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WHATWG Weekly: Now it’s <time> for <data>

October 29th, 2011 by Anne van Kesteren in Weekly Review

Revision 6695 made HTML attribute values match in a case-sensitive manner as far as Selectors are concerned. This approach was favored over having a hardcoded list of HTML attributes whose values had to be matched case-insensitively. Revision 6701 removed selectedOptions from the input element, a vestige from the Web Forms 2.0 era. Welcome to the weekend (jetlag) edition of the WHATWG Weekly.

New element: data

The major news today is that since revision 6783 we have a new element: data. We also lost an element: time. The data element represents a piece of human readable data that is made machine readable by its required value attribute. It can either be used for Microdata or as an element to help out scripts, in similar fashion to the data-* attributes.

The reason the time element has been replaced is that its primary use has been for marking up machine-readable times and dates in Microdata vocabularies, which is a use that has been requested for many other types of data as well (currency, numbers, location). The data element addresses these use cases in a generic fashion and provides yet another hook for scripts to play with.

The same revision also removed the HTML-to-Atom conversion algorithm. Authors can use a schema.org Microdata vocabulary instead.

WebVTT update

As reported earlier Simon Pieters did some research into timestamps. He now complemented that with research into separating cues. As a result of this parsing of WebVTT was made more forgiving. Newline handling was made more predictable.

Yours truly wrote a WebVTT parser and a Live WebVTT Validator in JavaScript so you can validate your captioning files.

Other changes

There were many other changes of significance:

• Since revision 6710 TextTrack and MutableTextTrack are identical. TextTrackCue became mutable in the next revision.
• Revision 6717 aligned the parsing rules for non-negative integers with those of integers.
• Revision 6718 turned the HTMLDocument interface into an extension of the Document interface. The plan is to do the same with the SVGDocument interface down the road and no longer introduce specific Document interfaces as you really want to have access to all their combined members if you deal with multiple languages at the same time.
• In revision 6727 the HTML standard gained yet another joke, this time in the form of a comment in the source code: Welcome to crazy town. Population: The Web.
• Now there is a draft for a URL API, we removed navigator.resolveURL() in revision 6745 as it would become redundant.
• Revision 6754 clarified the scope of attributes defined in the HTML standard. They are only applicable to HTML elements. This includes e.g. Microdata, which for that reason does not work on MathML or SVG at this time.

And even more than those, which you can look up for yourself by going through the HTML5 tracker or by following us on twitter: @WHATWG.

WHATWG Weekly: Fullscreen ↔ WHATWG Weekly: TPAC 2011