Open Web Platform Weekly Summary - 2012-01-16 - 2012-01-22

The latest release of the Open Web Platform weekly is mostly about Web Apps WG.

The group in charge of WebSocket Protocol is rechartering. They specifically want to define extension to WebSocket including

1. to define a per-frame compression extension to improve the bandwidth usage.
2. Define a multiplexing extension to improve the scalability of the WebSocket protocol
3. Define timeout-handling capabilities to reduce the chattiness of the protocol

Jonas Sicking (Mozilla) in Colliding FileWriters in File Writer API is wondering about the opportunitiy of having a FileWriter.close() if multiple pages create a FileWriter for the same FileEntry at the same time. (full thread). The File Writer API would allow Web applications to write files on the disk. That could become very handy by helping users to keep the control of their data using a distant Web services to process data, but keeping all data locally.

Charles Pritchard (Jumis) asked what is happening when the audio element is removed from the DOM while playing. The specification defines it and implementations follow the specification with very small differences.

Dimitri Glazkov (Google) is proposing to augment the HTML parser to recognize new elements. It might be needed by the Shadow DOM and HTML templates specifications. Though Henri Sivonen (Mozilla) is not convinced it is worth the cost of modifying the algorithm.

This week, the theme of Anne Van Kesteren's report is about… the new year and treats of the Web Platform.

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