHATWG | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
Welcome to a new semi-regular column, "This Week in HTML 5," where I'll try to summarize the major activity in the ongoing standards process in the WHATWG and W3C HTML Working Group.
The biggest news is the birth of the Web Workers draft specification. Quoting the spec, "This specification defines an API that allows Web application authors to spawn background workers running scripts in parallel to their main page. This allows for thread-like operation with message-passing as the coordination mechanism." This is the standardization of the API that Google Gears pioneered last year. See also: initial Workers thread, announcement of new spec, response to Workers feedback.
Also notable this week: even more additions to the Requirements for providing text to act as an alternative for images. 4 new cases were added:
- A link containing nothing but an image
- A group of images that form a single larger image
- An image not intended for the user (such as a "web bug" tracking image)
- Text that has been rendered to a graphic for typographical effect
Additionally, the spec now tries to define what authors should do if they know they have an image but don't know what it is. Quoting again from the spec:
If the src attribute is set and the alt attribute is set to a string whose first character is a U+007B LEFT CURLY BRACKET character ({) and whose last character is a U+007D RIGHT CURLY BRACKET character (}), the image is a key part of the content, and there is no textual equivalent of the image available. The string consisting of all the characters between the first and the last character of the value of the alt attribute gives the kind of image (e.g. photo, diagram, user-uploaded image). If that value is the empty string (i.e. the attribute is just "{}"), then even the kind of image being shown is not known.
- If the image is available, the element represents the image specified by the src attribute.
- If the image is not available or if the user agent is not configured to display the image, then the user agent should display some sort of indicator that the image is not being rendered, and, if possible, provide to the user the information regarding the kind of image that is (as derived from the alt attribute).
See also: revision 1972, revision 1976, revision 1978, revision 1979, Images and alternate text.
Other interesting changes this week:
- revision 1951: define
window.top
- revision 1956: "User agents must not run executable code embedded in the image resource."
- revision 1958: more notes on what is a valid image (a surprisingly difficult question)
- revision 1965: allow
<a> elements to straddle paragraphs
- revision 1998: define what happens when you set
onclick='' on a document outside a Window
- revision 1999: define
javascript: in Window-less environments
- revision 2001: define 'directionality' in terms of the
dir='' attribute for cases where the 'direction' property has no computed value
- revision 2002: define processing for the second argument to
getDataURL() for image/jpeg
- revision 2004: specify how to handle transparent images in the
toDataURL() method
- revision 2008: make patterns required in the
<canvas> API
- revision 2016: when
<script type=''> is given, it must match the type of the script, even if the script is Javascript
- revision 2019: remove
autosubmit='' from the <menu> element
Tune in next week for another exciting episode of "This Week in HTML 5."
Posted in Processing Model, Weekly Review, WHATWG | 21 Comments »
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
Lachlan Hunt and I recently gave a presentation entitled Getting Your Hands Dirty with HTML5 at the @media 2008 conference in London. The audience was mainly front-end developers; the kind of people who are using HTML to make a living, so it was a great chance to get the message out about some of the new features that have been under development.
The talk covered the Design Principles under which HTML5 is being developed, how some of the features of HTML5 can be used to enhance common web sites, and how people can get involved with the development of HTML5.
The presentation seemed to go reasonably well, especially given that we had not met till the morning of the talk although we did have fewer demos than I would have liked, both due to technical problems in the talk and a lack of time to prepare. So, for those who were at the talk (as well as those who were not), here are a somewhat random collection of demos of the HTML5 features we mentioned:
If anyone who saw the presentation is reading this and would like to provide constructive criticism on the talk, I would really appreciate it; giving talks is fun so it would be nice to get better at it 🙂
Posted in WHATWG | Comments Off on HTML5 Presentation at @media 2008