Thursday, June 19th, 2008
New in standards: Acid4 and HTML 5 update
Category: Standards
You can read the notes from what is updated or a visual diff which includes very low level details such as:
- API for the canvas element has been cleaned up. Text support has been added.
- globalStorage is now restricted to the same-origin policy and renamed to localStorage. Related event dispatching has been clarified.
- postMessage() API changed. Only the origin of the message is exposed, no longer the URI. It also requires a second argument that indicates the origin of the target document.
- Drag and drop API has got clarification. The dataTransfer object now has a types attribute indicating the type of data being transferred.
- The m element is now called mark.
- Server-sent events has changed and gotten clarification. It uses a new format so that older implementations are not broken.
- The figure element no longer requires a caption.
- The ol element has a new reversed attribute.
We also see that a new Acid4 is germinating:
Acid4 will be primarily a visual test, not especially scripted. Focus
will probably be on SVG, CSS, and mixing namespaces, probably with the
main document being an XML file with an SVG root element.Lessons Learned
- don’t include minor bugs
- don’t ask for specific tests, write the tests yourself
- request feedback from early on (t=0) in the cycle, both publically and directly to specific people
- ask for feedback about what things to test
- don’t actually show the test early in the cycle, to prevent people from targetting it while people are discussing what to test
- no performance stuff as part of the test (though as a separate competition is ok if you get everyone to sign off on the test being fair)
- make it have a pretty picture
Related Content:
4.6 rating from 19 votes
I heard in html 6 the element is going to be called Frank.
Looks like they just listed the first 8 “high-level” changes on the [html 5 notes] list. Here’s some other neat ones I found while browsing through the list:
Lot’s more neat stuff in there, definitely check it out.