Bruce Lawson's personal site

Being a compendium of links that I’ve read, or tweeted, gathered together for those who don’t hang around on twitter all day. Inclusion here doesn’t imply endorsement, just that I found it useful or interesting.

Standards ‘n’ Stuff

• Here’s the <picture> element, all grown up and looking so slinky in a mint-green WHATWG spec and matching tiara
• and HTML5 is on the way to recommendation, says W3C
• Proposal: <img autorotate> honours orientation metadata in the image (e.g. EXIF)
• The Web Ahead episode 74: HTML Semantics with Bruce Lawson – turn off Beyoncé, Beiber or Britney – listen to Bruce for an hour!
• Deconstructing the standard photo carousel into general-purpose web components – regardless of your feelings on carousels, this is a good read on the purpose of web components: “build bigger things from smaller things”
• html5-h custom element by Steve Faulkner is a web component to replace <h1>-<h6> and implement the proper HTML5 document outline. Interesting stuff; web components as a way to smooth around broken implementations.
• Use Cases and Requirements for Element Queries – Element Queries are like Media Queries, but on their container, not viewport.
• Adding captions and subtitles to HTML5 video by Ian Devlin and Chris Mills
• SVG 2 – Implicit ARIA Semantics
• CSS Working Group: Call for consensus: adding ‘rebeccapurple’ color to CSS Color Level 4 in memoriam Rebecca Meyer
• More from The Mighty Steve Faulkner: HTML5 accessibility implementation support in browsers
• Fuzzy anchoring – another proposal for a method to link to arbitrary places in a document you don’t control. See also Using CSS Selectors as Fragment Identifiers by Simon St Laurent and Eric Meyer (disclosure: I reviewed an early draft of this proposal). I want something like this, but there’s little interest in the standards groups, I think.
• New Opera for Android – Tap and swipe to manage your tabs, choose your browser layout.
• FUD corner: Why businesses should use caution with HTML5-based mobile apps – because developer error can introduce vulnerabilities. And, of course, correct them much faster on the web than waiting for someone to download a new version of your app.

Misc (no LULZ)

• The disruption machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong
• Dear Marc Andreessen – “If our industry stops painting anyone who questions our business models as Luddites and finds creative ways to build products and services that sustainably address real needs, maybe we can hold on to the receding myth of triumphal disruption.”
• The Internet Is Not a Safe Space – “Dissenting opinions won’t do. Dissenting opinions are violence.”

• Opera and Chrome to have ship <picture> imminently, RICG beginning work on Element Queries
• Opera reaches 1024 upstreamed Blink patches Team celebrates in sauna with fermented moose milk (“Ringnes”)
• It looks like Manifest for web application is gonna be, like, literally, a thing. It’s already in Firefox OS, Opera likes it, and Alex Russell – sounding like an enthusiastic estate agent with his breathless talk of “window decorating” & “exit extents” – gave it a yay from the Chrome team.
• W3C HTML JSON form submission – W3C draft spec
• A high-profile fork: one year of Blink and Webkit – ” a look at the Blink/Webkit fork one year later: how have the projects diverged, who is driving them, and what are they up to?”
• Looking at Russian market? Blink-based Opera is default on Huawei’s Android smartphones & tablets shipped to Russia.
• Everything You Need to Know About the CSS will-change Property by Sara Soueidan
• The CSS ”˜will-change’ property; odd solution to an odd problem. by Matt Wilcox
• What is WAI-ARIA, what does it do for me, and what not? by Marco Zehe, a Firefox accessibility engineer and screenreader user
• HTTP Archive – new stuff! – See trends in what the web is made of: “The HTTP Archive crawls the world’s top 300K URLs twice each month and records detailed information”.
• Getting Started with Gulp – the newest kewlest task runner thingie since Grunt became sooooo last Thursday
• Amazon, Hachette, And Giant Stompy Corporations – a post about book publishing, monopolies and culture. “Do not be married to a single ecosystem. Fuck the monoculture”
• Tubes: part of the mission to JSify everything, @dglazkov works on Web Platform Plumbing (henceforth, plz call me “Sugar Layer”)
• Oh! You Kid! How a sexed-up viral hit from the summer of ’09””1909””changed American pop music forever

A little over ten years ago, on 4 June 2004, Opera employee Ian “Hixie” Hickson sent a mail titled WHAT open mailing list announcement announcing

a loose, unofficial, and open collaboration of Web browser manufacturers and interested parties. The group aims to develop specifications based on HTML and related technologies to ease the deployment of interoperable Web Applications

Ten years is a long time, especially so in software, but nevertheless, the achievements of WHATWG have been remarkable. Hixie wrote

The working group intends to ensure that all its specifications address backwards compatibility concerns, clearly provide reasonable transition strategies for authors, and specify error handling behavior to ensure interoperability even in the face of documents that do not comply to the letter of the specifications.

Core aspects of the web platform were never adequately specified. XMLHttpRequest, for example, was shipped in IE5 in March 1999, and reverse-engineered and shipped in Firefox, Opera, Safari and iCab, but never actually documented until Anne van Kesteren co-specified it in WHATWG in a Working Draft of 5 April 2006. Anne’s currently working on the Fetch Standard, which defines something as basic as “requests, responses, and the process that binds them” and the Encoding Standard:

While encodings have been defined to some extent, implementations have not always implemented them in the same way, have not always used the same labels, and often differ in dealing with undefined and former proprietary areas of encodings. This specification attempts to fill those gaps so that new implementations do not have to reverse engineer encoding implementations of the market leaders and existing implementations can converge.

Of course, the poster children of WHATWG are the slew of new APIs that “HTML5” brings us – Web Workers, Web Sockets, native video and audio etc etc. There have been mistakes along the way (of course there have, in a decade!). Last year, Hixie told me

My biggest mistake”¦there are so many to choose from! pushState() is my favourite mistake, for the sheer silliness of ending up with an API that has a useless argument and being forced to keep it because the feature was so desired that people used it on major sites before we were ready to call it done, preventing us from changing lest we break it. postMessage()”˜s security model is so poorly designed that it’s had academic papers written about how dumb I was, so that’s a pretty big mistake. (It’s possible to use postMessage() safely. It’s just that the easiest thing to do is not the safe way, so people get it wrong all the time.) The appcache API is another big mistake. It’s the best example of not understanding the problem before designing a solution, and I’m still trying to fix that mess.

But to me, the biggest triumph of WHATWG has been error-handling and interoperability (actually, two sides of the same coin). We’ve moved from a vision of the future where everything was supposed to be XML and browsers were to stop parsing if they met malformed markup, to a present where every browser knows how to construct an identical DOM from the most mangled/tangled HTML. We’re moving to a world where interoperability is paramount, and where specifications are made in the open, in constant consultation with developers (for example, Service Workers, Web Components) based on real use-cases.

I think the existence and the work of WHATWG has secured the viability of the web platform. Happy 10th birthday. And thanks.