W3C Blog

The weekly summary of the Open Web Platform is out. There was a few giant threads, be prepared to mutate any opinions about these events. Read also Anne van Kesteren's report.

HTML5 is still in Last Call.

Conversations

Proposals

• Maciej Stachowiak (Apple) unsatisfied with the discussion on Shadow DOM API has started a new thread about Component Models and Encapsulation

• Anne van Kesteren (Opera) proposed to publish From-Origin as a first public WD but there were a few comments from Brad Hill (eBay) about security, and from Björn Höhrmann

• Aaron Colwell (Google) is proposing to extend HTML5 video for adaptive streaming.

• Anne van Kesteren (Opera) has proposed to reconcile document.URL and document.documentURI

Announcements

• Call to publish WebIDL as a Last Call Working Draft.

• Call to publish Widget Packaging and XML Configuration as a Proposed Recommendation. You can read the implementation report for 4 products.

Hot Topics

• The discussion on immediate (Canvas) and retained (SVG) mode graphics is still going on. Kimberly Blessing (Comcast) reminds us that there is a big interest for Canvas from set-top boxes implementers. Some interesting questions about accessibility led Doug Schepers to write Retain Accessibility Immediately. A more focused discussion on solving concrete cases would help. Right now, it is often a meta discussion about accessibility and graphics mode. This ties to discussions such as the Javascript PDF viewer currently in development at Mozilla. Matt May (Adobe) gave a list of Javascript projects using canvas creating accessibility issues.

• Mutation events replacement is the other big discussion of the week. First of all, lets’s go back to the DOM Level 2 Event Model specification published in 2000. The specification says: Mutation Events The mutation event module is designed to allow notification of any changes to the structure of a document, including attr and text modifications. Olli Pettay (Mozilla) mentioned that there was a patch for Gecko implementing a variant of a proposal by Jonas Sicking in 2009. Sergey Ilinsky (Ample SDK implementer) in June 2009 asked for Mutation events use cases. There is another giant thread about Mutation Events on the DOM mailing list that took place in June 2009 and we can find traces in March 2009.

• Some servers are unable to deal with empty filename parameter in XHR, Anne Van Kesteren (Opera) added a blob for File objects in this case.

• James Kozianski (Google) proposed in the past to add to the registerProtocolHandler specification the two functions: isRegistered() and unregisterProtocolHandler(). Ojab Vafai (Google) is wondering if the proposal makes sense. Timeless disagrees with the benefit of this feature for users. Some people proposed to use the notifications model but there is a balance to maintain in terms of features when it comes to user agreement interacting with Web applications.

• Discussion on AppCache. The discussion seems to mix understanding about what is HTTP and AppCache with a bit of user interactions.

• Should we have a specific HTTP Status code for HTTP headers which are too big? It raised the question of what is happening in the wild? What the servers and clients do with big HTTP headers?

• Mark Nottingham proposed to clarify the 1xx response semantics in HTTP.

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