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This Week in HTML5 – Episode 37

Friday, October 9th, 2009

The big news this week is microdata. Google sponsored a usability study on microdata syntax, which resulted in significant changes to the spec [r4066]. Also related: r4067 fixes a microdata example, r4068 updates the algorithm for extracting RDF triples from microdata, r4069 does some spec cleanup, and r4070 splits out the predefined microdata syntaxes into their own specs:

There was also work on events this week. r4032 defines what events are involved in copy and paste, closing bug 7668. r4037 defines when the reset event fires, closing bug 7699. r4039 defines when the abort event fires, closing bug 7700.

This week brings another milestone, one which went mostly unremarked in mailing lists, blogs, and IRC chatter. As with any large project, Ian Hickson has maintained an informal wishlist of things he would like to clarify, define, or otherwise include in HTML5. The list has grown and shrunk over the years. The list was stored in HTML comments, so it has never been visible unless you viewed the source of the HTML5 specification itself. And as with any large project, there comes a time when you realize you're not going to get to everything on your wishlist.

This week, the wishlist shrunk a lot, as Ian finally "punted" on several issues. Some of them may be tackled in HTML6. (Of course, if someone feels strongly enough, they can certainly argue that an issue still needs to be tackled in HTML5.) r4023 shows the deletions from the wishlist, including: "ability for a web app to save a file to the local disk," proposals for new attributes on the <title> element, partial form validation, multi-column select widgets, auto-formatting of number fields (like many spreadsheet programs do), relative dates, input controls for repeating dates (like anniversaries or other repeating events), and input controls for currency.

Other noteworthy changes this week:

Around the web:

Tune in next week for another exciting edition of "This Week in HTML5."

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