I will be taking the remainder of the month off and as nobody has volunteered thus far, WHATWG Weekly is unlikely to be updated in January. All the more reason to follow email and IRC.

Since last time the toBlob() method of the canvas element has been updated in revisions 6879 and 6880 to make sure it honors the same-origin policy (for exposure of image data) and handles the empty grid.

In the land of ECMAScript a proposal was made to avoid versioning by David Herman, which if successful will keep ECMAScript simple and more in line with other languages used on the web.

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.

Better autocomplete

Overnight a complete proposal for better autocomplete appeared on the WHATWG Wiki, apparently already experimentally implemented in Chrome (prefixed). It proposes a new autocompletetype attribute that takes values such as birthday and cc-number. The advantage over ECML is that changes only need to happen on the frontend. The backend can stay the same.

File API

Adrian Bateman proposed to remove the readAsBinaryString() method from the File API standard. Everyone else seems to be on board so it will likely go away soon. Thanks to ArrayBuffer the method became useless.

He also proposed a new argument for createObjectURL() to indicate the resource will only be used once and can then be garbage collected.

Stream API

Sort of analogous to Blob objects a new Stream object has been proposed by Microsoft and it comes with a bunch of friends too so you can interact with it. Combined with XMLHttpRequest this will allow streaming data to the server or downloading large amounts of data and processing it as it comes in.

Encoding problem

In response to Faruk Ateş' plea for defaulting to UTF-8, David Baron explained the platform encoding problem. The problem is that currently the default encoding varies per user (depending on locale primarily) and sites rely on locale-specific default encodings. Such sites visited by a user using a Dutch computer and a user using a Chinese computer, will render differently. In particular, their byte streams will be decoded using a different encoding. The implication is that the web is less global than it should be. How exactly we are to overcome the platform encoding problem, without everyone explicitly opting in to an encoding using <meta charset=utf-8> (please do so if you are a web developer), is still unclear. Ideas welcome!

WebVTT

Revision 6837 made it possible for WebVTT to be published as a standalone Living Standard. It will primarily be developed by the Web Media Text Tracks Community Group on the public-texttracks@w3.org mailing list. WebVTT is the platform's captioning and subtitle format (for HTML video) and its development can be tracked on Twitter via @webvtt.

Video conferencing

The same revision that let WebVTT be published as standalone document, removed everything related to peer-to-peer connections and video conferencing. The W3C Web Real-Time Communications Working Group forked our work in WebRTC 1.0: Real-time Communication Between Browsers and we (the WHATWG) are okay with them working on it instead.

Miscellaneous

My colleague Karl has been blogging again on the W3C Blog, read his summaries from the weeks of November 14 and November 21.

Yours truly added native JSON support to XMLHttpRequest. Just set responseType to "json" and response will give you a JSON-decoded object once fetching is done.

HTML is big, so follow what interests you!

Ian Hickson announced a new system on the mailing list that allows people to subscribe to specific sub-topics in the HTML specification, such as <canvas> or the HTML Syntax and Parsing sections. You can do so right from the specification itself. If you are interested in topics that are not yet a sub-topic, please let us know.

XMLHttpRequest

XMLHttpRequest is now developed as a single specification again, to reduce confusion, and make it easier for everyone to look at the same copy. Some subtle changes have been made as well, such as allowing responseType to be set before invoking open(), and restrictions on synchronous usage outside a worker context are planned. Synchronous in the main thread is bad, and you will not find any new XMLHttpRequest goodness there real soon now.

Emails

Because not everyone writes sites in a way that prevents future specifications from breaking them, Cameron McCormack has thought up a proposal that should help to make API design less restrictive. Karl Dubost pointed out that using GET when you mean POST is a bad idea.

Ryosuke Niwa is still working on the UndoManager and DOM Transaction specification and posted about a re-introduced AutomaticDOMTransaction interface. He also announced an updated draft and summarized the changes thus far.

<time> police

Revision 6827 introduced the new time element. The one that also allows for years, yearless dates, durations, and so on. It is based on extensive research by Tantek Çelik. That same Tantek is now battling the <time> police HTML WG co-chairs to get everything synchronized again. I am not privy of what is going on, as it happens behind closed doors.

find() and findAll()

Half a decade later we finally might get the short names for querySelector() that we actually wanted. Or not, it remains to be seen how compatible they are. In any event, Jonas Sicking started a thread on findAll()'s return value. An ECMAScript Array with some extra features.

WHATWG email

Ojan Vafai proposed a tabindexscope attribute for better control of tabbing behavior in a widget that is part of larger application. A little before James Graham suggested constructors for HTML elements. new HTMLButtonElement(), you name it. Michael A. Puls II briefly explains the difference between plugins and native support when it comes to attributes. Gavin Kistner found an oversight in data URL origin determination due to added support for CORS.

Kinuko Yasuda started a long thread on how drag-and-drop of folders is to be supported in the platform. Jonas Sicking suggested nothing much new is needed for that, though Glenn Maynard foresees problems reusing the current API. And on it goes.

Rafael Weinstein suggested a template element that would have special parsing behavior. Basically making the nested elements not do anything (e.g. not fetch images, execute scripts).

Last week the W3C held its yearly TPAC conference. See Unorganization for an impression of the event written by me. Karl wrote down some technical details. What follows is my brief technical takeaway.

<time> and again

The time element comes back and its new design will be heavily influenced by the research done on the Time element wiki page. In short, the API will be removed, and support for years, months, birthdays lacking a year, and durations will be added.

The remainder of the discussions in the HTML WG were by and large non-technical (or rabbitholing about the longdesc attribute), leading yours truly to suggest that maybe we should call it a day and move on to the next thing.

Components

Several meetings were had on components (formerly XBL) trying to get a sense of where we should be heading. Although not everyone could be present at every meeting, some progress was made. Components with a public API will likely be required to inherit from a single element type and components will always be bound in an asynchronous manner to ensure developers will not rely on them being synchronously bound.

Mutations

The new mutations model for the web was hashed out among the people working on it and the other day I put the mutations IDL in DOM4 as a start for the new standard.

Living Standards

It was my impression that people operating at various levels of the W3C were more open for change. To improve standards development similarly to what we are trying to do within the WHATWG. It remains to be seen what comes out of it, but it encouraging to see that this is a topic of conversation, with Tim-Berners Lee and Jeff Jaffe (W3C CEO) actively participating.

W3C License

Despite that all the text of the W3C HTML5 is available under a license that permits forking (namely the WHATWG text), the W3C Members keep denying the W3C HTML WG’s desire for a license that allows forking. People were puzzled.

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.

Fullscreen

The big news last week was renewed activity on Gecko:FullScreenAPI, a proposal by Robert O'Callahan to make fullscreen work for the platform. Yours truly made an initial attempt at formalizing it in terms of the DOM and HTML as Fullscreen.

The details of Fullscreen are currently being discussed on the WHATWG mailing list and IRC channel. As a reminder, both are open for anyone to join.

HTML standard

In revision 6657 Ian Hickson removed the text/html-sandboxed MIME type from the HTML standard. The goal of the MIME type was to allow untrusted content to be hosted on the same origin as trusted content. However, given that older versions of Internet Explorer treat content with the text/html-sandboxed MIME type as content with a text/html MIME type instead of as downloadable content, the text/html-sandboxed MIME type did not meet its design goals.

Revision 6668 introduces the ability for the itemtype attribute to take more than one value. This makes it easier to mark up items in Microdata that share a vocabulary.

Bindings

On the WebApps WG mailing list Ian Hickson outlined his current views on bindings. In particular the separation between bindings that expose an API (permanent bindings) and bindings that are stylistic (decorator bindings). Meanwhile Roland Steiner has updated the Component Model Discussion wiki page with the open issues, giving a good overview over where we are at this point.