HTML 5

Last week in standards world was about a component model for the web and mutation events, mostly. As a reminder, there is also the Open Web Platform Weekly Summary written by Karl.

Changes to the specification

There were only two changes this week. In response to feedback the way audioTracks and videoTracks (media captioning features) work has been changed.

The second change was purely editorial. Reorganizing the rendering section of the specification. The rendering section prescribes how HTML ought to be rendered in interactive desktop user agents (i.e. browsers), up to and including the nitty gritty details of quirks mode.

Outside the WHATWG

Dimitri Glazkov (Google) shared his work on a component model for the web. Maciej Stachowiak (Apple) outlined a number of a concerns with it. It seems still in the early stages, but this will eventually allow for better control of styling form controls and creation of your own controls (i.e. reusable components).

Olli Pettay (Mozilla) put forward a proposal to replace mutation events. Everyone is in favor of replacing mutation events because of their complexity, but exactly how is still under discussion. Rafael Weinstein (Google) explained why ideally he would prefer an alternative approach using an observer for mutations. He would be happy with the proposal Olli put forward though. After a lot of discussion Boris Zbarsky (Mozilla) considers that we might need both APIs.

WHATWG mailing list

• I (Opera) suggested we reconcile document.URL and document.documentURI based on work I did for DOM Core.
• Aryeh Gregor (Google) is still working on DOM Range and reported on how he normalized author-set selections
• Aaron Colwell (Google) proposed a new way to do adaptive streaming. Rather than have an intermediate format, extend the video API with a appendData() method which can be fed raw bytes. Robert O'Callahan (Mozilla) suggests it is done via Blob URLs instead.
• Michael Nordman (Google) thinks CORS and application cache manifests need to work together.
• Ojan Vafai (Google) meanwhile drew attention to a proposal by James Kozianski (Google) to make registerProtocolHandler() easier to integrate in sites.