A Live Interview With Rachel Andrew and Jeremy Keith on Vimeo
I really enjoyed this 20 minute chat with Eric and Rachel all about web standards, browsers, HTML and CSS.
I really enjoyed this 20 minute chat with Eric and Rachel all about web standards, browsers, HTML and CSS.
I have to admit, I don’t think I even knew of the existence of the playsinline
attribute on the video
element. Here, Chris runs through all the attributes you can put in there.
I don’t agree with Steven Pemberton on a lot of things—I’m not a fan of many of the Semantic Web technologies he likes, and I think that the Robustness Principle is well-suited to the web—but I always pay attention to what he has to say. I certainly share his concern that migrating everything to JavaScript is not good for interoperability:
This is why there are so few new elements in HTML5: they haven’t done any design, and instead said “if you need anything, you can always do it in Javascript”.
And they all have.
And they are all different.
Read this talk transcript, and even if you don’t agree with everything in it today, you may end up coming back to it in the future. He’s playing the long game:
The web is the way now that we distribute information. We will need the web pages we create now to be readable in 100 years time, just as we can still read 100-year-old books.
Requiring a webpage to depend on a particular 100-year-old implementation of Javascript is not exactly evidence of future-thinking.
The slides from a presentation by Drew on all the functionality that browsers give us for free when it comes to validating form inputs.
Half the battle of the web platform is knowing what technology is out there, ready to use. We’re all familiar with the ability to declare validation constraints in our HTML5 forms, but were you aware there’s a JavaScript API that goes along with it?
Dave uses just a smidgen of JavaScript to whip HTML5’s native form validation into shape.
Instead of being prescriptive about error messaging, we use what the browser natively gives us.
Web developers aren’t going to shed many tears for Flash, but as Bruce rightly points out, it led the way for many standards that followed. Flash was the kick up the arse that the web needed.
He also brings up this very important question:
I’m also nervous; one of the central tenets of HTML is to be backwards-compatible and not to break the web. It would be a huge loss if millions of Flash movies become unplayable. How can we preserve this part of our digital heritage?
This is true of the extinction of any format. Perhaps this is an opportunity for us to tackle this problem head on.
A look at the feedback needed for a slider control that feels “right”.
You can get most of the behavioural (though not styling) suggestions in HTML by doing this:
<form>
<input type="range" min="0" max="100" value="50"
onchange="amount.value=this.value"
onmousemove="amount.value=this.value">
<output name="amount">50</output>
</form>
PPK has posted some excellent thinking on calendar widgets to Ev’s blog.
Choosing the right input type for your form field.
A glanceable one-stop-shop for how today’s browsers are dealing with today’s accessibility features. Then you can dive deeper into each one.
This is a very handy resource—a collection of minimum viable implementations of HTML5 features and JavaScript APIs.
Una’s [Instagram filters in CSS}(https://github.com/una/CSSgram) are great, but the browser support for CSS filters isn’t as good as, say, the browser support for canvas. Here’s a clever bit of scripting to polyfill filters using canvas.
I love this little markup pattern: simple, accessible and elegant …with some quirky CSS gotchas around styling non-standard prefixed pseudo-elements. They came from the Shadow DOM …dun dun DUN!
A new presentation from the wonderfully curmudgeonly Steven Pemberton, the Nosferatu of the web. Ignore the clickbaity title.
I don’t agree with everything he says here, but I strongly agree with his preference for declarative solutions over (or as well as) procedural ones. In short: don’t make JavaScript for something that could be handled in markup.
This part really, really resonated with me:
The web is the way now that we distribute information. We will need the web pages we create now to be readable in 100 years time, just as we can still read 100-year-old books.
Requiring a webpage to depend on a particular 100-year-old implementation of Javascript is not exactly evidence of future-thinking.
Mike runs through the history of Flash. Those who forget the history of the web are doomed to repeat it:
The struggle now seems to be turning to native apps versus non-native apps on the mobile platform. It is similar to Flash’s original battle ground: the argument that the Web technology stack is not suitable for building applications with a polished user-experience.
I just noticed that I’m mentioned in the acknowledgements of this most handy of W3C documents. This pleases me disproportionately.
A history lesson and a love letter to the early web, taking in HTML, Photoshop, and the web standards movement.
Those were long years, the years of drop-shadows. Everything was jumping just slightly off the screen. For a stretch it seemed that drop-shadows and thin vertical columns of text would define the web. That was before we learned that the web is really a medium to display slideshows, as many slideshows as possible, with banner ads.
Paul Ford’s potted history of web standards, delivered in his own inimitable style.
Reading through the standards, which are dry as can be, you might imagine that standardization is a polite, almost academic process, where wonks calmly debate topics like semicolon placement. This is not the case.
This is hilarious …for about two dozen people.
For everyone else, it’s as opaque as the rest of the standardisation process.
HTML5 is now a W3C recommendation. Here’s what a bunch of people—myself included—have to say about that.