Finally, Cougar rounds out its collection of drafts, specs, and recommendations with a few loose pieces that have been floating around since the HTML 3.0 days. Included are new additions to tables, using forms to upload files, and a collection of work being done for internationalization (better known by its nickname, i18n - an "i," followed by 18 letters, followed by an "n").
So, yeah, what's up with tables? If you've been creating Web pages for any amount of time, you're most likely completely fed up with the incredible shortcomings in the language's page layout capabilities. Many designers, sick of waiting for absolute positioning (either in HTML or stylesheets), used HTML tables to approximate some level of control over their layouts. Eventually, as CSS matures, tables will be able to retire to their intended use: grouping and displaying tabular data. This spec goes a bit further in helping you do this. By adding the colgroup element, you can group a number of columns together and specify presentational qualities (like borders and backgrounds) of those collections. The spec has some good examples of how this would work. More alignment capabilities have been proposed, too, like decimal and even column-based alignment. There are a few recommendations on how to get large tables to render progressively (which they currently don't). And finally, the spec dives into strange territory, describing tables with scrollable cells and fixed headers.
While the tables draft may be far-reaching, the file upload draft is actually quite simple. The idea is to add a new type of input button to HTML forms that would trigger a dialog box that asks to upload a file from your local system. So, <input type="file"> could be rendered with a list of selected file names and paths next to a Browse button. Users would be able to submit applications, images, text files, or any other sort of document on their computer to a host machine. The spec digs in to details on MIME types and the like. It's interesting reading.
To think the Web is an English-language resource is to ignore the first two Ws in its acronym. Opening up HTML to the many issues surrounding internationalization has been needed for a long time, and this spec begins to address the issues. Be warned: The scope of the i18n draft is immense, but this is understandable, since the problem at hand is so widespread. The document describes issues of extended character sets, languages that aren't rendered from left to right, and how to specify language in Web documents. The lang attribute, for example, can be used by browsers translating documents from one language to another. For example, if your page contains the line "Let's have a fiesta!" and someone's browser is translating the sentence into German, how would you keep the word "fiesta" from being translated? Add a <lang="spanish"> around the word. There is a lot more in the draft, too. Again, I recommend spending some time with it if you're interested in these issues.
