The bits of HTML the W3C is publishing as HTML5 are getting ever more stable. Ian Hickson continued addressing feedback throughout last week. There are still some three hundred odd bugs outstanding, but mostly these are relatively minor problems. This does not mean that major changes might not happen of course. One discussion currently ongoing is whether the time element should be replaced with a more generic data element.
On the front of new features, Cisco and Mozilla put forward a new RTC API proposal. They also outlined how it is different from what is in the WHATWG specification. A long thread discussing the details followed. Video conferencing is the next big thing the web platform is going to tackle. Allowing for Chatroulette and Google+ Hangouts without plugins.
Ian Fette from Google proposed a new rel attribute value, attachment. A long thread led to the proposal of a new download attribute instead for the a element which allows specifying a filename. The attribute allows for specifying an implied Content-Disposition header on the retrieved resource. Darin Fisher outlines some of the advantages.
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The debate on what to do with mutation events is still ongoing, Web IDL and the WebSocket protocol are heading towards Last Call, HTML5 still is in Last Call, and Karl is still providing an alternative view on things in the Open Web Platform Weekly Summary.
Changes to the specification
While the W3C is still working on setting up another one of its Task Forces to sort out whether schema.org should use distributed extensibility via RDFa or Microdata, Ian Hickson wrote a lengthy email addressing Microdata feedback from the last month. This resulted in numerous changes to the specification.
Web IDL
For better or worse (I personally like it) Web IDL is the language to design APIs for the web. Thanks to heycam (and Mozilla for employing him to do this) it has been moving forward again and will probably be published as W3C Last Call Working Draft soon. The significance for web developers is that every specification that defines APIs of some kind (and everything cool but CSS does these days) uses it, so knowing how it works is useful.
The WebSocket protocol
Salvatore Loreto, co-chair of the IETF group responsible for developing the WebSocket protocol, announced on their mailing list that the protocol will go for IETF Last Call today. Implementations are still all over the place. Most browser implementations are still not further than one of the input documents to the IETF group. Firefox 6 will likely ship an updated version, using a vendor prefix. Plans from other vendors are less clear. However, I would expect them all to rather rapidly adopt this as it gives such a huge advantage in terms of speed on sites that use it.
Email
- Oli Studholme thinks that the way the
blockquote element is defined does not match common practice. He wrote a post called blockquote problems and solutions on it as well.
- In reply to Eric Winkelman — who expressed interest in working on a specification for metadata tracks — Ian Hickson outlined what needs to be done. His email is of interest to anyone who wants to introduce a feature on the web platform.
- The debate over whether the
registerProtocolHandler() API should be augmented with a method to unregister and one to figure out if it has been registered is still ongoing. Jonas Sicking has privacy concerns with the isRegistered() part of the proposal.
- James Robinson suggested a timing API for measuring intervals to replace the pattern using
Data objects that is used nowadays.
- Hugh Guiney asked for clarification on the
menu and command elements.
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Last week in standards world was about a component model for the web and mutation events, mostly. As a reminder, there is also the Open Web Platform Weekly Summary written by Karl.
Changes to the specification
There were only two changes this week. In response to feedback the way audioTracks and videoTracks (media captioning features) work has been changed.
The second change was purely editorial. Reorganizing the rendering section of the specification. The rendering section prescribes how HTML ought to be rendered in interactive desktop user agents (i.e. browsers), up to and including the nitty gritty details of quirks mode.
Outside the WHATWG
Dimitri Glazkov (Google) shared his work on a component model for the web. Maciej Stachowiak (Apple) outlined a number of a concerns with it. It seems still in the early stages, but this will eventually allow for better control of styling form controls and creation of your own controls (i.e. reusable components).
Olli Pettay (Mozilla) put forward a proposal to replace mutation events. Everyone is in favor of replacing mutation events because of their complexity, but exactly how is still under discussion. Rafael Weinstein (Google) explained why ideally he would prefer an alternative approach using an observer for mutations. He would be happy with the proposal Olli put forward though. After a lot of discussion Boris Zbarsky (Mozilla) considers that we might need both APIs.
WHATWG mailing list
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Still behind with most of the specifications I edit (as ever, really), but did catch up with what went down while I was away and tracked what happened during the week.
Changes to the specification
Errors in workers (the best place to write synchronous code) now propagate up all the way to window.onerror. In addition, self.location in workers now stringifies.
The postMessage() API became a little more complicated for forthcoming support of transferring ArrayBuffer objects. Instead of cloning the ArrayBuffer object this means that the sender ceases control of it. As cloning is no longer required using this functionality would be a performance win for applications. (And less memory usage.)
Mailing list
On the mailing list details of collapsed whitespace handling for the contenteditable attribute are hashed out, as well as getSelection() in the context of vertical writing modes, HTTP adaptive streaming of video, drawing with singular transforms and zero-sized gradients on canvas, and a few other things. There were also some requests:
- Rob Manson wrote to the list about augmented reality. Following his links leads to isweb3here.com, which suggests web3 means “real world computing” (your device linked with the world).
- John Giannandrea (with Google) meanwhile wrote about Microdata, asking if the specification can be changed based on feedback he got on schema.org. By the way, if you have not already, read Schema.org and Pre-Existing Communities. There is some great information there on how standards, organizations, and communities work.
Elsewhere
The DOM Core specification gained support for event constructors. Once this is shipped in browsers you will be able to do var ev = new Event("yay"). You can set attributes via a second argument: var ev = new ProgressEvent("progress", {loaded:42}).
In W3C bug 10623 the future of exceptions on the web platform is being discussed. Whether we should continue using DOMException or a new approach that relies less on the awkward code attribute checking. Input appreciated!
W3C HTML WG
Maciej posted a revised timeline for the W3C’s work on HTML5 (WHATWG develops a parallel edition of HTML that continuously evolves and has no version number). The W3C HTML5 draft is in Last Call which means your technical comments have to be filed by a certain date. That date is 3 August 2011. From that date onwards it is expected to take until new years until all feedback is addressed by the editors, and until end of April 2012 until the Working Group has verified. (At the moment the HTML WG charter calls for the HTML5 Candidate Recommendation draft to be published at that time. It seems likely however another Last Call draft is required first. Feedback has already resulted in substantive changes.)
Earlier Maciej also posted on editorial assistants that will help Ian out with dealing with the Last Call feedback.
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Big round of applause for Shelley for taking over in my absence. Much appreciated. As I am still somewhat catching up myself with everything that has happened in the last three months I decided to summarize changes to the WHATWG specification since May 23 and highlight a few other efforts I noticed. Hopefully next week I am back up to speed.
Changes to the specification
The send() method of the WebSocket object now accepts ArrayBuffer and Blob as arguments. I.e. the Web sockets API supports binary data. On the receiving end you can specify the type of object you want using the new binaryType attribute.
The application cache support gained support for caching of cross-origin resources over a secure HTTP connection.
Parsing of elements related to ruby markup was made more forward compatible.
A new typemustmatch attribute was introduced for object to ensure only specified plugins can be initialized. If you link cross-origin resources from object you should use this feature to prevent your users from being attacked.
The EventSource object is now enabled with cross-origin support, making it possible for developers to use different servers for the streaming aspects of their application.
These were just the highlights. Numerous other changes have been made, e.g. the WebVTT file signature was simplified, a security check for the AddSearchProvider() API was removed, the error and close events were removed from PeerConnection, et cetera. You can use the HTML5 Tracker to find out more.
Elsewhere
A little before May 23, but still worth highlighting. Adam Barth tackling processing of URLs in Parsing URLs for Fun and Profit. URLs are of course fundamental to the web, but much like any other piece of technology deployed on the web (e.g. HTML, CSS, HTTP) URLs have interoperability issues. As with the work done by WHATWG on HTML, the plan is to take those away.
Alexey Melnikov and Julian Reschke meanwhile are drafting Update to MIME regarding Charset Parameter Handling in Textual Media Types attempting to finally fix the brokenness of the ancient RFC 2046. In particular, how encodings are handled for text/* media types.
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