WHATWG Blog

> It’s not a global `print` function that’s called but `window.print`, right? `print` is sugar for `this.print` and `this` is the window object if it’s not explicitly bound to something else.

This is a common point of confusion because in a browser the global object is traditionally the same as window (or “self” or “frames”) so there wasn't a difference for many years until ES5 introduced strict mode, which left the default as undefined instead of silently using the global object, and things further fractured with Node (where it's “global”) and Web Workers (where only “self” works). (In browsers this is also complicated by the Window/WindowProxy distinction — see https://blog.whatwg.org/windowproxy-window-and-location and especially https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/globalthis#terminology)

A couple years back, “globalThis” was added to make it easier to write portable code across different environments without having to check various names: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-global

I don't think is not a particularly JavaScript-specific issue because any language which inherits scope can have the problem of a symbol not matching what you expected, which is why the ones which don't have compile-time checking tend to use linters which will report use of things which haven't been explicitly declared (not mention shadowing built-in names). If you want to blame JavaScript, the feature which would have made this more obvious would have been not ignoring extra arguments –…

There's recently been a round of debate about whether the alt attribute for media (eg, <img alt="Foo">) should remain required or could become optional.

As I understand it, some web page creators say "some of our images don't have good logical, human-readable alt text, so why make us put in alt attributes with crappy made-up values", and other people argue that it is worth the extra effort to improve accessibility. (No doubt I've butchered both sides of the argument, but that's what I was able to take away from it.)

See http://blog.whatwg.org/omit-alt for an argument in favor of making it optional, and http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/articles/altinhtml5.html for it being required, or http://juicystudio.com/article/requiring-alt-attribute-html5.php for a list of pros and cons.

The two standards groups hosting the draft HTML specs appear to have different centers of gravity with regard to this issue, and to be making increasingly snippy comments back and forth about the other's handling of the dispute.

> HTML5 defaults to UTF-8

I’m not sure this is correct, though the WHATWG docs[1] are kind of confusing. From what I can tell, it seems like HTML5 documents are required to be UTF-8, but also this is required to be explicitly declared either in the Content-Type header, a leading BOM, or a <meta> tag in the first 1024 bytes of the file. Reading this blog post[2] it sounds like there is a danger that if you don’t do this then heuristics will kick in and try to guess the charset instead; the documented algorithm for this doesn't seem to consider the doctype at all.

[1]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/semantics.html#charset

[2]: https://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-character-encoding

There's a deeper issue here that needs to be addressed. Consider the following review:

https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Editor

There are well over 30 WYSIWYG editors that (fail to) normalize the differences between browsers to provide a consistent text editing experience. Much of this duplicated effort would be better directed at reviewing, publishing, and updating a standard draft for editable, browser-based content.

https://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-contenteditable

Even though Squire isn't meant as a drop-in replacement for web page editing, it still suffers from the same endemic issue that plagues all editors: browser inconsistency.

> Contrast that with the agreed-upon work in the WHATWG HTML Living Standard discussed at https://blog.whatwg.org/js-modules, which is relatively finalized and is being actively implemented now in all browser engines.

Just to clarify, unlike TC39, the WHATWG HTML ("Living Standard") spec requires no consensus at all in order to add new features. Consensus is arrived at once all implementers have implemented the relevant features to the stable versions of their browsers.

To say that what is in the spec has consensus at the same time as browser implementers are beginning implementation (and expressing some concern over details) gets the WHATWG process backwards.

"The next version of HTML doesn't have a name yet. In fact, it may never have a name, because the working group is switching to an unversioned development model. Various parts of the specification will be at varying degrees of stability, as noted in each section. But if all goes according to plan, there will never be One Big Cutoff that is frozen in time and dubbed "HTML6." HTML is an unbroken line stretching back almost two decades, and version numbers are a vestige of an older development model for standards that never really matched reality very well anyway. HTML5 is so last week."

http://blog.whatwg.org/whats-next-in-html-episode-1