XML News from Tuesday, June 17, 2008

The W3C has posted a new working draft of HTML 5. "This specification defines the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web: the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In this version, new features are introduced to help Web application authors, new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability." There are also drafts of HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 and HTML 5 Publication Notes. The latter contains a convenient list of changes since the January 22 draft:

• Implementation and authoring details around the ping attribute have changed.
• <meta http-equiv=content-type> is now a conforming way to set the character encoding.
• 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.
• Character encoding detection has changed in response to feedback.
• Various changes have been made to the HTML parser section in response to implementation feedback.
• Various changes to the editing section have been made, including adding queryCommandEnabled() and related methods.
• The headers attribute has been added for td elements.
• The table element has a new createTBody() method.
• MathML support has been added to the HTML parser section. (SVG support is still awaiting input from the SVG WG.)
• Author defined attributes have been added. Authors can add attributes to elements in the form of data-name and can access these through the DOM using dataset[name] on the element in question.
• The q element has changed to require punctation inside rather than having the browser render it.
• The target attribute can now have the value _blank.
• The showModalDialog API has been added.
• The document.domain API has been defined.
• The source element now has a new pixelratio attribute useful for videos that have some kind encoding error.
• bufferedBytes, totalBytes and bufferingThrottled DOM attributes have been added to the video element.
• Media begin event has been renamed to loadstart for consistency with the Progress Events specification.
• charset attribute has been added to script.
• The iframe element has gained the sandbox and seamless attributes which provide sandboxing functionality.
• The ruby, rt and rp elements have been added to support ruby annotation.
• A showNotification() method has been added to show notification messages to the user.
• Support for beforeprint and afterprint events has been added.