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This Week in HTML5 – Episode 38

Tuesday, October 20th, 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.

This week, there were some more refinements to microdata. r4139 changes the names of the DOM properties that reflect microdata markup. r4140 renames the content property to itemValue Since no browser has actually implemented this API yet, these changes shouldn't make any difference. Standards are like sex; one mistake, and you're stuck supporting it forever! r4141 and r4147 fix up some microdata examples, in particular this example from Gavin Carothers about marking up O'Reilly's book catalog. Hooray for real-world examples!

There were also some noteworthy changes to the <video> and <audio> API. r4131 says that setting the src attribute on one of those elements should call its load() method. r4132 removes the load event for multimedia elements, and r4133 removes the "in progress" events (loadstart, loadend, and progress) that used to be fired while the video/audio file was downloading.

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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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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This Week in HTML5 – Episode 36

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

Since I started publishing these weekly summaries over a year ago, I've watched the HTML5 specification grow up. In episode 1, the big news of the week was the birth of an entirely new specification (Web Workers). Slowly, steadily, and sometimes painstakingly, the HTML5 specification has matured to the point where the hottest topic last week was the removal of a little-used element (<dialog>) and the struggle to find a suitable replacement for marking up conversations.

This week's changes are mundane, and I expect (and hope!) that future summaries will be even more mundane. That's a good thing; it tells me that, as implementors continue implementing and authors continue authoring, there are no show-stoppers and fewer and fewer "gotchas" to trip them up. Thus, the overarching theme this week -- and I use the term "theme" very loosely -- is "the never-ending struggle to get the details right."

Parsing

HTML5 is full of algorithms. Most of them are small parts of one mega-algorithm, called Parsing HTML Documents. Contrary to popular belief, the HTML parsing algorithm is deterministic: for any sequence of bytes, there is one (and only one) "correct" way to interpret it as HTML. Notice I said "any sequence of bytes," not just "any sequence of bytes that conforms to a specific DTD or schema." This is intentional; HTML5 not only defines what constitutes "valid" HTML markup (for the benefit of conformance checkers), it also defines how to parse "invalid" markup (for the benefit of browsers and other HTML consumers that take existing web content as input). And sweet honey on a stick, there sure is a lot of invalid markup out there.

Accessibility

As with so many things in the accessibility world, all of this week's changes revolve around the thorny problem of focus. I previously explained why focus is so important in episode 24.

Security

All of this week's security-related changes revolve around document.domain. As you might expect from its name, this property returns the domain name of the current document. Unfortunately (for security), the property is not read-only; you can also set document.domain to pretty much anything. This can cause all sorts of horrible side effects, since so many things (cookies, local storage, same-origin restrictions on XMLHttpRequest) rely on the domain of the document. This set of changes attempts to reduce the nasty side effects (and the possible attack surface) in case you absolutely must set document.domain to something other than its default calcuated value.

Semantics

Video

As regular readers of this column are aware, one of the big new user-visible features of HTML5 is native video support without plugins. As video is incredibly complicated, so to is the video support in HTML5. (Although not related to this week's changes, you may be interested to read my series, A gentle introduction to video encoding.)

Web Forms

Forms continue to be difficult.

Interesting Discussion Threads This Week

Around the Web

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

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This Week in HTML5 – Episode 35

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

On August 7, 2009, Adrian Bateman did what no man or woman had ever done before: he gave substantive feedback on the current editor's draft of HTML5 on behalf of Microsoft. His feedback was detailed and well-reasoned, and it spawned much discussion. See also: Adrian's followup on <progress> (and more here); his followup on <canvas>; on <datagrid> (which was actually dropped from HTML5 just minutes after Adrian posted his initial feedback, for unrelated reasons); his discussion with a Mozilla developer about <bb> (which was also subsequently dropped); discussion about <dialog> (which has now been dropped -- more on that in just a minute); Adrian's followup on <keygen>, with additional concerns listed here; his followup on the new input types; and last but not least, his position on <video> and <audio> (and followup about best-choice algorithms).

As you might expect, much of the discussion since August 7 has been driven by Microsoft's feedback. After five years of virtual silence, nobody wants to miss the opportunity to engage with a representative of the world's still-dominant browser. I want to focus on two discussions that have led to recent spec changes.

The rise and fall of <keygen>

The <keygen> element was invented by Netscape and subsequently reverse-engineered by every other browser vendor except Microsoft. It had never been part of any HTML specification before; indeed, it wasn't well-documented anywhere. It was added to HTML5 earlier this year (and covered in episode 12 and episode 31). The spec text borrows heavily from this incredibly detailed documentation posted to the WHATWG mailing list last July.

Adrian, on behalf of Microsoft, has stated in no uncertain terms that Microsoft has no intention of ever implementing the <keygen> element, and they would like it to be removed from HTML5. But what does "implementing" <keygen> mean? Well, the point of <keygen> is to provide a cryptography API, but as Ian Hickson points out, the element itself "integrates tightly with the form submission model, it affects the DOM APIs of other elements, it affects the parser, it affects the form control validity model -- it's not a feature that can be sensibly considered 'optional' if our goal is cross-browser interoperability. However, there is an alternative that I think would still satisfy Microsoft's desires to not implement <keygen>'s cryptographic features while still bringing interoperability to the platform in every other respect: we could make the support of each individual signature algorithm optional."

r3843 does just that -- it makes the cryptography parts of <keygen> optional. It is important that the element itself be implemented (even without the crypto bits), because it interacts with the DOM and the parsing model in strange ways.

As an postscript of sorts, I should point out that a recent change to the keytype attribute (r3868) allows client-side script to detect whether the crypto bits are actually supported. Detecting features is important, and this subtle change will allow authors to write feature detection scripts instead of relying on browser sniffing to decide whether to use keygen-based cryptography.

The art of conversation is, like, dead and stuff

Another hot topic this week is the removal of the <dialog> element. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Microsoft questioned the wisdom of a specialized element for marking up dialog. Other people have suggested that the element does not actually go far enough -- it lets you mark up basic conversation (people talking), but provides no semantics for stage directions, actions, thoughts, voiceover narration, and so on. (See also: Unwebbable, "The screenplay problem.")

To decide this burning question, the <dialog> element was removed, and conversations are now listed in the section on Common idioms without dedicated elements, with an example of how one might mark up a conversation with more generic markup, if one were inclined to do so. Predictably, this has already caused some backlash from the pro-<dialog> camp.

The conversation about marking up conversations also intersects with another burning question: can you use the <cite> element to mark up a person's name? HTML 4 said yes, and even provided an example that used the <cite> element that way. Dan Connolly, who added the <cite> element to HTML 2 (yes, 2), says "I consider that a bug in the HTML 4 spec. I wish I had reviewed it more closely." Still, specs are normative, not what their authors say about them after-the-fact, and the web has collectively had 12 years of HTML 4 which explicitly blessed the technique. I've used <cite> to mark up people's names for years in my own markup, and I'm certainly not going to go back and change all those blog entries to conform to somebody's sense of purity.

New examples

Speaking of examples, the HTML5 spec just got a whole lot more of them. To wit:

Further Reading

Other spec changes this week:

Around the web:

Quote of the week:

Richard Schwerdtfeger, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Accessibility Architect at IBM, co-author of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0, XHTML Access Module, and XHTML Role Attribute Module, in a discussion of aria-describedby:

longdesc was a disaster.

On a personal note, I'm writing this on a new laptop with a sticky "3" key, a minor annoyance turned major by the fact that this week's revisions are numbered in the 3000 range. While many people complain about the pace of changes in HTML5, as far as I'm concerned, revision 4000 can not come quickly enough.

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

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This Week in HTML 5 – Episode 34

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

In last week's episode, I mentioned that the HTML 5 specification now includes a media registration for text/html. Ian Hickson explains why HTML 5 re-registers text/html: "The main thing that needs updating is the removal of the permission for sending syntactic profiles of XML as text/html. In addition, the encoding considerations, fragment identifier definition, and the text about recognising HTML documents are somewhat out of date and can be significantly improved by referencing HTML5 now."

This addition has not been without controversy. For example, Julian Reschke believes that "RFC 2854 applies to all HTML vocabularies (and references them), while HTML5 just describes the 'current' language." [ensuing discussion] I personally disagree that HTML 5 needs to define all elements and attributes of previous HTML versions in order to "earn" the right the re-register text/html, but it is true that HTML 5 does not do so. Or didn't, before r3683 added a definition of the <meta scheme> attribute and a definition for the <head profile> attribute. So there's that.

In other news:

Interesting discussion of the week: Web Storage: apparent contradiction in spec. At issue is how much freedom browsers should have to manage their client-side state, including cookies, local databases, and local storage. On one side is Linus Upson, project manager of Google Chrome: "It is important that all local state be treated as a cache. User agents need to be free to garbage collect any local state. If they can't then attackers (or the merely lazy) will be able to fill up the user's disk." On the other side is Brady Eidson of Apple: "One key advantage of LocalStorage and Databases over cookies is that they *do* have a predictable, persistent lifetime, and the browser is *not* allowed to prune them at will. ... [O]nce the data is stored, it should be considered user data - as 'sacred' as a user's file on the file system." Linus responds: "If the spec requires UAs to maintain local storage as 'precious' it will be the first such feature in HTML 5. Everything else in the spec is treated as volatile." It goes on like that for a while. Schuyler Duveen presents some use cases. Boris Zbarsky (Mozilla) thinks it's a matter of trust. The entire thread highlights the multiple trains of thought for what local storage is for, what it means, and how it should be treated.

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