The world wide web has officially lasted 25 consecutive years, which means it’s catching up to its parent, the Internet, which itself is bearing down on 45. That’s an important distinction. The Internet is not the web, it is the foundation on which the web was born. In honor of…
Plenty has been written about the W3C and DRM. Sadly, most of it has been written in the form of attacks against the W3C, with very few laying out the facts. Note: I am a participant in the W3C HTML Working Group (as an invited expert). Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)…
On Friday Jeff Croft posted a piece titled Web Standards Killed the HTML Star where he makes the argument that just knowing HTML and CSS is no longer enough to get a job. He states that the web standards movement has effectively rendered the need for specialized knowledge of browser…
I’m a bit behind on my reading. There is always some new wiz article on web technologies and it’s hard to keep up. Since any chummer can write one, sometimes you have to approach them with caution even if they’ve survived the meat grinder of public review for as long…
This post is an unexpected follow-up to my post Image alt Exception Change Re-Re-Requested (note one fewer “re-”) from June 2012. Back then, some had called into question the need for alt attributes to be required and ubiquitous on all img tags. Well, guess what — alt is back under…
If you’ve been following the latest chaos in the responsive image debate, you may know that there is a battle afoot between supporters of src-n, srcset and picture. If you don’t believe me, I refer you to this WHATWG post, a polite round-up of today’s bar fight. Key is that…
It’s old news by this Thursday morning, but in case you had not heard, Google is forking WebKit to make its own rendering engine, Blink. Opera will be using the Blink fork of WebKit as its rendering engine. A combination of people who are far smarter, far more well connected,…
Last week I spent my Friday afternoon trying to get my head around how to apply ARIA properly to a tabbed interface. I even got so far as to map it out on my whiteboard and snap a photo so I could mull it over during the weekend. And then…
I have no illusions that accessibility on the web can be tricky. It’s primarily tricky because of the way developers choose to implement it. Web Axe nicely sums it up: Most people don’t realize that the web IS accessible. The problem is that designers and developers break it.— Web Axe…
When I saw main proposed as an element a few months ago (or content or maincontent as alternate names), I didn’t think the process to fold it into the HTML specification would move very quickly. Much to my surprise on the W3C HTML Working Group mailing list the main element…
I’ve been a member of the W3C HTML Working Group for a month now and appear to have joined at a point when there is a push to get HTML5 wrapped up as quickly as possible. While we all (should) know that HTML5 as it is referenced in the media…
My Twitter stream and the headlines of sites across the web yesterday lit up with Facebook’s CEO blaming its stock price (failure to meet hyped expectation) on HTML5 (and its failure to make the Facebook mobile experience suck less). Even ZDNet jumped on that bandwagon with a post titled Facebook’s…