Simon Willison’s Weblog

Firefox 4: the HTML5 parser—inline SVG, speed and more. A complete replacement for the oldest part of Gecko (the HTML parser dates back to 1998) headed up by HTML5 validator author Henri Sivonen, using the parsing algorithm defined in the HTML5 specification. Improvements include parsing taking place off the main UI thread and the ability to embed SVG and MathML directly inline in HTML pages.

# 12th May 2010, 8:56 am / firefox, gecko, henri-sivonen, html5, mathml, svg, recovered, firefox4, parser

HTML 5 audio player demo. Scott Andrew’s experiments with the HTML5 audio element (and jQuery)—straight forward and works a treat in Safari, but Firefox doesn’t support MP3. Presumably it’s not too hard to set up a fallback for Ogg.

# 1st February 2010, 9:58 am / audio, firefox, html5, javascript, jquery, mp3, ogg, safari, scott-andrew

HTML 5 Parsing. Firefox nightlies include a new parser that implements the HTML5 parsing algorithm (disabled by default), which uses C++ code automatically generated from Henri Sivonen’s Java parser first used in the HTML5 validator.

# 11th July 2009, 11:36 pm / browsers, firefox, henri-sivonen, html5, john-resig, mozilla, parsing, validator

Firefox 3.5 for developers. It’s out today, and the feature list is huge. Highlights include HTML 5 drag ’n’ drop, audio and video elements, offline resources, downloadable fonts, text-shadow, CSS transforms with -moz-transform, localStorage, geolocation, web workers, trackpad swipe events, native JSON, cross-site HTTP requests, text API for canvas, defer attribute for the script element and TraceMonkey for better JS performance!

# 30th June 2009, 6:08 pm / audio, browsers, canvas, crossdomain, csstransforms, dragndrop, firefox, firefox35, fonts, geolocation, html5, javascript, json, localstorage, mozilla, offlineresources, performance, textshadow, tracemonkey, video, webworkers

Cross-Window Messaging. Now in Firefox 3 trunk, the HTML 5 specified ability for JavaScript to send messages between windows (or iframes) hosted on different domains. Fantastically powerful, but must be implemented with care to avoid accidentally processing bad messages from malicious third parties.

# 10th February 2008, 12 pm / crosswindowmessaging, firefox, firefox3, html5, javascript, john-resig