I’m not a big fan of acronyms in general but I like the word WWILF : What Was I Looking For. It’s such a webby word. You know the drill: you start looking at a Wikipedia page about zeppelin crashes and before you know it, you’re reading about ekranoplans and Dyson spheres . That’s wwilfing. Interestingly, there’s no Wikipedia entry for wwilfing. Maybe it should just redirect to the page about the World Wide Web . … Read the rest here
Is CSS the New Photoshop? : John Nack, Photoshop’s principal product manager: As people can do more and more in code, it makes sense to ask whether even to use Photoshop in designing Web content. I think Adobe should be freaking out a bit, but in a constructive way…. As for Photoshop, we could either teach the app to speak HTML natively (via live HTML layers ), or we could translate Photoshop-native artwork into HTML (e.g. ‘copy this button/text as HTML/CSS’). It’s not yet clear to me, however, how such code would smoothly integrate into one’s projects… Read the rest here
The Declaration of Independence, Rendered with CSS3 and @font-face : The markup is fairly clean, but still somewhat presentational. On the whole, however, this is nicely executed. … Read the rest here
In 01992, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a document called HTML Tags . In September 02001, I started keeping this online journal. Back then, I was storing my data in XML, using a format of my own invention. The XML was converted using PHP into (X)HTML, RSS, and potentially anything else …although the “anything else” part never really materialised. In February 02006, I switched over to using a MySQL database to store my data as chunks of markup… Read the rest here
What You Can Learn From Panic’s Approach to Email Marketing : One more link from Campaign Monitor. Several design and markup examples included. … Read the rest here
A Day Apart in Seattle was more like a seminar than a workshop. Rather than being an intimate gathering in a small room, it was more lecture-like in an amphitheatre setting. But that didn’t stop me interacting with the attendees. There were plenty of great questions throughout, and I also had everyone complete an exercise. I reprised the exercise I gave at dConstruct back in September. It isn’t a test of the audience… Read the rest here
I hereby declare April to be HTML5 Month …at least for me. I’m about to embark to on a month of markup pedagogy. I’ll be expounding on the language features of HTML5 at various locations across meat- and cyberspace. It all starts on April 7th in Seattle . That’s where I’ll be delivering one half of A Day Apart . … Read the rest here
“Video for Everybody”: HTML5 ‘video’ Compatibility, Sans JS : Similar to html5media but “without the use of JavaScript or browser-sniffing.” Two disclaimers: 1) I’ve not tried this trick myself, and 2) the amount of markup it requires may be no better than using JavaScript. /via @ taddgiles … Read the rest here
html5media Script Renders in Any Browser : As you’re probably aware, the element isn’t natively supported by all browsers (yet). This was the only missing piece in my attempt to make the Colosseo site fully HTML5, and it meant embedding the “making of” video via Vimeo (Flash) rather than storing it server-side and using something like the SublimeVideo player for playback. Dave Hall’s html5media script is a transitional solution that allows you to use in your markup, and browsers that don’t yet support it will be fed a Flash-based player. /via Daring Fireball … Read the rest here
ColosseoType.com, An All-HTML5 Endeavor : The site for the Colosseo poster is my first production-ready website with HTML5 under the hood. I’ve coded sites semantically with HTML5 class names before (see Jon Tan’s article ), but this is the first with legitimate HTML5 elements such as and in the markup. IE doesn’t yet recognize HTML5, so I’ve added Remy Sharp’s HTML5 shiv script , which forces IE to acknowledge the new elements. Granted, the Colosseo site is a one-pager, but hey, it’s a start. Update: It looks like Firefox 2.x doesn’t play well with HTML5, either. Here’s another article from Remy Sharp on getting Firefox 2 to recognize HTML5… Read the rest here
I’m a bad conference organizer. Why? Because we opened the An Event Apart 2010 schedule for sales back in, um, flippin’ November , and I never mentioned it here. Cripes, I never even posted when we announced the lineup of cities. I could go through the great big long sob-story list of reasons why 2009 was really tough and blah blah blah, but when you get right down to it, I fell down on my job. Okay… Read the rest here
The latest Clearleft offering is Workshops for the Web . It made sense to move our workshop offerings out of the Clearleft site—where they were kind of distracting from the main message of the company—and give them their own home, just like our other events, dConstruct and UX London . As well as the range of workshops that can be booked privately at any time, there’s a schedule of upcoming public workshops for 2010: CSS3 Wizardry on January 29th , Copywriting for the Web on March 5th , HTML5 for Web Designers on April 23rd , UX Fundamentals on June 11th and Usability Testing on July 16th . The next workshop, CSS3 Wizardry with Rich and Nat , promises to be packed full of cutting-edge front-end techniques. Book a place if you want to have CSS3 kung-fu injected into your brainstem. Visual Design I’m pretty pleased with how the site turned out. … Read the rest here
It’s been a strange week in HTML5. The web—and Twitter in particular—has been awash with wailing and gnashing of teeth as various people weigh in with their opinions on either the W3C or the WHATWG —depending on which camp they’re in—being irreversibly broken …exactly the kind of ludicrous over-reaction at which the internet excels . This particular round of chicken-littling was caused by the shuffling of some spec components. The W3C HTML Working Group recently decided to split microdata into a separate specification (which I think is fair enough given RDFa’s similar status). Hixie then removed some other parts of HTML5; a move which was seen as a somewhat petulant reaction to the microdata splittage. Cue outfreakage . … Read the rest here
Keeping up with HTML5 can seem like a full-time job if you’re subscribed to both the W3C public-html list and the WHATWG mailing list . If you have to choose just one, the WHATWG list is definitely the red pill. The W3C list has a very high volume of traffic, mostly about politics and procedure. Sam Ruby deserves a medal for keeping the whole thing on an even keel. The WHATWG list, on the other hand, can get pretty nitty-gritty in its discussions of Web Workers, Offline Storage and other technologies that are completely over my head. The specification itself is shaping up nicely… Read the rest here
This book, HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions , by Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson is subtitled, "A Web Standardistas’ Approach." As you might imagine, the book takes a purist approach to teaching the basics of HTML and CSS to the reader. Jumping into this book, I wasn’t sure what to expect. By the end, though, I felt that this is more than just another book: it’s a textbook. And that should come as no surprise as the authors are lecturers at the University of Ulster in Belfast. … Read the rest here
Twitter doesn’t allow for much verbosity but sometimes it’s possible to squeeze some code into 140 characters or fewer. I particularly like Simon’s piece of JavaScript . Paste this into the address bar in Safari: javascript:(function(){var d=0;setInterval(function() {document.body.style['-webkit-transform']= ‘rotate(’+ d +’deg)’;d+=1},10)}()); Earlier today, I wrote : Writing <abbr title=”and”>&</abbr> in my markup and abbr[title='and'] { font-family: Baskerville; font-style: italic; } in my CSS. This is something that Dan has written about in the past, citing Bringhurst; In heads and titles, use the best available ampersand . Dan suggested wrapping ampersands in a span with a class of “amp” but in a comment, I proposed using the abbr element: <abbr title=”and” class=”amp”>&</abbr> But really, you don’t even need the class because you can just use an attribute selector: abbr[title='and'] { font-family: Baskerville, Palatino, “Book Antiqua”, serif; font-style: italic; } But, asks Mat Marquis , what about a certain browser that can’t even handle the simplest of attribute selectors? … Read the rest here
Looking through the list of hiccups highlighted by the HTML5 Super Friends and my own personal tally , things are progressing at a nice clip with HTML5. The pubdate attribute has been removed from the article element and shifted to a nested time element instead. The content model for the footer element has been changed to match author expectations —that’s a biggie. That still leaves a few issues: The confusion between section and article that I’ve been researching . … Read the rest here
As promised , I’ve gathered the data from one of the exercises I administered at the dConstruct HTML5 and CSS3 workshop and totted the results up in a table. There were 30 people in the workshop but I only managed to retrieve 22 results—I don’t know what happened to the missing eight sheets of answers. This is a smaller sampling than I was hoping for and I realise that it’s too small to be considered scientifically accurate but I think it’s still interesting to see the responses of 22 smart, savvy web developers. Across the top (in the table header) are the possible answers; nine new elements in the HTML5 spec. Each row shows the answers given for each element as workshop attendees attempted to match up the names of the elements with the nine definitions provided from the spec. The most common answer in each case has been highlighted. … Read the rest here
I mentioned in my previous post that I “had come away with my head reeling from the massive length and depth of the often-changing specification”, which is entirely true. Printouts of the current draft of the HTML5 spec can reach, depending on your operating system and installed fonts, somewhere north of 900 pages. Yes: nine hundred . There are unabridged Stephen King novels that run shorter. You might well say to yourself: “Self, is it just me, or are the people doing this completely off their everlovin’ rockers… Read the rest here
dConstruct week is in full swing. The conference itself is tomorrow. Remy and Brian are doing their workshops today. Myself, Rich and Nat did our HTML5 and CSS3 Wizardry workshop yesterday. I was handling the HTML5 side of things and had quite a bit of fun with it. … Read the rest here