This Week in HTML 5 – Episode 11
Welcome back to "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. Last Friday was Halloween for some of you; in the United States, it involves dressing up in slutty costumes, begging your neighbors for handouts, and getting diabetes. Yesterday, many of you set your clocks back one hour for Daylight Savings Time. And for those of you on the Gregorian calendar, it is now November.
Dates and times loom large in this week's updates. "What is today's date?" is a deceptively simple question, matched in complexity only by the related question, "What time is it?" Sources for Time Zone and Daylight Saving Time Data gives a good overview of the current state of the art for answering both questions. In the movie Crocodile Dundee, Mick says he once asked an Aboriginal elder when he was born; the elder replied, "in the summertime."
r2381 defines global dates and times:
A global date and time consists of a specific Gregorian date, consisting of a year, a month, and a day, and a time, consisting of an hour, a minute, a second, and a fraction of a second, expressed with a time zone, consisting of a number of hours and minutes.
r2382 defines local dates and times:
A local date and time consists of a specific Gregorian date, consisting of a year, a month, and a day, and a time, consisting of an hour, a minute, a second, and a fraction of a second, but expressed without a time zone.
A month consists of a specific Gregorian date with no timezone information and no date information beyond a year and a month.
r2384 and r2385 define a week:
A week consists of a week-year number and a week number representing a seven day period. Each week-year in this calendaring system has either 52 weeks or 53 weeks, as defined below. A week is a seven-day period. The week starting on the Gregorian date Monday December 29th 1969 (1969-12-29) is defined as week number 1 in week-year 1970. Consecutive weeks are numbered sequentially. The week before the number 1 week in a week-year is the last week in the previous week-year, and vice versa.
A week-year with a number year that corresponds to a year year in the Gregorian calendar that has a Thursday as its first day (January 1st), and a week-year year where year is a number divisible by 400, or a number divisible by 4 but not by 100, has 53 weeks. All other week-years have 52 weeks.
The week number of the last day of a week-year with 53 weeks is 53; the week number of the last day of a week-year with 52 weeks is 52.
Note: The week-year number of a particular day can be different than the number of the year that contains that day in the Gregorian calendar. The first week in a week-year year is the week that contains the first Thursday of the Gregorian year year.
<input> form elements can be declared to take a local date and time, a global date and time, a date, a time, a month, or a week. You can also declare a global date and time in a <time> element or in the datetime attribute of <ins> and <del>.
HTML 5 does not define weekends or holidays, and therefore does not define business days. Interstellar datekeeping has been pushed back to HTML 6.
In other news, Chris Wilson suggested a different strategy for the much-maligned <q> element, which kicked off a long discussion, which in turn spawned several tangential discussions: <q> and commas, <q> vs <p>, UA style sheet for <q>, <q addmarks=true>, and the overly-optimistically-titled Final thoughts on <q>. The basic problem is that, while HTML 4 clearly states that user agents should render with delimiting quotation marks, Microsoft Internet Explorer (prior to IE8b2) did not do so. IE8b2 does do so, but it falls back to client-side regional settings to display quotation marks in pages where the author has not specified the language (which is the vast majority of pages). Also, in some languages, convention dictates alternating single and double quotes for nested quotations, but HTML 4 did not specify how to handle this, and different browsers handle nested quotation marks in different ways.
Other interesting tidbits this week:
- r2361 clarifies that disabled form controls don't see
clickevents. - r2362 suggests how to inform users about the acceptable patterns available in an
<input pattern="...">element. - r2363 changes the serialization algorithm for HTML fragments. Less-than (
<) and greater-than (>) characters are no longer escaped in attribute values. This seems important. - r2371 defines the optional 4th argument,
selected, which can be passed toOption()to create a new<option>element. Hat tip: Anne van Kesteren. - r2379 defines implicit form submission.
- r2368 clarifies that
<input value>attributes may not contain carriage returns or line feeds. - A controversial feature of the original Web Forms 2 was that form controls could be associated with multiple forms. HTML 5 has now dropped this feature; form controls can only be associated with (at most) one form. Hat tip: Anne van Kesteren.
- Ian Hickson suggests a simple script to test for Web Forms 2 support.
- Aaron Leventhal provides feedback on the algorithm to associate table headers with table cells, from the perspective of assistive technologies, which are the primary target audience for such an algorithm.
- Ian Hickson is asking for co-editors for 10 parts of HTML 5 that could reasonably be split off into separate specifications.
Tune in next week for another exciting episode of "This Week in HTML 5."