W3C Blog

I have been busy the last two weeks with traveling for conferences and workshop. I skipped the last weekly summary of the Open Web Platform. Let’s get that right on track and give information for the last two weeks about HTML5 and broader topics such as Web apps discussions and HTTP. The May 22 deadline for entering Last Call is approaching quickly. In two weeks, a new challenging phase of the work is starting. As a reminder we do not exit a recommendation phase but always entering the next one.

HTML Working Group Decisions

Issue-152 about multitrack resources has been closed without prejudices.

Conversations

Proposals

• Proposal for a web application descriptor
• HTMLImageElement — use of SVG within <canvas> by David Dailey
• Model-driven Views by Rafael Weinstein (Google), a design for a formalized separation between View and Model in the browser, with needs of web applications being the primary motivator.
• SpellCheck API by Hironori Bono (Google Chrome)

Announcements

• A new working group has been created on Web Real-Time Communications, check the charter.

Hot Topics

• Improving DOM Traversal and DOM XPath
• Selection events in editable content
• [File API: FileSystem] Path restrictions and case-sensitivity by Eric U (Google)
• hgroup element has been dropped from the HTML5 specification, then this change has been later on reverted. Some members think the element is confusing, others that it is still useful.
• The ongoing long topic of these last two weeks was about… HTML5 licensing issues with a survey. A summary of the results has been written by Maciej Stachowiak (Apple, HTML WG co-chair). He highlighted that this was a survey of individuals, not Member organizations, and in many cases many individuals affiliated with the same Member organization replied. Sam Ruby (IBM, HTML WG co-chair) published the results by organizations on his own blog.
• A long thread has been going on around the caret location api issue. Different participants of the group bringing new information. Jonas Sicking (Mozilla) believes it introduces user fingerprinting and that will encourage people to write canvas text authoring tools introducing more accessibility issues. Benjamin Hawkes then gave more context in a series of emails. Gervase Markham (Mozilla) reminded the list that ex-Bespin Skywriter moved away from Canvas. But then the discussion died again on May 1st. There was also a companion thread about this issue.
• Thierry Michel (W3C) has started a discussion about metadata access which has been diverted to a discussion around ePub.
• device independent title attribute support in browsers with the release of an extension by Chaals (Opera)
• Maciej shared some implementation details about VoiceOver and Safari for tooltip accessibility.
• Shelley Powers’ summary
• Privacy and HTTP intermediaries

This column is written by Karl Dubost, working in the Developer Relations & Tools at Opera Software.