Today, the XML Activity, with several Working Group charters, was approved. This is a major milestone for W3C, not because of the activities of these groups themselves, but for W3C’s process of developing standards.
For the first time, all of W3C’s active Working Groups now operate in public.
I’m proud to have helped in the formation of the new W3C Music Notation Community Group. It’s a free and open group, and if you’re interested in the future of digital music representation, you should join now!
My name is Doug Schepers… and I’m an annotator.
You might be an annotator, too. If you think you might be, you should come to our support workshop in San Francisco in April.
There has been a heated argument recently on the W3C Canvas API mailing list between accessibility advocates and browser vendors over a pretty tricky topic: should the Canvas API have graphical “objects” to make it more accessible, or should authors use SVG for that? I think it’s a false dichotomy, and I offer a proposal to suggests a way to improve the accessibility potential of the Canvas 2D API by defining how SVG and the Canvas 2D API can be used together.
This brings together some ideas I’ve had for a while, but with some new aspects. This is still a rough overview, but the technical details don’t seem too daunting to me.
Offered without comment.
Post about HTML5 logo and overblown “controversy” surrounding it:
1,078 hits on the first day.
Post about details on W3C touch events spec, including a roadmap and future plans:
273 hits on the first day.
Last week, I published the first draft (and subsequent updates) of the Web Interface specification, which defines touch events. This is the first spec from the new W3C Web Events Working Group.
Peter-Paul Koch (PPK) gave it a positive initial review. Apparently, others thought it was news-worthy as well, because there were a few nice write-ups in various tech sites. Naturally, cnet’s Shank scooped it first (he has his ear to the ground), and it was fairly quickly picked up by macgasm, electronista, and Wired webmonkey.
I thought I’d go into a few of the high-level technical details and future plans for those who are interested.
Continue reading “Getting In Touch”
I was involved in rolling out the new HTML5 logo for W3C; I wasn’t the person in charge, but I helped out with some aspects of it.
The interesting thing to me was the reaction to the logo, aesthetics aside. (I like the logo personally, but I also like the retro-futurism of Soviet Realist art, like the statuary in Memento Park in Budapest, and comic books.) I loved the parodies and jokes about the logo, but I was both unsurprised and disappointed at the some of the negative dialog (and in some cases, monolog) about what the logo is meant to represent.
Continue reading “HTML5 Logorrhea, or Use Your Inside Voice”
With SVG being integrated more and more into HTML5, both included via <object> and <img> elements, and inline in the same document, some natural questions about SVG and CSS are receiving more focus. This includes box model questions like background and border, and pointer events.
I’m interested in comments from the community on what direction SVG should take.
Continue reading “Pointers on Background of SVG Borders on Mutiny”
I’ve been doing a lot of website stuff this week. Here’s some highlights:
Continue reading “Short Stuff”
SVG paths have a pretty good set of shape commands, enough to let you draw any 2D shape you might want in an authoring tool: horizontal, vertical, and diagonal straight lines, elliptical arc segments, and cubic and quadratic Bézier curves. Béziers are great, giving you precise control over the position and curve interpolation of each point in a concise format, using control points (“handles”), and are easily chained together to create complex shapes.
But let’s say you have a series of points, and you want to draw a smooth line between them, e.g. for stock data, an audio wave, or a mathematical graphing equation. Béziers are not as handy there, because not all the points needed to define a Bézier spline are on the curve itself. Obviously, you can decompose any set of points into a set of Béziers, but that takes math, and who wants to do that? (Put your hand down, nerd. I’m talking to the normals.)
Sometimes, you just want to lay down a set of points, and let the browser draw a smooth curve (unlike polylines, where each segment is just a straight line between the points). Like this: