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…
You might recognize the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) from such specifications as HTML, CSS, XHTML, ARIA, MWABP and other acronyms that are hardly pronounceable. Today the W3C has added yet another item to its list, in the form of the Federated Social Web Incubator Group (the announcement). You may…
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards body that has brought us such fun specs as HTML, XHTML (or what’s left of it), CSS and other exciting yet dry specs, has today announced that it has created a standard for mobile web applications best practices. From the Mobile Web…
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,…
The history of the web is littered with unexpected patent claims that feel frivolous to nearly all. These are driven partly by a terrible system for reviewing and awarding patents and a litigious society that sustains a business model of lawsuits in the hopes that some will just pay.The latest…
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 will be speaking twice in September, both of them sponsored by Infotech Niagara. If you’re in the Buffalo area, these are great opportunities to boost my ego and watch me cruise abandoned plates for food. Developing Coding Standards The first event is Developing Coding Standards, where I will be…
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…
Until CSS3 is a final specification, we can expect to see browser makers attempting to implement some of the ideas on their own, sometimes with a nod to the forthcoming spec and sometimes without a clear correlation. Given the pressure for browser makers to claim support for a CSS3 feature…