PUBLIC MARKS with tag w3c

Interoperability [REDACTED], do you speak it?

While preparing my HTML workshop, I’ve been re-reading W3C specs in far further detail than I ever would’ve imagined. The reading experience is far from delightful. Not only is the text the entire browser width in measure, but it’s dense and laborious to read. No wonder browser vendors have traditionally missed subtle details.

As far as I can tell, the only WebKit is benefiting.

But the W3C saw, or was made to see, the writing on the wall and built a set of standard APIs into HTML5 for just this case and most modern browsers have picked it up. The draft for the spec is http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html if you want to read it through or need further info. The API is pretty marvelously simple. This implementation changes the URL to return latitude and longitude when they are available, which we can use in our Django view. Plus, the same code works on mobile devices (at least the iOS ones I carry) with no changes.

Despite claiming to support flexbox, Firefox seems to have a broken implementation.

webtech-mainz_12.10.2010_3375

Observing this gives me all the more sympathy for bodies like the W3C et al who kill themselves trying to define standards for things that to many people are still profoundly arcane abstractions (but as we see, are very real, very affective.)

This specification defines an API for opening an HTTP connection for receiving push notifications from a server in the form of DOM events. The API is designed such that it can be extended to work with other push notification schemes such as Push SMS.

It’s true that those API’s would better be defined in a clean, independent forum analogous to the W3C than inside the boiler-room of development at any single cloud provider, but that’s a secondary issue.

Just be open to the idea of us moving towards the One Web in the future. It's just a matter of time, but some day we'll all be able to access applications regardless of device or platform and it will be glorious.

WebAPI is an effort by Mozilla to bridge together the gap, and have consistent APIs that will work in all web browsers, no matter the operating system. Specification drafts and implementation prototypes will be available, and it will be submitted to W3C for standardization.

For the first time, I'm optimistic about the possibility that the W3C is willing to institute enough changes that the WHATWG will no longer be necessary.

a strict subset of the full HTML5 specification that omits user-agent (UA) implementation details. It is targeted toward Web authors and others who are not UA implementors and who want a view of the HTML specification that focuses more precisely on details relevant to using the HTML language to create Web documents and Web applications.

The W3C Resource Timing API provides an expanded set of events for capturing individual resource timings on a page, which is essential for deep analysis. However, this API is still in the early design stages and there seems to be a lot of ongoing debate about how much information can and should be exposed through JavaScript, e.g., for privacy reasons.

I think with the WHATWG improvement just happens. More as a byproduct of the larger goal and not really getting in the way of anybody. At the W3C there is too much bureaucracy for "just happens" and so instead of working on what you want to be working on, you have to argue about rules.

Aaron Swartz, a 24-year-old programmer and online political activist, was indicted Tuesday in Boston on charges that he stole over four million documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JSTOR, an archive of scientific journals and academic papers.