HTML 5

Welcome back to "This Week in HTML 5," where I'll try to summarize the major activity in the ongoing standards process in the WHATWG and W3C HTML Working Group.

This week, there were some more refinements to microdata. r4139 changes the names of the DOM properties that reflect microdata markup. r4140 renames the content property to itemValue Since no browser has actually implemented this API yet, these changes shouldn't make any difference. Standards are like sex; one mistake, and you're stuck supporting it forever! r4141 and r4147 fix up some microdata examples, in particular this example from Gavin Carothers about marking up O'Reilly's book catalog. Hooray for real-world examples!

There were also some noteworthy changes to the <video> and <audio> API. r4131 says that setting the src attribute on one of those elements should call its load() method. r4132 removes the load event for multimedia elements, and r4133 removes the "in progress" events (loadstart, loadend, and progress) that used to be fired while the video/audio file was downloading.

Other noteworthy changes this week:

• r4097 defines fallback content for the obsolete <applet> element.
• r4098 "dramatically simplifies <script defer> and <script async> handling." [Background: bug 7792]
• r4106 makes the step argument to the <input> element's stepUp() and stepDown() methods optional.
• r4111 removes <link rel=feed>. As I documented earlier this year, rel=feed was a reasonable idea that never took off. Only one browser ever implemented it, and in a survey of 3 billion pages I could only find a single page that used it.
• r4126 lists suggested default encodings for different locales. [Background: RE: HTML5 Issue 11 (encoding detection): I18N WG response...]
• r4138 drops support for non-UTF-8 encodings in Web Workers. [Background: [whatwg] Please always use utf-8 for Web Workers]
• r4099 marks the creation of Web Applications 1.0, a super-spec that contains HTML5, pre-defined microdata vocabularies, Web Workers, Web Storage, Web Database, Server-sent Events, and Web Sockets. This marks the first time that some of those specs have been published by the WHATWG, rather than the W3C, and therefore the first time that said specs have been published under a Free-Software-compatible license. (The W3C is still deciding whether to use such a license.)

Around the web:

• An Introduction to HTML5 covers a lot of ground
• Video on the Web is the latest chapter from my upcoming book on HTML5.

Tune in next week for another exciting edition of "This Week in HTML5."