Open Web Platform Weekly Summary - 2011-04-11 - 2011-04-17

Our weekly summary of the Open Web Platform. Details from HTML5 and broader topics such as Web apps discussions and HTTP. It is the 7th edition and I still have to learn how to publish this a little bit more in advance.

HTML Working Group Decisions

border attribute on table element - ISSUE-155

There was a time when the only solution to have or remove lines representing the table cells was to set a border attribute. Since then, we can easily set those with CSS properties. That said should the attribute still be conforming? It has been decided to adopt the change proposal to enable all users to distinguish the cells of a table. cellpadding and cellspacing have not been addressed and if people feel that it should be, they will should open a separate issue. Reopening this issue would require to identify a substantial number of Non-CSS UAs, syndication systems, or editors that do draw borders on HTML tables by default and pages which depends on this behavior.

leif halvard silli considers that the subsequent edits where not conform to the decision, and found out later additional information, and after objecting, finally withdrew it.

prose for img element - ISSUE-31

There was an issue about the prose used for img element in the specification. It has been decided. The final adopted text is

An img element represents an image.

The image given by the src attribute is the embedded content; the value of the alt attribute provides equivalent content for those who cannot process images or who have image loading disabled.

accessibility for img element - ISSUE-31, ISSUE-80

There has been a very complex debate around validity, title, aria-labelledby attributes usage. There is currently more than one way to give explicit information about images, etc. Then questions arised around the right combination of features such as "should it be permitted to omit alt when role=presentation is specified?" or "to omit alt when the generator mechanism is present?" The decision gives a long summary of the issues at stake. Read it. The summary is:

• The presence of aria-labelledby does not make missing alt conforming.
• The presence of role=presentation does not make missing alt conforming.
• The presence of <meta name="generator"> makes missing alt conforming.
• Use of private communications does not, in itself, make missing alt conforming.
• The presence of title makes missing alt conforming.
• The presence of figcaption makes missing alt conforming.

Steve Faulkner formally objected on having conformance when title is specified and alt is missing (recorded) and also on the fact that the HTML5 Last Call would have different normative decisions than WCAG 2.0. There also discussion on the capabilities of CMS or browsers with regards to the alt attribute.

Conversations

Proposals

• Cameron Heavon-Jones makes a proposal for extending the attribute values for forms on input to be able to set the HTTP client headers. Read Authentication Forms. A bug has been opened.
• summary and details elements' specification by Tomasz Jamroszczak
• Proposing <canvas>.toBlob(contentType) by Kyle Huey
• Canvas.getContext error handling by Glenn Maynard

Announcements

• Bruce Lawson (Opera) has created a list of people to follow on twitter for their frequent mentions of topics surrounding HTML5.
• HTTP Working Group published new drafts for HTTP bis
• Request for Comments for the March 10 Last Call Working Draft of Server-sent Events and Web Workers. send them to the following list by 21 April 2011.
• W3C Public Newsletter with the last published specifications.

Hot Topics

• The discussion about access on media/plugin metadata is very active
• Shelley Powers has published WHATWG Weekly: WHATWG goes Native!.
• Steve Faulkner disagrees with some edits made in the specification around ARIA mappings, then Ian Hickson (Google, HTML5 Editor) agreed that he misunderstood the issue.
• Boris Zbarsky (Mozilla) noted Browser inconsistencies in implementing name getters on forms and form element collections
• Rich Schwerdtfeger (IBM) started a discussion about Canvas API accessibility.
• Willy Tarreau explained about dirty and unreliable hacks to provide proxy authentication in enterprise in Talking HTTPS to proxies
• The discussion on WebSQL and friends continues.
• FileWriter and read-only files
• BlobBuilder.getBlob should clear the BlobBuilder
• Jonas Sicking (Mozilla) started a long thread about File.slice bug in FileAPI specification.
• Support for matchesSelector()
• Result of calling MultipleReads on FileReader
• Decimal comma in numeric input by Jukka K. Korpela

This column is written by Karl Dubost, working in the Developer Relations & Tools at Opera Software.