HTML 5

James Hawkins proposed the intent element in a way that brings back memories of HTML4. Happy to be reminded we are over SGML now. This is the WHATWG Weekly.

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.