Home E-mail Subscribe

Showing all entries with tag: standards Subscribe

URI error-handling in HTML5, and documenting the (real) Web vs. reinventing it

Ian Hickson, the editor of the current HTML5 draft, posted an Error handling in URIs message to the uri@w3.org mailing list outlining some issues related to browser error handling behaviour for URIs, and to IRIs and character encodings other than UTF-8 — and asking, “Is there any chance that the URI and IRI specifications might get updated to handle these issues?”.

That posting and question spawned some spirited discussion, with messages from Julian Reschke, Anne van Kesteren, Tim Bray, John Cowan, Frank Ellermann, and Martin Duerst, and provoking some comments like the following one:

That’s kind of what I said already, and why I guess that HTML5 will never fly: It tries to reinvent the Web, if not the Internet.

…and from Ian to the above, the following response:

Actually we’re trying to not reinvent the Web, but to document it, so that browser vendors can write browsers that handle existing Web content in a fashion compatible with legacy UAs without reverse-engineering each other.

(It’s true that this is requiring defining things that are at odds with existing specifications, but that’s mostly because those specifications aren’t in fact in line with real usage…)

“Concerns” raised about W3C Access Control spec have been little more than FUD

Microsoft’s lead PM for XHR/Ajax sneaks in some FUD in a new Securing Cross Site XMLHttpRequest posting on the IE Blog that otherwise gives a succinct and fairly balanced overview of the shared problem case that various competing “cross-site request” spec proposals (Microsoft’s XDR/XDomainRequest proposal, the W3C Access Control for Cross-Site Requests draft, and Doug Crockford’s JSONRequest) are all trying to solve.

It’s great to see that Sunava includes in that posting a call to join the W3C Web Applications Working group. It’s less great to see the following sentence in the posting:

As can be expected with securing a large cross section of cross domain scenarios, a number of concerns have been identified with the CS-XHR [W3C Access-Control for Cross-Site Requests] draft by the web development community, the IE team members and members of the Web Apps Working Group.

What’s not great about that sentence is what it obscures:

  • many of the “concerns” raised about the Access-Control spec have been little more than FUD
  • a number of the non-FUD concerns were based on simple misunderstandings of the spec
  • the remaining concerns have already been addressed/rebutted repeatedly by implementors such as Jonas Sicking (who wrote the code for the Access-Control support in Mozilla), Kris Zip, and others
  • a number of detailed and substantial concerns have also been identified with the Microsoft XDomainRequest proposal (by Kris Zyp and several other people), but those concerns have yet to be adequately addressed in any responses from Microsoft

We (the W3C WebApps WG) will be having a face-to-face meeting next week in Redmond (hosted by Microsoft) to continue the discussion.

Video interview from XTech

Update: An entry about this video interview and the other interviews that Ian did at XTech is now online at the BBC Backstage site:

Backstage Blog: Video interviews from Xtech 2007

Among the videos that Ian Forrester from the BBC shot at XTech 2007 the week before last is an interview with Steven Pemberton and me. We talk about the Mobile Web Initiative, XHTML2, XForms, HTML5, the <canvas> element, and a few other things.

Use the Click to Play link below to watch the video (warning: requires Flash Player 8).

WebKit devs kicking some CSS ass

David Hyatt appears to have kept himself busy over the holidays by implementing support in WebKit for a couple of very nifty CSS features: first, some custom CSS properties for stroking text (that is, for adding outline effects to character glyphs), followed by support for the CSS3 box-shadow property.

Bonus feature: While you’re over at the Surfin’ Safari blog, make sure to also check out the video of KDE/KHTML developer-demigods Lars Knoll and George Staikos talking about KHTML and WebKit. If you’re a browser-technologies junkie, consider it a must-see.