Shawn Medero » w3c

Daily Brief, February 12th 2010, Weekend Edition

Shawn Medero — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:41:52 +0000

Somedays, what is actually going on with progress in the W3C’s HTML WG, with respect to HTML5, is anyone’s guess
Adobe’s Flash player 10.1 supports a private browsing mode. For those unaware, like your web browser, Flash has cookies too
Seattle’s Saltchuk Resources has developed a hybrid tug boat
Ithaca’s Gimme! Coffee composted roughly 24 tons in 2009. [Read about how it happens and what the end product is][4a]
Director and writer John Hughes’s son have uncovered roughly 300 notebooks of their father’s notes
Aaron Schwartz muses on concepts of “Open Government” and “Transparency” in politics
Captain America feels out of touch with the Tea Party

Daily Brief, February 6th 2010, Weekend Edition

Shawn Medero — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:13:55 +0000

Joanna Smith Rakoff describes her experience as an assistant at Harold Ober Associates, JD. Salinger’s publisher. Ultimately one of her roles ended up being a gatekeeper of Salinger’s personal life by replying to the many letters addressed to the author.
Opera 10.5 snapshot build 9240 re-adds support for the W3C Geolocation API, reenables Opera Unite and Spell checking, and (via site-patching) adds support for Google Wave.
The Guardian’s new Zeitgeist is a “what’s popular right now on our site” page presented visually as a heat-map. The Guardian blog has an entry up describing with the behind-the-scenes introduction.
William J. Rapaport, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Buffalo, provides a history of the sentence “Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.” This is the sort thing that trips up folks working on any sort of natural language processing disambiguation task.
Google Apps is phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 in 2010.
Finally, if you still haven’t made time for it, Obama’s appearance at a Republican Retreat in Baltimore is one of the more fascinating moments in U.S. Presidential history. This sort of “question time” between elected head of state and elected representatives is apparently quite common in other countries.

HTML5’s Section Element? Try HTML 1.0

Shawn Medero — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:43:31 +0000

I was reading through an archive email thread with the subject of “still no DTD, huh?”. It is mostly Dan Connolly and Tim Berners-Lee discussing dtds and some bugs in the NeXT editor that generated HTML, including everyone’s favorite “quoted attribute values.” People have long blamed Internet Explorer for allowing such loose HTML syntax, but it really goes back much further than that.

The more interesting content of these emails centers around the discussion of elements such as

, , and their descriptions/use match pretty closely to what we have in HTML5 today.

Dan Connolly provides an example of the intended use of these elements:




foo

   

       header 


      paragraph associated with above header

      

       header 


      stuff under H2

Tim replies to this example with:

YEs, sections appeal to me too. Especially when making big HTML files out of lots of little ones. The effect of
..
would be to demote all headings by one inside the section. I would be inclined then to have simpky a tag which would be equivalent to H0 and map onto H1 within a section, or Hn within n sections. The SGML parser can’t generate this stuff, but the editors could derive it from the style information. We would have to introduce
early on to get a transistion period. Then in HTML3 we would declare H2 etc obsolete.

If you look in the comments of the original HTML DTD, there’s even a place for these tags

It is an fun look at what might have been…

Google Proposes Method of Crawling AJAX-Delivered Content

Shawn Medero — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:28:08 +0000

I’m catching up on my feeds in Google Reader, when I notice this piece from Google’s Webmaster blog titled “A proposal for making AJAX crawlable”.

First, let’s come to understanding about how fragment identifiers are currently being used on the web, prepared for the W3C Tag by Google’s T.V. Raman.

Now back to the Google Webmaster blog proposal:

In summary, starting with a stateful URL such as
http://example.com/dictionary.html#AJAX , it could be available to both crawlers and users as
http://example.com/dictionary.html#!AJAX which could be crawled as
http://example.com/dictionary.html?escaped_fragment=AJAX which in turn would be shown to users and accessed as
http://example.com/dictionary.html#!AJAX

0_o

I’m sure the SEO folks love this proposal but it seems like there are larger Web Architecture issues here that this proposal violates.

Microsoft Feedback on HTML 5

Shawn Medero — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:48:45 +0000

Dear reader, if you had any hope HTML 5 would make it to last call by October 2009 then this email to the HTML WG from the Microsoft IE team will conveniently take you back to reality.

Summary

I tried to summarize Microsoft’s response in a few witty lines, but I couldn’t do it. Instead I ended up with this mess of ideas that I’ve left below.

New Elements

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team isn’t keen on implementing some of HTML 5’s new elements as currently spec’d:

Their reasoning for push back generally suggest that the elements are unnecessary, handled fine by a scripting library, or too underspecified to be interoperably implemented, though it is worth reading the entire email to understand their issues with each piece.

I will happily concede that adding

and

seem somewhat unnecessary if they don’t provide any additional UA or DOM features. On the flip side, as someone who regularly uses screen-scraping I can see a lot of potential in having these elements but suspect they won’t be used properly anyway. To be fair, I don’t think implementations are that far along on the new sectioning elements though they have gathered mostly positive feedback from the HTML authoring community.

keygen

They’d also rather not reintroduce because they’ve deprecated support for it as of Windows 7 and they don’t feel that adoption is wide-spread enough to warrant inclusion.

input@type=date

For the new date-based HTML form input types () they’d like to see better time-zone related language than “User agents must not allow the user to set the value to a string that is not a valid global date and time string expressed in UTC, though user agents may allow the user to set and view the time in another time zone and silently translate the time to and from the UTC time zone in the value.” given the complexity of time-zones.

bb

Their comments on , a “user-agent button”, are somewhat humorous:

Having a consistent installation experience for independent applications is the key to their success. Supporting the instantiation of individual apps through a page control provides too much programmable flexibility that developers could use to hijack the end-user experience thus creating an inconsistent process.

I would never use the phrase “Consistent installation experience” to define my time spent using Microsoft products or products developed by 3rd party developers for the Microsoft ecosystem. That said, every team in Microsoft is unique and I do believe that the current Internet Explorer team places a high value on user experience.

Their comments go on to suggest a number of improvements to the element (particularly around the scripting model and where it should live in the DOM) that I think are quite sensible. This is the probably the first substantive feedback I’ve seen on , so kudos to Microsoft. (Update: Mozilla chimes in on .)

(and & also mentioned again in this section) have distinct benefits for assisted technologies (AT). If we’re going to leave table@summary conforming because of the promise it holds for AT then surely new elements that could be very beneficial for the same set of users seems reasonable. I do sense that their concerns here are not outright dislike for this element but much more about getting feedback from fellow user-agent implementors on whether this element should be specified in more detail.

contenteditable & UndoManager

These are two APIs: contenteditable is for implementing WYSIWYG HTML editing and UndoManager is a proposed method for dealing with rolling back changes to the DOM. That they knock contenteditable for being underspecified is somewhat funny because it is a Microsoft feature that several browsers and HTML 5 have had to reversed engineer due to lack of detailed public documentation. Maybe Microsoft could offer take over editorship for this portion of the spec.

I’m honestly not even sure why they commented on UndoManager given that the draft contains the following language about it:

This API sucks. Seriously. It’s a terrible API. Really bad. I hate it.

Perhaps it is worthwhile to starting calling out these sections in hopes of pulling them from the draft now. If that was the intent, then I can get behind that.

Conclusions

In general I’m excited that Microsoft is commenting on HTML 5 but I’m also quite concerned at the nature of their comments given how far along HTML 5 is. Regardless of what Adobe would have you think, the HTML 5 ship has in fact left the station, mostly thanks to the mobile user agents in use on Android devices, Apple iPhones, and Palm Pres.

Shawn Medero — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:00:44 +0000

A Working Draft of “Usage Patterns For Client-Side URI parameters” was released on Wednesday (April 15th, 2009) and the TAG is soliciting feedback. I’ve seen more and more modern web applications using the fragment identifier (#) to collect and pass data around, I’d highly suggest anyone using this method take a look at this document. Admittedly TAG covers a lot of stuff that I imagine your average web developer would classify as “some rocket science, astronaut crap” but this is a rather practical subject and the draft language is easily digested.