Open Web Platform Weekly Summary - 2011-12-12 - 2012-01-15

I’m just back from 3 weeks off. I’m restarting the Open Web Platform weekly summary with an incomplete summary of what happened in the last few weeks, but mostly things that caught my eyes. The next weeks editions will be hopefully better.

HTML5

A global translate attribute will be added to HTML5. The values are yes or no with the same inheritance policy than the lang attribute. The goal is to specify if a piece of text should or not should not be translated automatically. For example, you might have the following markup 

<p lang="en">Mr <span translate="no">Hope</span> 
is speaking at…</p>

When translating from English to French, the string “Hope” will not be translated to “Espoir” in French.

There were a lot of discussions about what are the right encodings for the Web platform. A draft, Encoding, has been started to summarized these elements.

Web Apps

Speaking to your computer to create a query and have a result in return. Controlling (commanding) your computers to do certain actions by voice. These are things that would be allowed on Web applications if there was a Speech API. A call for comments has been sent to the WebApps WG. The proposal came after the work of the W3C Incubator Group about HTML Speech. You can read the first version of a draft for an HTML Speech API.

The Shadow DOM first draft has been published. It is a method of establishing and maintaining functional boundaries between DOM subtrees and how these subtrees interact with each other within a document tree, thus enabling better functional encapsulation within DOM. Follow the discussion.

Art Barstow (Web Apps WG co-chair, Nokia) has published a list of expectations for the year 2012. It gives a good overview of the directions taken by the Web Apps WG

DOM

document.characterSet has been chosen over document.charset which was barely implemented.

CSS

Web Architecture

The TAG has published a new finding on identifying Application State trying to draw best practices with regards to the use of hash signs in URIs for example. They also published a page summarizing the issues around persistence of identifiers.

HTTP

The HTTP WG has posted new version of the HTTP 1.1bis specifications. Julian Reschke noted that It shows that we’re getting close to LC; most of the changes are minor.

Elsewhere

• Reading List – Vendor prefixes, mobile, monoculture
• How to make a Web standards proposal
• Concise XPath
• A new validation service in town
• Preliminary implementation of CSS3 features for fonts by IE

This week, the theme of Anne Van Kesteren’s report

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