HTML 5

The debate on what to do with mutation events is still ongoing, Web IDL and the WebSocket protocol are heading towards Last Call, HTML5 still is in Last Call, and Karl is still providing an alternative view on things in the Open Web Platform Weekly Summary.

Changes to the specification

While the W3C is still working on setting up another one of its Task Forces to sort out whether schema.org should use distributed extensibility via RDFa or Microdata, Ian Hickson wrote a lengthy email addressing Microdata feedback from the last month. This resulted in numerous changes to the specification.

Web IDL

For better or worse (I personally like it) Web IDL is the language to design APIs for the web. Thanks to heycam (and Mozilla for employing him to do this) it has been moving forward again and will probably be published as W3C Last Call Working Draft soon. The significance for web developers is that every specification that defines APIs of some kind (and everything cool but CSS does these days) uses it, so knowing how it works is useful.

The WebSocket protocol

Salvatore Loreto, co-chair of the IETF group responsible for developing the WebSocket protocol, announced on their mailing list that the protocol will go for IETF Last Call today. Implementations are still all over the place. Most browser implementations are still not further than one of the input documents to the IETF group. Firefox 6 will likely ship an updated version, using a vendor prefix. Plans from other vendors are less clear. However, I would expect them all to rather rapidly adopt this as it gives such a huge advantage in terms of speed on sites that use it.

Email

• Oli Studholme thinks that the way the blockquote element is defined does not match common practice. He wrote a post called blockquote problems and solutions on it as well.
• In reply to Eric Winkelman — who expressed interest in working on a specification for metadata tracks — Ian Hickson outlined what needs to be done. His email is of interest to anyone who wants to introduce a feature on the web platform.
• The debate over whether the registerProtocolHandler() API should be augmented with a method to unregister and one to figure out if it has been registered is still ongoing. Jonas Sicking has privacy concerns with the isRegistered() part of the proposal.
• James Robinson suggested a timing API for measuring intervals to replace the pattern using Data objects that is used nowadays.
• Hugh Guiney asked for clarification on the menu and command elements.