Open Web Platform Weekly Summary - 2011-04-18 - 2011-04-24

Our weekly summary of the Open Web Platform. Details from HTML5 and broader topics such as Web apps discussions and HTTP. This was quite a quiet week for the 8th edition at the exception of the CSS Working Group which I could not follow properly. Feel free to chime in the comments to add information about CSS or other groups.

HTML Working Group Decisions

There was no new decision taken this week. Though the decision on ISSUE-31 from last week is still being discussed. The discussions revolves around the community practices and framweworks with regards the alt attribute.

Conversations

Proposals

• Sean Hayes (Microsoft) proposes to make <track> an element containing a <source> element to enable multi-tracks, which he withdrew later on because of the decision of the media subgroup coming with a different proposal.
• Dominique Hazaël-Massieux (W3C) proposed a new approach to HTML Media Capture. Aryeh Gregor explains some use cases.
• Israel Hilerio (Microsoft) proposed a change to the Sync API

Announcements

• May 1 is the comment deadline for the 22-Mar-2011 LCWD of the Widget Packaging & Configuration spec
• Marcos Caceres left Opera Software this week, but indicated that he is willing to continue editing the Widget specification if he can find resources for the next 6 months.
• 1st draft for Battery Status Event Specification
• Call for Participation until May 31 for SVG Open 2011.

Hot Topics

• Steve Faulkner notes the HTML working group decision that it is conforming to provide caption content for images whilst omitting the alt attribute and he is asking about implementation of title attribute by browsers vendors.
• Silvia Pfeiffer (Google) summarized the consensus by the media subgroup of the accessibility task force about the issue-152 on multitrack resources. The group decide to adopt the 4th proposal with a few modifications. A discussion started.
• There is a gigantic discussion about what to include or not include in the HTML5 Licensing survey.
• and an even bigger discussion started by Leif Halvard Silli about False aria-describedby expectations in ARIA Authoring Practices (longdesc).
• Henri Sivonen asked about overriding the MIME type in XHR2 after the request has started.
• Travis Leithead (Microsoft) sent Microsoft feedback on the Last Call Working Draft of Web Workers
• Nothing much happened on the whatwg mailing-list except a discussion about microformats, microdata, and custom data attributes and a discussion on Dynamic pseudo-classes on video/audio element to allow styling of controls
• Shelley Powers' summary

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