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22 items tagged “ian-hickson”

2010

At this point all I could honestly tell you from the point of view of the editor of several of the HTML5 documents being held up is that the W3C have said they're won't publish without the objections being resolved, and that the objection is from Adobe. I can't even tell what I could do to resolve the objection. It seems to be entirely a process-based objection.

Ian Hickson

# 15th February 2010, 7:38 pm / ian-hickson, adobe, hixie, html5, w3c, canvas, process

2009

Codecs for <audio> and <video>. HTML 5 will not be requiring support for specific audio and video codecs—Ian Hickson explains why, in great detail. Short version: Apple won’t implement Theora due to lack of hardware support and an “uncertain patent landscape”, while open source browsers (Chromium and Mozilla) can’t support H.264 due to the cost of the licenses.

# 2nd July 2009, 10:16 am / h264, video, audio, html5, ian-hickson, theora, ogg, chromium, mozilla, google, patents, codecs

[whatwg] Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics for. Hixie’s proposal for microdata, a simplified RDFa to be included in the HTML5 spec which allows self-contained communities to invent their own microformat-style spec and use it to add structured semantics to their markup. Whether or not you like the proposal itself the explanation is a fascinating read.

# 11th May 2009, 2:41 pm / microformats, microdata, markup, html5, ian-hickson, rdf, rdfa, semantics, whatwg

We did some studies and found that the attribute was almost never used, and most of the time, when it was used, it was a typo where someone meant to write rel="" but wrote rev="". To be precise, the most commonly used value was rev="made", which is equivalent to rel="author" and thus was not a convincing use case. The second most common value was rev="stylesheet", which is meaningless and obviously meant to be rel="stylesheet".

Ian Hickson

# 14th April 2009, 4:34 pm / ian-hickson, hixie, revcanonical, rev, html5, markup

The HTML5 parsing specification contains rules to transform any possible sequence of characters or bytes into a standard document object model. From conversations with Ian, I believe this was one of his primary goals for the initial HTML5 specification.

Benjamin Smedberg

# 15th January 2009, 10:19 pm / benjamin-smedberg, html5, ian-hickson

2008

Someone asked for onbeforeunload, so I started fixing it. Then I found that there was some rot in the drywall. So I took down the drywall. Then I found a rat infestation. So I killed all the rats. Then I found that the reason for the rot was a slow leak in the plumbing. So I tried fixing the plumbing, but it turned out the whole building used lead pipes. So I had to redo all the plumbing. But then I found that the town's water system wasn't quite compatible with modern plumbing techniques, and I had to dig up the entire town. And that's basically it.

Ian Hickson

# 19th December 2008, 1:58 pm / ian-hickson, onbeforeunload, standards, whatwg, html5, javascript

The alt=“” attribute from Ian Hickson. In case you were wondering how it all ended, Hixie has a mammoth summary post explaining the facts and the potential alternatives.

# 11th September 2008, 5:45 pm / ian-hickson, html5, alt-attribute

Interview with Ian Hickson about HTML5. Good questions, interesting answers, including an explanation and breakdown of the planned 2022 date for the final recommendation.

# 11th September 2008, 5:29 pm / html5, ian-hickson

James Bennett: Why HTML. Finally, somewhere to point people when they ask why I avoid XHTML that’s a bit more up to date than Hixie’s rant from 2002.

# 18th June 2008, 12:27 pm / xhtml, james-bennett, html, ian-hickson, hixie, web-standards

Ignoring reality in favour of what we would like to be true doesn't actually work. This simple axiom probably underlies almost everything the WHATWG has done so far, and it has so far served us well.

Ian Hickson

# 7th April 2008, 7:24 am / annevankesteren, whatwg, ian-hickson

Ian's Acid 3, unlike its predecessors, is not about establishing a baseline of useful web capabilities. It's quite explicitly about making browser developers jump - Ian specifically sought out tests that were broken in WebKit, Opera, and Gecko, perhaps out of a twisted attempt at fairness. But the Acid tests shouldn't be fair to browsers, they should be fair to the web; they should be based on how good the web will be as a platform if all browsers conform, not about how far any given browser has to stretch to get there.

Mike Shaver

# 27th March 2008, 1:35 pm / mike-shaver, acid3, ian-hickson, webkit, opera, gecko, browsers, web-standards

Acid3 is out. The third Acid test, again compiled by Ian Hickson. This one viciously tests DOM Scripting standards compliance and currently exposes flaws in every browser.

# 5th March 2008, 12:34 am / javascript, ian-hickson, acid3, standards, web-standards-project

If Web authors actually use this feature, and if IE doesn't keep losing market share, then eventually this will cause serious problems for IE's competitors — instead of just having to contend with reverse-engineering IE's quirks mode and making the specs compatible with IE's standards mode, the other browser vendors are going to have to reverse engineer every major IE browser version, and end up implementing these same bug modes themselves.

Ian Hickson

# 23rd January 2008, 10:07 am / ian-hickson, hixie, internet-explorer, ie8, xuacompatible, web-standards, browsers

2007

The future of web standards. Nice analysis from James Bennett, who suggests that successful open source projects (Linux, Python, Perl etc) could be used as the model for a more effective standards process, and points out that Ian Hickson is something of a BDFL for the WHAT-WG.

# 17th December 2007, 1:16 pm / w3c, bdfl, whatwg, ian-hickson, james-bennett, web-standards, linux, python, perl, open-source, standards

The companies that couldn't beat Microsoft have all died, and evolution has resulted in three very different types of companies that are each immune to Microsoft's strategies in their own way. Yet all are still vulnerable to the same thing: a better product. For the end users, this is a good position for the industry to be in.

Ian Hickson

# 6th December 2007, 3:43 pm / microsoft, open-source, apple, google, ian-hickson, competition

I've actually been using the latest version of JAWS recently, as part of my work on HTML5. From a usability point of view it is possibly the worst software I have ever used. I'm still horrified at how bad the accessibility situation is. All this time I've been hearing people worried about whether or not Web pages have longdesc attributes specified or whatnot, when in fact the biggest problems facing blind users are so much more fundamental as to make image-related issues seem almost trivial in comparison.

Ian Hickson

# 4th September 2007, 12:27 pm / accessibility, usability, jaws, screenreaders, hixie, ian-hickson

The CSS working group is irrelevant. “Someone really needs to do to CSS what the WHATWG has been doing to HTML”.

# 6th June 2007, 10:10 am / ian-hickson, css, hixie, w3c, stardands, whatwg

Two visions. It looks like Mark Pilgrim is going to be joining Hixie at Google.

# 20th March 2007, 8:32 am / mark-pilgrim, ian-hickson, google

Live DOM Viewer (via) Neat tool from Hixie that provides an insight in to what browsers are actually thinking.

# 6th February 2007, 1:12 am / browsers, javascript, dom, ian-hickson

2002

Hixie on XHTML

Ian Hickson: Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful. Ian makes an excellent case for sticking with HTML 4.01 rather than upgrading to XHTML. Here’s the killer point (at least for me):

[... 193 words]

Hixie on WaSP

Hixie has been poking around the new Web Standards Project site, and he is not impressed. His analysis of the site makes interesting reading, with complaints including CSS colour and background not being set at the same time and the content-type of the document being set as “text/html” rather than the more correct “text/xml” required for XHTML documents.

[... 169 words]