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Adactio Go to the source

I can never pinpoint the exact moment at which I “get into” a particular technology. CSS, DOM Scripting, microformats …there was never any Damascene conversion to any of them. Instead, I’d just notice one day, after gradually using the technology more and more, that I was immersed in it. That’s how I feel about HTML5 now. There’s another feeling that accompanies this realisation. I remember feeling it about CSS in the late 90s and about DOM Scripting half a decade ago. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

HTML5 is a strange character with what appears to be a split personality. Hardly surprising then that something so divided would appear to be so divisive. First of all, there’s the spec itself. The specification HTML5 walks a fine line between maintaining backward compatibility with existing markup and forging the way as a modern, updated specification for the future. If it strays too far in paving the cowpaths and simply codifies what authors already publish, then the spec would mandate using table s for layout and font elements for presentation because that’s still what most of the web does. On the other hand, if it drifts too far in the other direction, the result will be something as theoretically pure but as practically useless as XHTML2 . … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

HTML5 is a strange character with what appears to be a split personality. Hardly surprising then that something so divided would appear to be so divisive. First of all, there’s the spec itself. The specification HTML5 walks a fine line between maintaining backward compatibility with existing markup and forging the way as a modern, updated specification for the future. If it strays too far in paving the cowpaths and simply codifies what authors already publish, then the spec would mandate using table s for layout and font elements for presentation because that’s still what most of the web does. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

The W3C announced last week that the XHTML 2 Working Group will wrap up at the end of this year . This should have been a straightforward, welcome announcement. Instead it has confused a lot of people who believe that it heralds the end of XHTML—see, for example, the comments on Zeldman’s blog post . This confusion is understandable given the lamentable names that have been assigned to different technologies. This isn’t the first time this has happened… JavaScript sounds like it has something to do with Java. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

The W3C announced last week that the XHTML 2 Working Group will wrap up at the end of this year . This should have been a straightforward, welcome announcement. Instead it has confused a lot of people who believe that it heralds the end of XHTML—see, for example, the comments on Zeldman’s blog post . This confusion is understandable given the lamentable names that have been assigned to different technologies. This isn’t the first time this has happened… JavaScript sounds like it has something to do with Java. It doesn’t. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

Now that we’ve announced the book , we can also announce another exciting thing: Handcrafted CSS: A Day of Markup & Style will be a unique, one-day workshop presented by Ethan Marcotte and myself on September 14, 2009 at the Hawthorne Hotel here in Salem, Massachusetts . You’ll get a copy of the book (the Video Edition , including the DVD ), and we’ll present the content live, throughout four takeway-packed sessions, followed by Q&A. Breakfast, lunch and two snack breaks are also provided. And we’ll cap off the day with an after party at an awesome location to be determined. The Hawthorne Hotel is located in downtown Salem, just 16 miles north of Boston. It’s also just a 10-minute walk from the MBTA Commuter Rail station which connects Salem to Boston in about 25 minutes… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

After posting my reasons for switching back to px for font-size citing page zooming as the primary justification, it was apparent that enthusiasm for page zooming wasn’t as unanimous as I had thought. As a refresher from the article, low-vision users (or anyone) can alter their browser’s text size by changing the default text size permanently via the browser’s settings, or on-the-fly using the keyboard commands Ctrl+ / - (Windows) or Command+ / - (Mac). Until recently, these commands would cause all major browsers to scale up or down the size of the text while retaining the formatting and layout of the page, commonly called text scaling or text zooming . Now, however, recent versions of every major browser now default to page zooming instead of text scaling for Ctrl+ / - and Command+ / - commands AND for the “Zoom” option in the browser’s menu. Page zooming literally zooms the entire page — layout, formatting, and text size — in unison. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

After posting my reasons for switching back to px for font-size citing page zooming as the primary justification, it was apparent that enthusiasm for page zooming wasn’t as unanimous as I had thought. As a refresher from the article, low-vision users (or anyone) can alter their browser’s text size by changing the default text size permanently via the browser’s settings, or on-the-fly using the keyboard commands Ctrl+ / - (Windows) or Command+ / - (Mac). Until recently, these commands would cause all major browsers to scale up or down the size of the text while retaining the formatting and layout of the page, commonly called text scaling or text zooming . Now, however, recent versions of every major browser now default to page zooming instead of text scaling for Ctrl+ / - and Command+ / - commands AND for the “Zoom” option in the browser’s menu. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

It’s been a long five years since it was orginally published, but last month month a new Web Standards Solutions, Special Edition was released by Friends of ED . Late last year, I gave the manuscript a little freshening up, mostly reviewing things in the crop of browsers that have been released since the initial version. I’ll stress that this was not a large overhaul of the book (hence Special Edition rather than Second Edition), so if you’ve already read the original, or own it, you’re better off spending your dime on another book. But while it wasn’t a giant update, it was nice to give it some extra attention, and pass it through through tech editing, copy editing, compositing and proofreading cycles once again. In the end, I’m really happy it just made the book that much more solid for folks that haven’t read it—and hopefully still a good introduction for those getting started with semantic markup and CSS . In other book news, I’ve been toiling away on something brand new, and look forward to sharing much more about that very soon… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Recently I made the switch back to HTML 4 for DOCTYPE s and px for font-size (sound like 1999 again?), and I’ve tweeted about it occasionally. I’m documenting the switch more thoroughly here. HTML 4.01 Strict I’ve chosen to go with HTML 4.01 Strict as the DOCTYPE in my projects moving forward, favoring it above XHTML 1.0 Strict and HTML 5. I’ll briefly explain my reasoning. XHTML 1.0 Strict – This is what many of us in the industry, including myself, have been using for the past few years… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

After I started rewarding machine tagging on Huffduffer with API calls to Amazon and Last.fm, people started using them quite a bit. But when it came to displaying tag clouds, I wasn’t treating machine tags any differently to other tags. Everything was being displayed in one big cloud . I decided it would be good to separate out machine tags and display them after displaying “regular” tags. That started me thinking about how best to display machine tags. One of the best machine tag visualisations I’ve seen so far is Paul Mison ’s Flickr machine tag browser , somewhat like the list view in OS X’s Finder… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

It’s been a busy week for microformats . Google announced that it was following in the footsteps of Yahoo’s SearchMonkey in indexing microformats and RDFa to display in search results. For now, it’s a subset of microformats— hCard and hReview —on a subset of websites, including the newly microformated Yelp . The list of approved sites will increase over time so if you’re already publishing structured contact and review information, let Google know about it . But the other new announcement is equally important. After a lot of hard work, the value class pattern is ready for use. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

It’s been a busy week for microformats . Google announced that it was following in the footsteps of Yahoo’s SearchMonkey in indexing microformats and RDFa to display in search results. For now, it’s a subset of microformats— hCard and hReview —on a subset of websites, including the newly microformated Yelp . The list of approved sites will increase over time so if you’re already publishing structured contact and review information, let Google know about it . … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Lionel Schriver’s piece in the Standpoint called Dashed Bad Form is a witty affair, comparing and contrasting the semicolon and the em dash . Alas, the self-describing nature of the article is completely lost in the online version—though presumably not in the print edition—having suffered the all-too-common fate of emdashculation; every instance of an em dash in the article has been converted into a plain ol’ hyphen. Oh, the irony! …proper irony too—not that confused Alanis Morissette kind . It’s probably a CMS issue. But, hey, it’s as good an opportunity as any to point to the classic article on A List Apart , The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters) . … Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

Ah, blogging: the new long-form Tweet. This morning I said : retraining myself not to /> close img, input, and meta tags. It’s an uphill battle. Which received an instant string of responses asking, in a nutshell, “why?” So I clarified : because I’m done with XHTML is why. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I was away in Berlin for a few days, delivering a DOM Scripting workshop to the good people at Aperto . I had a good time, made even better by some excellent Spring weather and the opportunity to meet up with Anthony and Colin while I was there. I came home to find that, in my absence, rev=”canonical” usage has gone stratospheric . First off, there are the personal sites like CollyLogic and Bokardo . Then there are the bigger fish: 24 Ways Baconfile Ars Technica PHP.net Flickr Excellent! I’d just like to add one piece of advice to anyone implementing or thinking of implementing rev=”canonical” : if you are visibly linking to the short url of the current page, please remember to use rev=”canonical” on that A element as well as on any LINK element you’ve put in the HEAD of your document. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

At last—at long, long last!— the results of the A List Apart Survey 2008 are available , along with the anonymized raw data we collected. There are a great many reasons why it took so long to get this out the door. A big part is that it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort, which means it happens in our “free time” (and there the word “free” has a couple of meanings). I say it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort because the detailed analysis is actually done by a pair of professional statisticians, who are paid for their time and expertise. They did a great job once more, and did it in a reasonable time frame. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

In one of those instances of convergent online evolution, the subject of URL shorteners has been popping up a lot lately. You know; TinyURL , bit.ly , tr.im , and the like. I suspect a lot of this talk was prompted by the launch of the DiggBar and its accompanying short URL service that serves up your content in an iframe —time to break out that frame-busting JavaScript you haven’t needed for years. David Weiss writes about the security implications of URL shortening services . Meanwhile, Joshua Schachter talks about the danger of link rot : The worst problem is that shortening services add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

We’ve rolled out some changes over here at SimpleBits that have been chipped away at for months. Visually, it’s not a drastic difference, but lots of adjustments and polishing were done in other areas. Chunks of copy were chopped, multiple pages combined into one, things simplified. More care and attention was given to the internal layout of pages that aren’t weblog pages. Finally. Also, the idea of fluid grid layouts has intrigued me since I heard Ethan talk about them at a Markup & Style Society event we threw a year ago… Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

We’ve rolled out some changes over here at SimpleBits that have been chipped away at for months. Visually, it’s not a drastic difference, but lots of adjustments and polishing were done in other areas. Chunks of copy were chopped, multiple pages combined into one, things simplified. More care and attention was given to the internal layout of pages that aren’t weblog pages. Finally. … Read the rest here