Open Web Platform Weekly Summary - 2011-11-14 - 2011-11-20

This week, the Open Web Platform weekly summary is about HTML5 Tidy (yes it is back!), A few things about web apps such as storage mechanisms, and a few discussions about DOM properties. CSS has been discussing a few things including the issue of vendor extensions. And more bite sized information. Enjoy!

HTML5

Tidy, the useful piece of code that was helping you to fix your broken XHTML and HTML had not evolved. Björn Hörhmann published a patch to fix it. Dominique Hazaël-Massieux (W3C) decided to create a HTML5 tidy github project

Web Apps

There are many ways of storing information on the Web on the client side. The cookies was one of the first one, but since AppCache and Web Storage have been developed. There is a wiki page on client side database solutions documenting what are the relations between the different technologies.

There is a lot of work going on for enabling a FullScreen API.

I mentioned Web Intents last week. An introduction about Web Intents has been written by the priceless timeless.

DOM

There is a proposal for a new findAll property. Jonas Sicking (Mozilla) is asking what type findAll should return.

Anne van Kesteren (Opera) had opened a bug on Webkit bug reporting system about the deprecated document.width and document.height properties. It is fixed! The two properties have been removed from the Webkit source code. He also started a new round of discussions on how to improve the DOM

Rafael Weinstein (Chromium Team) is proposing to have a fragment of DOM being inactive but inside the page for future use. Dynamic web pages could use them during the user interaction later on. The proposal is a declarative Inert DOM (a <template> element)

CSS

Fantasai (Mozilla) is explaining how the CSS Working Group is working.

scoped stylesheets have been introduced to define a mechanism where the stylesheet would apply only in a precise context. scoped is more complicated to implement than initially thought.

Semantic Web

RDFa is the swiss army knife for injecting rich data into your Web pages. Initially designed for XHTML, the group is in the process of evolving it for HTML. There is a lot of discussion around it on how to make it easy for developers and compatible with the current Web. Sebastian Heath proposed to change a bit the consumption of RDFa to take into account id. Now a Web author needs to declare an about attribute:

<p id="item1" typeof="ex:item" about="#item1">
   <span property="item_name">An interesting item (1)</span>
 </p>

His proposal is to reduce it to:

<p id="item1" typeof="ex:item">
   <span property="rdfs:label">An interesting item (1)</span>
 </p>

which would produced the triples of information.

 <http://example.org/document1#item1> rdf:type <http://example.org/ns/item> .
 <http://example.org/document1#item1> rdfs:label "An interesting item (1)" .

Web Architecture

Vendor extensions

There are at a regular pace discussions about vendor extensions in CSS. In my daily job, I have to contact Web sites which have improper use of CSS and makes it hard to have a good Web experience for any users. So I have written a mail to explain why I disliked them: CSS vendor extension issues. Henri Sivonen (Mozilla) extended the discussion in a more general discussions on how Vendor Prefixes Are Hurting the Web. Daniel Glazman (CSS WG co-chair) doesn’t completely agree, or maybe he does, for certain parts and decided to write an answer to Henri Sivonen, which triggered another supportive post by Alex Russel (Google) on why Vendor Prefixes Are A Rousing Success.

Conclusion? The discussion is going on.

SVG

I had missed that last July, but it seems that there is a “new” quaterly publication about SVG. The first issue has 3 articles covering DOM Helper, D3.js and sensorial expressions and emotion.

HTTP

Henri Sivonen (Mozilla) landed support for HTML parsing in XMLHttpRequest in Firefox engine (Gecko). He is giving details on how he has implemented it. His implementations create a direct feedback for changing XMLHttpRequest specification. The same way Julian Reschke has implemented and tested a part of the specification about content-type rewriting. These are two of the many ways you can help specifications development.

URIs

Tools and Tutorials

• Pushing and Popping with the History API
• Latency Of HTML5 <audio> Sounds
• In defence of the pubdate attribute.

This week, the theme of Anne van Kesteren’s report is about <time> and findAll. I feel there is fatigue desire to know if it's useful in Anne’s report. He is asking for feedback.

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