If you pay any attention to the plodding chaos that is the development of HTML5, then you’ve probably seen the discussions around the video element and how best to encode videos. Over a year and half ago Ian Hickson gutted the video and audio portions of the HTML5 specification to…
I can’t turn on the TV, surf the web, or peer into my Twitter feed without stumbling into another year-end wrap-up of 2010. These dime-a-dozen contrivances abound like the proverbial lemming to the cliff (lemmings don’t really do that, it’s also a contrivance). However, there have been enough of some…
One of the best parts of December, regardless of whether you believe in Christmas or that it belongs in December, is the fun of the advent calendar. As a kid I used to look forward to jamming a new piece of creche-themed chocolate (chocolate stablehand, anyone?) into my mouth every…
In an effort to help educate the general public about its browser, Chrome, and the web in general, Google released an online “book” called 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web. Done in the style of an illustrated children’s book that allows readers to flip through the pages,…
Given the rise of mobile computing on phones and pads, web developers can no longer think of the sites they develop as living in the world of the desktop browser. Thankfully, things are much easier than they used to be. Developers no longer need to focus on arcane reformulations of…
It’s kind of hard to avoid all the coverage of IE9 this week. There are some rather in-depth reviews and analyses out there that take it apart and try to outdo each other with intricate detail in coverage. I don’t care so much about that. I’m interested in the general…
When Google changes its logo in honor of a holiday, someone’s birthday, or just for the heck of it, it sometimes gets some chatter. When Google created the Pac-Man logo, articles appeared of people trying to figure out how it worked, or commenting on tech support calls within organizations from…
In case you haven’t seen the Arcade Fire video, The Wilderness Downtown, you should take a look at it. Google and Arcade Fire got together to show off what Google Chrome could do with all the new gee whiz technology out there, and if you listen to all the major…
I’m going to make the assumption that if you are reading this you have at least a passing interest in typography on the web and have heard about Google’s new font preview tool. There are already plenty of articles talking about how easy it is, how Google hosts the typefaces,…
The W3C has today announced its brand new validator, named Unicorn for reasons they do not explain. The new validator combines four other validators into one: Unicorn combines a number of popular tools in a single, easy interface, including the Markup validator, CSS validator, mobileOk checker, and Feed validator, which…
Patrick H. Lauke is the Web Evangelist at Opera Software and ran the Accessibility Task Force for the Web Standards Project (WaSP). Last week (July 13) he gave a talk to the Institutional Web Management Workshop on HTML5. He lead viewers on a general history of HTML5, through an overview…
Back in November, the W3C released a handy tool aimed at helping developers quickly access information from various W3C specifications (W3C Cheatsheet for developers). The features were pretty straightforward: This cheatsheet aims at providing in a very compact and mobile-friendly format a compilation of useful knowledge extracted from W3C specifications…