It makes sense for authors who may produce a handful of pages to be processed by an uncountable number of imperfect tools to agree on restrictions that may go well behond the minimal logical consequences from normative text elsewhere if those restrictions increase the odds of the document produced being correctly processed.
Such restrictions are not a bad thing. In fact, such restrictions are very much a good thing.
Bill McCoy: EPUB in effect takes the Wild, Wild Web and tames it. EPUB for example requires use of the XML serialization of HTML5 (XHTML5), rather than “Tag Soup” aka “Street” HTML. This means that EPUB content, unlike arbitrary web pages, can be reliably created and manipulated with XML tool chains. EPUB defined Reading System conformance more tightly than HTML5 defines for browser User Agents, pinning down things that are under-specified in the union of W3C standards. [via Patrick Mueller]
The result is a lot like Markaby, except you get to be/have to be explicit when you are creating a tag. In this demo, there is no logic, so the benefits of doing so are less clear, but include you being able to use tags that aren’t known to Markaby, like the ones that were added in HTML5. Both inline and views are supported, but support for layouts has yet to be added.
Andreas Bovens: we’ve decided to stop throwing draconian XML parsing failed error messages, and instead, attempt to reparse the document automatically as HTML.
Lawrence Rosen: Specifications are different from software, but they are weapons in the competitive software wars and they are subject to legal control by contract and by law. Companies try to control specifications because they want to control software that implements those specifications. This is often incompatible with the freedom promised by open source principles that allow anyone to create and distribute copies and derivative works without restriction. This article explores ways that are available to compromise that incompatibility and to make open standards work for open source.
Mike Davies: So the #! URL syntax was especially geared for sites that got the fundamental web development best practices horribly wrong, and gave them a lifeline to getting their content seen by Googlebot.
Henri Sivonen: When you publish WebM content, instead of explaining which browsers support WebM, you can simply link to webm.html5.org and it will detect if the user’s browser supports WebM. If the browser doesn’t support WebM, the page will suggest upgrading the browser to a new version that supports WebM, installing a WebM decoder if the browser supports 3rd-party decoders and one is available, switching to another browser or using another operating system (as applicable and in that order).
John Cowan: I’ve been developing a parser for MicroXML which I have dubbed MicroLark, in honor of Tim Bray's original 1998 XML parser Lark. I didn’t take any code from Lark, but we ended up converging on similar ideas: it provides both push and tree parsers (as well as a pull parser), it is written in Java, and I intend to evolve it as MicroXML evolves.
I’ll openly admit at this point that I’m skeptical about the prospects of MicroXML. I continue to be more hopeful about XML5. That being said, my own personal efforts have stalled for the moment, at least as they relate to node.js.
Ian Jacobs: W3C unveiled a logo for HTML5 today. HTML5 in the broad sense covers many different technologies at varying degrees of standardization and adoption. Commercial sites have begun to take advantage of some of the technology, and we are excited that this logo will help raise awareness about HTML5 and W3C.
Update: Ian Jacobs: The most unified criticism has centered around the FAQ's original statement that the logo means "a broad set of open web technologies", which some believe "muddies the waters" of the open web platform. Since the main logo was intended to represent HTML5, the cornerstone of modern Web applications, I have updated the FAQ to state this more clearly. I trust that the updated language better aligns with community expectations.
I’ve posted a rough beginnings of an implementation of xml5 for node.js. The core of this work is the tokenizer, for which I wrote a simple script to do the conversion of Anne van Kesteren’s implementation of the parse state methods to the style that Aria Stewart used for html5. Pretty much the remainder was “borrowed” from html5.
Mike Jazayeri: Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.
There are a few changes Frédéric should consider in order to make his feed consumable by the widest variety of consumers, but the subject of this post focuses on what changes should be made to the feed parser in order to support this case better.
James Clark: Relative to XML, my objectives for MicroXML are:
Compatible: any well-formed MicroXML document should be a well-formed XML document.
Simpler and easier: easier to understand, easier to learn, easier to remember, easier to generate, easier to parse.
HTML5-friendly, thus easing the creation of documents that are simultaneously valid HTML5 and well-formed XML.
This page, like most pages on my web site, is valid HTML5 and well-formed XML. This page also happens to conform to MicroXML. I can’t make that statement in general about pages on my site, as I do make infrequent use of xlink attributes (page down a bit in the attribute syntax section of the HTML5 spec).
More generally, unless xlink becomes grandfathered in somehow, MicroXML is not sufficient for SVG.
Eric Marcoullier: Aaaaaand that’s all she wrote for Delicious and MyBlogLog
Just when I was starting to wonder whether self-hosting my email was going to be a good idea or not, this happens. I still use this application daily. The only substantive change: I substituted nokogiri (which is actively supported) for html5 (which is not).
I tried out CoffeeScript, and was impressed. A clean and consistent syntax, optimized for modern use cases including string interpolation and event based programming, and one that generates human readable JavaScript. Couple it with HAML and SASS, and the maintainability of web pages goes way up.
Apparently, Brendan has a thing against significant newlines, but has no problem with the word in having different meanings depending on whether or not its usage is surrounded by parenthesis or not. My preference leans towards languages with a higher degree of internal consistency.