Open Web Platform Weekly Summary - 2011-10-31 - 2011-11-06

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Last week, there was the annual W3C TPAC. The HTML Working Group met (day 1, day 2) and many other groups for discussing general issues. I introduced the Open Web Platform weekly summary and asked feedback on how to improve it or if I should drop it. I got mostly positive feedback and I will improve it in the next few weeks.

There are a lot of things to say about the fruitful meetings we had during this week. Maybe another time.

HTML5

The time element was dropped from the specification, but the community requested to be restored.

There is yet another difficult discussion on extensibility and how to handle it properly. Time to time, this topic will happen. This time, it is related to specifying arbitrary attributes for Audio-Video.

The hgroup element is not satisfying. Kornel Lesi?ski is proposing to replace it with the hsub element with a simpler content model.

(Do not copy that code in your pages.)

<body>
<h1>Title</h1>
<hsub>Subtitle</hsub>

<h1>Second Title</h1>
<div>
    <hsub>Second Subtitle 1</hsub>
    <hsub>Second Subtitle 2</hsub>
</div>
</body>

<article>
    <hsub>The Magical</hsub>
    <h1>Title</h1>
    <hsub>That Has</hsub>
    <hsub>Multiple Subtitles</hsub>
</article>

AppCache

When developping offline applications, we are using a manifest file containing the file to cache. There is a proposal to add syntax to the manifest that would to allow always request files when online, but not when offline. There is also a proposal to be less dependent on the URL and have an additional identifier to cope with minted URLs which tries to avoid caching (which IMHO is circular).

Canvas

one feature Web developers are asking for is the ability to draw DOM objects to an HTML canvas. — Robert O'Callahan, Mozilla — Drawing DOM Content To Canvas

DRM

There is a discussion brought to the HTML WG by the WebTV task force to know if there is a possibility to add a mechanism to protect content. There is no resolution yet. On this same topic, an interesting article has been published on the history of the different systems proposed in the past.

There are more than a few reasons digital rights management (DRM) has been largely unsuccessful. But the easiest way to explain to a consumer why DRM doesn’t work is to put it in terms he understands: “What happens to the music you paid for if that company changes its mind?” It was one thing when it was a theoretical question. Now it’s a historical one. — The DRM graveyard: A brief history of digital rights management in music

HTTP

A new draft has been published by James Snell for Prefer Header for HTTP. The Prefer request-header is used to indicate that particular server behaviors are preferred by the user-agent, but not required for successful completion of the request.

The version 17 of HTTPbis drafts has been published too.

Last Call Working Drafts

Tools

This week, the theme of Anne Van Kesteren’s report is mainly about <time> and <data>.

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

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