WHATWG Weekly: Shadow DOM and more encoding fun!
You might have missed this. Because of this lengthy thread on throwing for atob() space characters will no longer cause the method to throw from revision>6874 onwards. This is the WHATWG Weekly, with some standards related updates just before the world slacks off to feast and watch reindeer on Google Earth.
Shadow DOM
Dimitri Glazkov (from good morning, WHATWG!) published Shadow DOM. A while earlier he also published, together with Dominic Cooney, Web Components Explained. The general idea is to be able to change the behavior and style of elements without changing their intrinsic semantics. A very basic example would be adding a bunch of children to a certain element to have more styling hooks (since this is the shadow DOM the children will not appear as actual children in the normal DOM, but can be styled).
Encoding Standard
Two weeklies ago you were informed about the encoding problem we have on the platform. While HTML already took quite a few steps to tighten up things (discouraging support for UTF-7, UTF-32, etc. defining encoding label matching more accurately), more were needed. Especially when it comes to actually decoding and encoding with legacy encodings. The Encoding Standard aims to tackle these issues and your input is much appreciated. Especially with regards to the implementation details of multi-octet encodings.
The mapping of windows-1252 to iso-8859-1 is severly wrong.
The Wikipedia page about this encoding provides good knowledge on the subject.
It goes the other way around and although “wrong” it matches all implementations.