Simon Willison’s Weblog

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80 items tagged “html”

2007

HTML Entity Character Lookup. Look up HTML entities by characters that are a similar shape.

# 3rd July 2007, 3:41 pm / html, unicode, tool

HTML5 differences from HTML4. Useful guide, collated by Anne van Kesteren.

# 16th June 2007, 12:31 am / annevankesteren, html5, html

start.gotapi.com. Lightning fast lookups of API documentation; includes Python docs, YUI, HTML, CSS and lots more.

# 5th June 2007, 6:05 pm / css, html, yui, python, docs, documentation, gotapi

Six Months Later: The New HTML Working Group. In case you haven’t been paying attention, Kevin Yank summarises some of the key discussions in the new HTML working group.

# 10th May 2007, 11:23 pm / html, kevinyank, sitepoint, whatwg

My "why move away from SGML?" reason is the way that every time I have to explain to someone that their Mozilla bug in invalid because HTML is actually an SGML application [...] I finish up by saying "if you want to see the actual spec that I've been told says that, you can buy a copy for 230 Swiss francs."

Phil Ringnalda

# 14th April 2007, 10:21 am / sgml, html, html5, phil-ringnalda

What the heck is HTML 5? Slides from my five minute HTML 5 talk at Oxford Geek Night 2.

# 12th April 2007, 2:41 pm / oxfordgeeknight2, oxford-geek-nights, whatwg, html, speaking

Triplr. Ultra simple GET-based web service for converting RSS / Atom / RDF / Microformats+GRDDL to HTML / ntriples / RDF / RSS / JSON / Turtle. Small pieces, loosely joined.

# 30th March 2007, 3:30 pm / triplr, rss, atom, rdf, microformats, grddl, html, ntriples, json, turtle, semanticweb

W3C Relaunches HTML Activity (via) “XHTML has proved valuable in other markets” == XHTML on the public Web has failed. Long live HTML!

# 7th March 2007, 10:34 pm / html, xhtml, w3c

2006

Tim Berners-Lee: Reinventing HTML. “It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally.” W3C to work on HTML again.

# 28th October 2006, 12:27 am / html, html5, w3c, web-standards, tim-berners-lee

2003

Defending Structural Markup

I’ve been somewhat taken by surprise by the latest round of anti-CSS rants (initiated by JWZ, followups all over the place), mainly because I’ve been using CSS for long enough now that I’d started to forget about the legions of web developers out there who haven’t yet realised what they’re missing. Instead of getting stuck in to dissecting other people’s complaints I’m just going to lay down a few of my own core beliefs.

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Safari conditional comments

The current extended discussion over whether or not Safari should have some kind of specific CSS blocking technique built in (sparked off by Mark Pilgrim) reminds me of a relatively unpublicised feature of Internet Explorer called conditional comments. These specially crafted HTML comments allow web authors to specifically hide code from versions of IE, or alternatively to hide code from any browsers that are not a specified version of IE. Here’s how they work:

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2002

Dave on tag soup

Dave Winer: What is Tag Soup?

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Hixie on XHTML

Ian Hickson: Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful. Ian makes an excellent case for sticking with HTML 4.01 rather than upgrading to XHTML. Here’s the killer point (at least for me):

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Q tag bad

Mark Pilgrim explains why the <q> tag is bad for accessibility.

Accessible headers

Mark’s latest accessibility tip concerns header tags (<h1> through <h6>). Mark explains that using headers in the right order helps screen readers to interpret the structure of your pages, and shows how to use CSS to effectively style headers. Mark once again demonstrates the comment hack as a way of bringing Netscape 4 in line with other browsers, a technique that has been criticised by the More Like This Weblog as unnecessary encouragement for NS4 users. Incidentally, Johannes Koch has an excellent summary of CSS hiding techniques.

Final table tip

A final table tip from Mark: Providing a summary for tables. Mark explains the summary attribute which should be attached to every <table> tag to summarise the purpose of the table. Tables used for layout should include an empty summary attribute to show they are layout tables (in a similar way to empty alt tags for layout images). The summary attribute is only used by text to speech browsers, so I’m slightly confused as to why it should be included for layout tables—surely if the attribute is empty a speech browser will skip tstraight over it as if it wasn’t there?

Accessible tables

Mark has been educating us on the accessible way of marking up tables, with particular reference to calendar tables on blogs. My blog doesn’t have a calendar (yet, I’m considering adding one) but Mark’s articles have brought up some interesting things that I was previously unaware of. Giving your calendar a real caption explains the <caption> tag, which can provide a useful (and easily styled) caption for any table. Using real table headers explains how <th> tags are interpreted by speech browsers and shows how they can be used in conjunction with the abbr attribute to create more accessible table columns.

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Additional navigational links

Today’s accessibility tip: Providing additional navigation aids. Mark explains the concept of “relative” links using the <link> tag, which can be used to provide shortcuts to the next and previous page in a sequence as well as links to a site’s homepage. He also provides instructions for implementing them in Moveable Type, and asks for suggestions as to how it could be done in Radio. These links are not rendered in the actual body of a page but can be used by many browsers to provide additional navigation aids. My blog has these already but only as shortcuts to my categories and a link back to the home page—I haven’t yet implemented them for next/previous buttons while browsing the archives (which is arguably their most useful ability). Time to get hacking...

Day 6: Doctypes

Mark Pilgrim starts his series of weblog accessibility tips today with tutorial on adding a doctype to a blog.

Mark explains all

Over at diveintomark Mark Pilgrim has explained the aims of his Accessibility series:

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