The WHATWG Blog

WHATWG Weekly: week ending May 8th

May 9th, 2011 by Shelley Powers in Weekly Review

The WHATWG email list seeming rather quiet this last week.

José Lucas Teixeira de Oliveira brought up the idea of an active menu—associating a nav element with an article in some way.

Ian Hickson caught up with correspondence from last December and January. One of the items concerned the selectionDirection property and especially what the value of 'none' means.

Ian was also busy making HTML5 edits, several of which I wanted to share.

One edit is applying an indeterminate pseudo-class to an indeterminate progress bar, and another clarifies how to make a determinate and indeterminate progress bar. Ian also provided additional adaptive renderings for progress bars, including vertical progress bars, and even a square progress bar.

Another significant edit, the removal of hgroup, triggered a considerable amount of discussion in the W3C HTML WG.

This one went back and forth for a bit. The best summation I found of the entire event was a Twitter posting, referencing a post by HTML5 Doctor:

They put their hgroup in.
They pull their hgroup out.
They put their hgroup in 
and shake it all about...

Fun stuff. The long and short of it is that the edit to remove hgroup was reverted, and the issue will be discussed more fully during Last Call.

Also of note in the W3C HTML WG last week was the poll regarding HTML5 licensing. Maciej Stachowiak provided a summary of the results. Interesting reading.

I haven't been covering other W3C groups as much as I should have. I was reminded by another Tweet about a proposed SpellCheck API to check out the Web Application WG email list. In the email list, I noted a very long discussion on the status of WebSQL or whether IndexedDB has replaced it.

In my wanderings about web application land, the status of WebSQL seems to cause the most confusion. It is my understanding at this time that the WebSQL specification is no longer being maintained or pursued.

If you're a web application developer, you'll definitely want to follow the W3C Web Apps email archives. It does have an RSS feed you can subscribe to.

The W3C also kicked off a new working group, the Web Real-Time Communications Working Group, to define client-side APIs to enable Real-Time Communications in Web browsers.

For more of what's happening in the W3C, do check out Karl Dubost's weekly reviews in the W3C Blog.

Weekly Review: May 2nd ↔ WHATWG Weekly: Week ending May 16th