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This Week in HTML 5 – Episode 29

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

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.

The big news for the week of March 30th is the addition of a synchronous database API to the Web Storage spec (which was split out from the HTML 5 spec a few weeks ago). This new API defines a DatabaseSync object whose methods return SQLTransactionSync objects. This directly mirrors the asynchronous database API, which had already defined a Database object whose methods return SQLTransaction objects. [r2958]

Another interesting change this week is r2921, which adds the placeholder attribute to the <textarea> element. I tracked the initial discussion of the placeholder attribute in episode 8 and noted its appearance in HTML 5 in episode 13. Previously you could only use the placeholder attribute on <input type=text>, <input type=email>, <input type=url>, and <input type=password>, but Thomas Broyer pointed out that Google Code (among others) uses placeholder text on <textarea> elements. Such sites could now theoretically migrate their current script-based solutions to HTML 5 markup.

Other interesting changes this week:

Around the web:

Tune in next week for another exciting episode of "This Week in HTML 5."

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