Open Web Platform Weekly Summary - 2013-02-04 - 2013-02-10

A few days late because of the W3C ebook workshop, here my delivery of the weekly Openweb Platform Summary from February 4 to 11, 2013. You can read again last week version. Your comments are helpful.

Authorization dialogs in Web APIs

"Do you authorize the browser to access your geolocation?" is a common question triggered by the geolocation API. The request is made to the user because it has privacy implications. More and more Web APIs are requesting users an authorization: pointerlock, fullscreen, WebRTC, local storage, etc.

You can imagine that with complex Web applications, it might quickly clutter the UI and the user experience. How do we solve that?

FileAPI is near features complete (LCWD)

Manipulating files for Web applications is key, either to upload on a server or just play with the file in the realm of the Web application. The introduction section of the draft has a very compelling example.

Arun has sent an email asking everyone to have a last look at the File API draft before putting it through Last Call, aka when the group considers it is features complete. Review it!

document.register and ECMAScript 6

Erik Arvidsson sent a message on how document.register is specified and why it will create issues for EcmaScript 6. The result is a very long thread following an equally long discussions in the bugzilla.

Drawing squares on a whiteboard

Yes sometimes the CSS Working Group members just like to draw squares on a whiteboard. I haven't found which meeting it refers to. Someone may help in the comments.

HTTP/2.0 in Tokyo

The HTTP Working Group met in Tokyo. Upgrade, Header Compression, Hop-By-Hop Headers, Frame size, Flow Control, Priorities are some of the topics addressed at the meeting. The HTTP2 spec is also maintained on github too.

Designing Good Web APIs

Marcos Caceres, newly elected member of the TAG, has started a thread on how do we avoid to design bad Web APIs such as the one for IndexedDB API. As Robin Berjon notes, it is not necessary easy to decipher which methods will be the right one but giving tools for Web developers to more easily use the low level APIs might be a start:

For the latter bit, I reckon it would be a good practice for groups working on low-level APIs to more or less systematically produce a library that operates at a higher level. This would not only help developers in that they could pick that up instead of the lower-level stuff, but more importantly (at least in terms of goals) it would serve to validate that the lower-level design is indeed appropriate for librarification.

Robin was also the co-author of a Web API Design Cookbook

These events hiding in the shadow

Anne van Kesteren, now Mozilla, sent an email about the relations in between events and the Shadow DOM. Instead of having a fixed list of events that are stopped, Anne (and Jonas) are proposing a flag to the dispatch algorithm. So it would be clear if the event has the right to be seen outside of the environment it started in.

CSS @supports and user preferences

CSS @supports is helpful for knowing if a specific browser supports a property but what should it do if it contradicts the user preferences? The CSS Working Group has decided that @supports is not affected by limitations imposed by UA or system

Cross-References across different resources

Being able to style references including numbering is already delicate in single pages, it is a very hard topic to solve in the context of a multi-resources document. Think for example ebooks which are multipages packaged in an ePub.

Shiny icons for the Semantic Web

Konrad has been working on a set of different icons to represent topics of the Semantic Web.

Open Annotations

Making an annotation is basically just a mechanism to say this part of this resource is related to this other part of this ressource. It put in relations things, be a photo, a text, a sound, etc. It is what we do in our books or when discussing things together. The issue is how to do that on the Web in an interoperable way. It's what the Open Annotation Community Group is trying to do.