HTML WG Agenda/Issues

This list of issues is largely obsolete in favor of tracker's agenda planning view plus the two alternating teleconference reservations:

Collaboration Tools and Tips

ZakimDemo: speaker queue, muting
MeetingRecords, RRSAgent. local IRC conventions such as DanC: (for attribution) vs DanC, (for direct address).

See also MailingLists for email conventions, updated public-html archive page with instructions on how to subscribe/unsubscribe, HTML WG participation FAQ.

Pending Issues, Tasks

Issue tracking
- trying out Tracker for HTML WG issue tracking/triage Dan Connolly (Monday, 29 October)
Name for XHTML serialization
- XHTML 2 WG discussion 20 Jun
  We owe a reply; the 1st WD of our spec will be an implicit reply; courtesy suggests an explicit reply as well.
- 16 Aug: ACTION: ChrisW discuss XHTML name coordination with XHTML 2 WG in the Hypertext CG [DONE]
- Re: The only name for the xml serialisation of html5 Dan Connolly
ARIAIntegration
- ARIA in HTML -- a new FAQ, and a proposal Aaron M Leventhal (Thursday, 20 September)
- ARIA Proposal Simon Pieters Wed, 26 Sep 2007
- Meeting with SVG, XHTML, WAI people to move forward on ARIA as a cross cutting technology Richard Schwerdtfeger (Wednesday, 17 October)
- ARIA States and Properties Meeting Richard Schwerdtfeger (Wednesday, 24 October)
table headers
We owe a reply to the 6 Jun message from the WAI PF WG. The 1st WD of our spec will be an implicit reply; courtesy suggests an explicit reply as well. Suggestions? IssueTableHeaders seems to be the relevant wiki topic.
Forms Taskforce update
Note Charter Proposal Anne van Kesteren (Tuesday, 2 October).

for reference: DBWG group for the task force
section 15. SMIL 3.0 State in the 13 July 2007 last call working draft; compare with Offline Web Apps Ian Hickson (Friday, 24 August)
- [SMIL30 LC Comment] Please use only one namespace Simon Pieters 31 Aug 2007
review of XHTML Basic 1.1?
survey of top web sites
progress: I have completed one-third. Sean Fraser, July 16, 2007. 24 Apr threaddidn't seem to show much.
candidate requirement: parsing to tree-shaped Dom see 21 Mar IRC discussion starting 18:19 (in what timezone?), including test case sketches in blog entries such as Tag Soup: How UAs handle <x> <y> </x> </y> of 2002-11-21
candidate requirement: market threshold:
at one point the charter did say a total 10%, which was reviewed by the Webkit team, and everyone involved agreed was better.
Ian Hickson 15 Mar 2007 14:27:30 +0000

See also webkit blog discussion. The text from that version of the charter is:

The HTML Working Group's work will be considered a success if there are multiple independent complete and interoperable implementations of its deliverable that are widely used (with a total market share, measured by at least two widely recognized reporting organizations, of 10% or more of the Web browser market).

Changing the charter at this point is expensive, but that requirement is perhaps worth adopting by WG decision.
conflict with principle of modularity: HTML parsing, <script>, and document.write() test/issue details? Dan Connolly (Thursday, 15 March)
See also examples/test in Dailey 20 Mar
Hixie replies that "This is a known, long-standing bug in Opera." Where is it known? Is it acknowledged by Opera?
interoperability of object: Note <object> attributes Ian Hickson (Thursday, 12 April) .
Today, <object> is probably the least interoperable element in HTML.
Asbjørn Ulsberg 19 Mar 2007 22:04:32 +0100

Indeed, object was standardized prematurely (lesson learned from HTML 4 WG chairing, let's hope). Test cases and story telling (use cases)...
candidate requirement re editing:
there should I think be a requirement in the specification that implementors provide a way to manually add and modify markup in the edited text, so that there is always the opportunity to add or modify information in a way that is not supported by the editor.
Laurens Holst
Mon, 19 Mar 2007 06:45:50 +0900

Test case candidates

Note HtmlTestMaterials

These are claims about interoperability problems that I'd like to see explored in the form of test cases:

IE maps unknown start and end tags to empty elements; Other browsers assume unknown start tags are for non-empty elements with an inline content model
attributes do not need enclosing quote marks; the XML /> syntax for empty elements is ignored even if attributes are enclosed in quote marks
Gecko coerces unknown tags to upper case, Opera doesn't
browser varations in treatment of XML namespaces with DOM-based work arounds using scripts
IE will in some cases parse to a lattice not a tree
behavior for multiple definitions of same ID value

See van Kesteren 14 Mar for pointers to some more test materials; Graham replies with a pointer to some encoding tests.

Hunt 20 Mar 2007 takes issue with a number of XHTML 2 features; a reply from Holst makes a number of compatibility claims. It would be useful to see these subtantiated by test cases.

Admin TODOs

Chair solicits advice on these, but doesn't delegate them to WG decision.

Announcement mailing list, RSS feeds
- ACTION: DanC to set up an announcement mailing list, noodling with chaals
  progress: public-html-wg-announce
- WITHDRAWN: MikeSmith to write up a summary of changes for last [period of time], description of where changes go
Note also: public-html-comments, following msg from Connolly 25 Jun

Note also: Mike Smith's planet HTML 5, HTML category int the W3C Q&A blog
Wiki Migration
Note Connolly's msg of 15 Aug

Toward Cost-effective Teleconferences

A chair's job is to see that each persons time is well spent. Meeting time is very valuable; for example, with 12 people in a meeting, five minutes is one person-hour. Good records preserve the value of the time spent in meetings.

Meeting experts are unanimous on this point: even with the ubiquitous tools of organization and sharing ideas -- whiteboards, flip charts, Post-it notes -- the capacity for misunderstanding is unlimited. Which is another reason companies turn to computer technology. The best way to avoid that misunderstanding is to convert from "meeting" to "doing" -- where the "doing" focuses on the creation of shared documents that lead to action.

The Seven Sins of Deadly Meetings, By: Eric Matson, Fast Company April/May 1996, Page 122

See also: the MidwestWeeklyAgenda pattern in the ESW Wiki, along with MeetingRecords and ActionItems.

Ian Hickson's message of 27 March requests the following information:

What problem the meeting is supposed to be fixing

Why e-mail has failed to solve the issue, why a meeting is expected to solve the problem better

Who should call in

What people should read as briefing material before the call

What results from the meeting would result in the meeting being considered a success

An 18 April message clarifies that this request regards each agendum.

Meanwhile, of course, the teleconference medium is tangibly different from email in a number of ways. For example, in the teleconference survey, we find comments such as:

The current tidal wave of comments backwards and forwards appear to make little progress, is unfocused, and contains many comments that are treated as correct just because nobody bothers to refute them.

Bob Hopgood

A teleconference allows for straw polls and such to be taken in seconds, where they take days or weeks by email.

Liaisons

IETF

presentation to IETF in Chicago July 22-27?
text/html mime type RFC update?
HTTP Content-Type overlap: review of content type rules by IETF/HTTP community Dan Connolly (Friday, 17 August)

Mobile BP

please reivew mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 Dan Connolly (Thursday, 7 June)
lc tracker?
last call: W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0, W3C Working Draft 25 May 2007; comments due 22 June 2007

WHATWG

pending invitation to participate in HTML5 Hickson 8 March

TAG

there are some open TAG issues, esp TagSoupIntegration-54; e.g. XHTML modularization and substitution groups (tag issue XMLVersioning-41, TagSoupIntegration-54, RDFinXHTML-35)

how to support validation/checking with extensions
Versioning and html[5] from Chris Wilson 12 April; follow-up from Henri Sivonen with test case.
should CSS, HTML, etc. documents bear version information? Connolly to www-tag 30 Mar 2007
Distributed Extensibility Sam Ruby (Thursday, 2 August)
People often author content which is inserted into a larger context. Blogs, wikis, comments, are but a few examples. Requiring the entire page to be xml well formed, and requiring that none of the page be displayed if there is any well formedness errors, is a non-starter for most sites. I'd love to see the day when svg could be copy/pasted into MySpace and MathML copy/pasted into Facebook, and have it "just work".

Sam Ruby (Sunday, 14 October)

XHTML 2 WG

use of /1999/xhtml namespace. Note Holst 02 Jun 2005 and PR#7808
Last call comments on XHTML Role Attribute Module Simon Pieters 26 Oct 2007
input on name for XML serialization of HTML 5? Dan Connolly (Thursday, 14 June), XHTML 2 WG minutes 20 Jun (noted 21 Jun by Kosek), Re: Choosing name for XML serialization Connolly 25 Jun.

Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

Re: headers attribute debate Al Gilman (Wednesday, 6 June); response pending. note IssueTableHeaders, TableAccessibility
I gather accessibility issues have been raised around canvas; details, anyone? example/test sketch?

RF video codec XG?

Your argument makes a good case for a standardization effort. If there are two other member organizations that support it, that's sufficient to start an incubator group.

By making your argument here, you're asking me chair a discussion of which video codec is right for the web. I'm nearly overwhelmed by the breadth of the discussion topics already in our scope without adding this one.

If there were consensus to add this to our charter, I would consider putting together a proposal to the W3C membership to do so. But opinions are clearly divided, so I suggest we leave it out of scope for this Working Group.

Connolly 6 Apr

At this point,
 > WHATWG folks want Theora.

Yes, it's a likable format.

Lie 19 Mar 2007 19:53:18 +0100

See also DIRAC. Video codecs are out of scope for the HTML WG; Please consider starting an XG.

WebAPI WG

XHR spec cites HTML charset rules. @@link to comment

GRDDL WG

let's keep metadata profiles (head/@profile) in HTML for use in GRDDL etc. (Monday, 9 July) Connolly