Time for your Open Web Platform weeklysummary dose. A bit of HTML5, a bit of Web apps, a pinch of Web Architecture and HTTP and everything tied with a Web Education ribbon.

HTML5

Charles Pritchard (Jumis) is asking if the allow_popupattribute valueis ready for prime time. IE has an implementation of it and Webkit has an ongoing patch. The goal of the attribute is to allow pop up in some circumstances where it is usually not possible, such as sandboxed iframes.

The abbrattribute on thelements will be addedto HTML5 specification.

There is a proposal for the next version of HTMLto have a DOM attribute to have access to the metadata contained in images.

There is a meta perma-thread revolving along longdescattribute but also images map and accessibility. This discussion is not finished yet and let's hope people will reach a common understanding on the issue.

Web Apps

Robin Berjon proposed to add screen orientation lockto the rechartering of Web Apps WG. It is happening sometimes that an app will make sense only when the screen has a specific orientation. On the other hand, your body might have a position which is not the one perceived by the device. For example when you are reading news lying down on the side, and you screen suddenly rotates because of your position.

Should you be able to install Web Apps on your computer. Tim Berners-Lee (W3C) think so and argues for it.

Glen Shires (Google) proposes the creation of a Community Group for the Speech Javascript API.

The discussion on adding Image.toBlob()is still active . It is very similar to Canvas.toBlob(). Some people wondered if in fact it should not be more general and apply to any kind of binary streams.

Education

Chris Mills (Opera Software), who is actively involved in developing a neutral repository for Open Web documentationacross platforms, has outlined how the group will move forward . You can join the Web Education Community Group.

HTTP

The discussion about the rechartering of HTTP WG is still going on for working on the new generation of HTTP. There is a lot of input on what are the good strategies for the future. Some people share their opinions about the SPDY experiment . Pretty sure that the IETF WG F2F in Paris(March 25-30, 2012) will be quite active. I will not be there unfortunately.

Web Architecture

Larry Masinter (Adobe) sent a proposal for working on MIME and the Web. The discussion addresses the issues around registries which come quite often. Basically how do we maintain the balance in between the flexibility of the open Web and a control set of values avoiding fragmentation.

Robin Berjon proposed a new draft about the work on API Minimization. He is looking for feedback.

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

At this year’s 21th International World Wide Web Conference – WWW2012, W3C organizes a W3C tutorial track over two days, on Monday 16 and Tuesday 17 April 2012.

Half-day tutorials from leading experts will be available to researchers and developers seeking to pick up new skills on the latest developments on W3C Web standards.

One of these W3C tutorials will be about “ Developing Mobile Web Applications” and will be taught by Dominique Hazaël-Massieux (W3C Mobile Web Activity Lead) and Frances de Waal ( W3DevCampus trainer for the Mobile Web and Application Best Practices online training course). The tutorial informations are summarized below:

• W3C tutorial on “Developing Mobile Web Applications”
• by Frances de Wall and Dominique Hazaël-Massieux
• on Tuesday April 17th – morning
• at the Lyon Convention Centre, Lyon, France
• Abstract: Participants to the tutorial will learn how to build applications for mobile devices using Web technologies. We will first focus on what makes it different to use the Web on mobile devices compared to computers: the specific constraints of these devices, as well as their increasing specific advantages. The tutorial will then look at how to exploit all the specificities of the mobile user experience, via JavaScript APIs, touch interactions, camera integration, etc.
• Please register to this tutorial before 13 February to get an early bird rate!

Part of the goals of our MobiWebApp project is to help more European SMEs get involved in the standardization work around Web applications on mobile devices.

As a result, we’ve been pushing for the adoption of a new W3C Membership level targeted at small enterprises, which W3C just announced is now available to any company with less than 10 employees, less than 2.25M Euros of gross revenues and has never been a W3C Member before.

The fee for most Europe-based companies is at 1950€ (as can be verified in the W3C fees calculator), making it a great opportunity for small business that would like to help shape the future standards of the Web. Don’t miss it!

An initial set of new tests related to bidirectional text support in HTML5 have been added to the Internationalization test suite. More tests will follow shortly.

These tests look at support for the new bdi element, and at behavior associated with newlines.

The tests are published in the i18n-html5 test suite in the W3C Test Harness as well as being accessible in the usual Internationalization Activity format.

A page summarizing the latest resultsis available.

Ukrainian:

Обслуговування HTML та XHTML(Serving HTML & XHTML)

Коли слід використовувати узгодження мови(When to use language negotiation)

Можливості відображення(Display capabilities)

Формати дати(Date formats)

Дати та час(Dates and Time)

Russian:

Обслуживание HTML и XHTML(Serving HTML & XHTML)

Когда следует использовать language negotiation (согласование языка)(When to use language negotiation)

Возможности отображения(Display capabilities)

Формати даты(Date formats)

Даты и время(Dates and Time)

These articles were translated thanks to Alexandr Shlapak.

We are expecting talks from Microsoft, Wikimedia, Mozilla, Joomla, the European Commission and CNGL representatives at the MultilingualWeb workshop in Luxembourg, and we will be filling the remaining slots soon. The deadline for submission of talk proposals is 10th February, so if you want to speak at the event please registeras soon as possible. You can submit your proposal on the registration form.

We also recently announced that Ivan Herman , Semantic Web Activity Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C), will deliver the keynote talk.

This fourth MultilingualWeb workshopwill be held in Luxembourg, hosted by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission.

The MultilingualWeb project is looking at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the Web multilingually. The project aims to raise the visibility of existing best practices and standards and identify gaps, with a view to helping content creators, localizers, tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web.

Participation is free. We welcome participation from both speakers and non-speaking attendees. For more information and to register, see the Call for Participation.

The Unicode Consortium has announced the release of Version 6.1 of the Unicode Standard, continuing Unicode’s long-term commitment to support the full diversity of languages around the world. This latest version adds characters to support additional languages of China, other Asian countries, and Africa. It also addresses educational needs in the Arabic-speaking world. A total of 732 new characters have been added.

This version of the Standard also brings technical improvements to support implementers. Improved changes to property values and their aliases mean that properties now have easy-to-specify labels. The new labels combined with a new script extensions property means that regular expressions can be more straightforward and are easier to validate.

Over 200 new Standardized Variants have been added for emoji characters, allowing implementations to distinguish preferred display styles between text and emoji styles. For example:

Among the notable property changes and additions in Unicode 6.1 are two new line break property values, which improve the line-breaking behavior of Hebrew and Japanese text. Segmentation behavior was also improved for Thai, Lao, and similar languages.

Two other important Unicode specifications are maintained in synchrony with the Unicode Standard, and have updates for Version 6.1. These will be finalized in February:

UTS #10, Unicode Collation Algorithm
UTS #46, Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing

This Open Web Platform weekly has quite a lot of stuff. Among the important things being discussed for the last week, Mark Notthingham announced that there is a will to recharter the HTTP WG for working on HTTP 2.0. The thread on the HTTP WG mailing list has been huge.

The indexedDB specification doesn't explain how to generate keys. Jonas Sicking (Mozilla) explained how indexedDB keys were generated in Firefox.

Arun Ranganathan (Mozilla) has published a new Editor's draft of the File API for review. ( Full Thread ) and Cameron McCormack (Mozilla) has published a version of WebIDL for Last Call . Vincent Scheib (Google) announced that the Mouse Lock specification has been moved and renamed Pointer Lock.

Following a blog post by Tobie Langel (Facebook) about the mess of manifests for Web apps (widgets, extensions, etc.), Robin Berjon is asking if the Web Apps WG should work on aligning those to a common format . We have to note that there was a normative format already definedin the widget specification, but which was not followed by all implementers.

will HTTP verbs LINKand UNLINKbe resurected, it is what James Snell is proposingwith a few use cases.

Another go is being done at the recurring topic about responsive images.

Ilya Sherman (Chromium) is proposing to add an autocompleteattribute to the inputelement . The proposal is documented on the wiki.

A request for a new commentelement triggered a very long answer by Ian Hickson (Google) on the nature of the articleelement.

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

The latest release of the Open Web Platform weeklyis 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 APIwould 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 audioelement is removed from the DOM while playing . The specification definesit 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 templatesspecifications. 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 reportis 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.