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Cameron Moll Go to the source

Of Mice and Markets : Zeldman: In the short run it’s going to be hell, just as the browser wars and their lack of support for common standards were hell. But it is the short run…. When I see fragmentation, I remind myself that it is unsustainable by its very nature, and that standards always emerge, whether through community action, market struggle, or some combination of the two. This is a frustrating time to be a web designer, but it’s also the most exciting time in ten years. We are on the edge of something very new. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

Yesterday, a copy of my latest book arrived in the mail, the Third Edition of Bulletproof Web Design . The first edition came out back in 2005, and I’ve been revising it every few years. This latest edit was a bit larger than the 2nd because so much has changed. HTML5, CSS3, Responsive Web Design—all of these things dovetail nicely into the core bulletproof concepts from the original book. If you have the 2nd edition, the new version is likely not a necessary upgrade (New Riders probably loves me for saying that). Meaning, the guidelines for building flexible websites are still there, but a lot of the code and some of the examples have been brought up to speed. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Meet Jack the Lumberjack. He’s the new mascot for Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS . When working on the e-book, I wanted to have something that could provide an identity for the book and for the project. The idea of it being a lumberjack quickly came to mind. I liked the idea of a lumberjack for a number of reasons. For those that aren’t aware, I live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Divya Manian , one of the super-smart web warriors behind HTML5 Boilerplate , has published an article on Smashing Magazine called Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value . I’m afraid I have to agree with Patrick’s comment when he says that the abrasive title, the confrontational tone and strawman arguments at the start of the article make it hard to get to the real message. But if you can get past the blustery tone and get to the kernel of the article, it’s a fairly straightforward message: don’t get too hung up on semantics to the detriment of other important facets of web development. Divya clarifies this in a comment : Amen, this is the message the article gets to. Not semantics are useless but its not worth worrying over minute detail on. The specific example of div s and sectioning content is troublesome though… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

When I first heard that Hixie had removed all traces of the time element from the ongoing HTML spec, my knee-jerk reaction was “This is a really bad idea!” But I decided not to jump in without first evaluating the arguments for and against the element’s removal. That’s what I’ve been doing over the past week and my considered response is: This is a really bad idea! The process by which the element was removed is quite disturbing: Hixie (as a contributer) opens a bug proposing that the time element be replaced with the more general data element. Lots of people respond, almost unanimously pointing out the problems with that proposal. Hixie (as the editor) goes ahead and does what exactly what he wanted anyway. Technically that’s exactly how the WHATWG process works… Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

I’ve been following the announcements of the new Windows 8 UI (and particularly ‘Metro’) this week with great interest. I think they’ve done a fantastic job with Metro, it really looks like a fresh start UI wise. One detail stood out in particular. In the screenshots I noticed that they’ve adopted the Open Share Icon in their UI. To fill you in, the Open Share Icon came about after the original share icon was purchased by the company that provides the ShareThis service. While still licensed for public use, some people felt this wasn’t in the spirit of the thing, and decided to create a completely open version instead . … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I was in Minnesota last week for An Event Apart Minneapolis . A great time was had by all. Not only were the locals living up to their reputation with Amy and Kasia demonstrating that Kristina isn’t an outlier in the super-nice, super-smart Minnesotan data sample, but the conference itself was top-notch too. It even featured some impromptu on-stage acrobatics by Stan . A recurring theme of the conference—right from Zeldman ’s opening talk—was Content First . In Luke ’s talk it was more than a rallying cry; it was a design pattern he recommends for mobile: content first, navigation second. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Web Typography for the Lonely : “…aims to excite designers about the possibilities of cutting-edge web standards and javascript through beautiful and inspiring typographic explorations.” Complete with downloadable code, and cleverly written by Christopher Clark. From the Coolinate page: I am very aware that Coolinate is a dumb name for anything ever. Sadly, my other ideas— Line-shadowify, Manystuffify, and Bloginate — all seemed dumber. There weren’t many options really. Putting some lines under text isn’t an activity that conjures epic war-hero-style action verbs… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Over on the HTML5 Doctor site, Oli has written a great article called Quoting and citing with <blockquote> , <q> , <cite> , and the cite attribute . Now, I still stand by my criticism of the way the cite element has been restrictively redefined in HTML5 such that it’s not supposed to be used for marking up a resource if that resource is a person. But I think that Oli has done a great job in setting out the counter-argument: By better defining <cite> , we increase the odds of getting usable data from it, though we now need different methods to cover these other uses. Oli’s article also delves into the blockquote element, which is defined in HTML5 as a sectioning root . Don’t be fooled by the name: sectioning roots are very different to sectioning content in a fundamental way. Whereas sectioning content elements— section , article , nav and aside —are all about creating an explicit outline for the document from the headings contained within the sectioning content (using the new outline algorithm ), the headings within sectioning roots ( blockquote , td , fieldset , figure , etc. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

In my previous post I stated that while I didn’t think responsive design was the right approach for every mobile experience, it was appropriate for 90% of cases and should become the natural default option. Sadly the current default for most organisations is to build a suite of device specific mobile apps. While giving designers control over layout and companies the ability to make a bit of extra money through app store sales, this seems like an expensive, labour insensitive and somewhat wasteful approach. Especially when you consider the relatively small number of app consumers, compared to the number of people who access the web through mobile devices. For most online companies a mobile optimised website is going to be the smartest option in terms of reach and ROI. I think one of the big problems with responsive design is that it’s a relatively new and unproven concept. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

South by Southwest Interactive is over for another year. Contrary to some of my expectations, it was quite wonderful. Yes, there were plenty of social media marketing douchebags thrusting schwag and spouting pitches, but there were also shedloads of enthusiastic friendly geeks eager to hang out and share ideas. Knowing how big the event had grown, I thought I might have trouble seeing all my friends, but I was pleasantly surprised. Instead of running around in a mad dash to see everything and meet everyone, I took things nice’n’slow and ended up meeting up with everyone anyway. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

Yesterday, Web Standards Sherpa launched. A WaSP outreach project initiated by Aaron Gustafson and Easy! Designs and sponsored by Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, W3C and several other companies. I had the pleasure of handling the initial design and art direction for the site and working with the fantastic team that put this project together. It’s exciting to see it alive and kicking. Web Standards Sherpa will… “…provide web professionals the opportunity to receive feedback, glean advice and learn best practices from experts in the field to help them improve the quality of their own work.” Check out the first pool of articles from sherpas Jared Spool, Aaron Gustafson and Erin Kissane or read more from the Web Standards Project… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

This blog launched in August 2003 and was one of the very first standards based websites in the UK. Back then Flash was king and the latest design trend was the pixel font. We viewed the web though a 800×600 lens and few people even knew about accessibility, let along cared. How times have changed. The rest of the web has moved on, but my little backwater has remained frozen in time. What seemed like cutting edge back in 2003 is now embarrassingly out of date. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

I recently decided to create a CSS Editors Leaderboard , which is my attempt to rank the various editors of CSS modules based on the current process status of their modules, how current the modules are, and so on. It’s kind of a turn of the wheel for me, given that I started out my CSS career with browser support leaderboards. Now you can see who’s amassed the most spec points, and who’s made the most effective use of their time and energy. Who knows? Maybe some editors will try to game the system by pushing their specs along the process track. That’d be just awful . … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Craig Grannell from .Net magazine got in touch to ask me a few short questions about last week’s events around HTML5. I thought I’d share my answers here rather than wait for the tortuously long print release cycle. What are your thoughts on the logo? The logo is nice. Looks pretty sharp to me. Why were you unhappy with W3C’s original stance (“general purpose visual identity”)? … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Two good things have happened. WHATWG Firstly, as I hoped , the WHATWG have updated the name of their work to simply be HTML . This is something they tried to do a year ago , and I kicked up a stink. I was wrong. Having a version number attached to an always-evolving standard just doesn’t make sense… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Webmonkey: HTML5 Gains Logo, Loses Meaning It doesn’t really matter if the New York Times thinks CSS 3 or SVG are HTML5, but we’d like to think that at least the organization in charge of describing what is, and is not, HTML5 would make some effort to distinguish between tools. Lumping everything together is as silly as a carpenter referring to every tool in their toolkit as “a hammer.” CNET News: W3C’s new logo promotes HTML5—and more Curiously, though, the standards group—the very people one might expect to have the narrowest interpretation of what exactly HTML5 means—instead say it stands for a swath of new Web technologies extending well beyond the next version of Hypertext Markup Language. GigaOM: The Truth Behind HTML5′s New Logo Fiasco It’s as if the government suddenly announced that from today, all vegetables will be called potatoes, just because some vegetables are potatoes. The Register: W3C tackles HTML5 confusion with, um, more confusion And much like Apple, Google, and Microsoft before it, the organization that oversees HTML5 has confused it with all sorts of other web standards. The Web Standards Project: HTML5 logo: be proud, but don’t muddy the waters! Now the W3C has come out and essentially condoned the branding of everything from CSS to actual HTML5 to WOFF as “HTML5”… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Webmonkey: HTML5 Gains Logo, Loses Meaning It doesn’t really matter if the New York Times thinks CSS 3 or SVG are HTML5, but we’d like to think that at least the organization in charge of describing what is, and is not, HTML5 would make some effort to distinguish between tools. Lumping everything together is as silly as a carpenter referring to every tool in their toolkit as “a hammer.” CNET News: W3C’s new logo promotes HTML5—and more Curiously, though, the standards group—the very people one might expect to have the narrowest interpretation of what exactly HTML5 means—instead say it stands for a swath of new Web technologies extending well beyond the next version of Hypertext Markup Language. GigaOM: The Truth Behind HTML5′s New Logo Fiasco It’s as if the government suddenly announced that from today, all vegetables will be called potatoes, just because some vegetables are potatoes. The Register: W3C tackles HTML5 confusion with, um, more confusion And much like Apple, Google, and Microsoft before it, the organization that oversees HTML5 has confused it with all sorts of other web standards. The Web Standards Project: HTML5 logo: be proud, but don’t muddy the waters! Now the W3C has come out and essentially condoned the branding of everything from CSS to actual HTML5 to WOFF as “HTML5”. We can’t imagine a single action that will cause more confusion than this misguided decision (and the W3C has produced some pretty impenetrable specs in its time) Roger Johansson: HTML5 now includes CSS3, SVG and WOFF? … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

One year ago, I objected strenuously when the WHAT WG temporarily changed the name of their spec from “HTML5” to plain ol’ “HTML”: Accurate as that designation may be, I became very concerned about the potential confusion it would cause. I understand why the WHATWG need to transition from using the term HTML5 to simply using the term HTML to describe their all-encompassing ongoing work, but flipping that switch too soon could cause a lot pain and confusion. Now that term the “HTML5” has become completely meaningless— even according to the WC3 —I think it’s time to rip off the bandaid and flip that switch. I was wrong. Hixie was right. The spec should be called HTML … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

One year ago, I objected strenuously when the WHAT WG temporarily changed the name of their spec from “HTML5” to plain ol’ “HTML”: Accurate as that designation may be, I became very concerned about the potential confusion it would cause. I understand why the WHATWG need to transition from using the term HTML5 to simply using the term HTML to describe their all-encompassing ongoing work, but flipping that switch too soon could cause a lot pain and confusion. Now that term the “HTML5” has become completely meaningless— even according to the WC3 —I think it’s time to rip off the bandaid and flip that switch. I was wrong. Hixie was right. The spec should be called HTML … Read the rest here