Peter Beverloo

Media Source, Binary Web Sockets, Accessibility and Border Images

Published on in Google Chrome, Last Week, tech, WebKit. Version: Chrome 15

With 563 commits at WebKit and 854 at Chromium, totalling up to 1,407 changes, it has been a busy week again. Highlights include addition of the Media Source API and support for binary Web Socket messages.

Dominic Mazzoni landed quite some accessibility improvements in Chromium for Windows. Dozens of roles and states have been corrected for a variety of elements, support for tables featuring row and column spans has been improved, and support for range inputs and live regions has been added. Finally, an onVolumeChange event has been added to the Accessibility Extension API. Mac work will follow soon.

Network related error messages in Web Inspector’s console will now link to the respective request in the Network panel. Furthermore, the window won’t grow anymore on every close-open cycle.

As for improved support for specifications, Chris Marrin landed support for requestAnimationFrame in the Mac. Text within a <dfn> element will now be italic, the WebVTT cue text parsing rules have been implemented, together with DOM construction and six new non-prefixed protocols are now supported by registerProtocolHandler. Top margins for table captions will now be respected, media elements have been taught the muted attribute, border attributes with percent values now work on images and column breaks are now more reliable with large line heights.

For folks using Web Sockets, WebKit now supports both receiving binary messages (as Blobs and ArrayBuffers) and sending binary messages (also as Blobs and ArrayBuffers). This is a huge step forward in supporting the new protocol. Meanwhile, Aaron Colwell implemented the Media Source API within WebKit, making it possible to dynamically append data to video playback.

Dave “scattered” Hyatt started to implement the CSS properties for border-image. Patches for border-image-repeat, border-image-slice and border-image-source have already landed, meaning only border-image-width and border-image-outset are left. Simultaneously, they have also been added for WebKit’s Masks. Sam Weinig and Kentaro Hara taught WebKit about various forms of Event constructors.

Other changes which occurred last week:

And that’ll be all again! 🙂

3 Responses to “Media Source, Binary Web Sockets, Accessibility and Border Images”

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“Furthermore, the window won’t grow anymore on every close-open cycle.”

FINALLY! Will it still grow when Ctrl+Tabbing around? I hope that’s included in this.

Border images look awesome! I was just trying them out for a site a few weeks ago, but was frustrated about lack of support. Good to see they’re finally in Chrome.

“If Chrome’s taking more than 25 seconds to close, it will now deliberately crash itself.”

….huh, interesting way to solve that problem I guess.


Jon Rimmer

September 6, 2011 at 10:00 am

Ooh, I didn’t know about the “fill” keyword that’s been added to the border-image-slice spec. That solves my main complaint with Webkit’s original implementation, that you couldn’t combine it with CSS gradients to create a gradient border. This should make it a lot easier to generate nice pure-CSS buttons and panels.