94 posts tagged “html”
2008
Elliotte Rusty Harold: Why XHTML. “XHTML makes life harder for document authors in exchange for making life easier for document consumers.”—since there are a lot more document authors than there are tools for consuming, this seems like an argument AGAINST XHTML to me.
Embedding custom non-visible data in HTML 5. “Every HTML element may have any number of attributes starting with the string ’data-’ specified, with any value.”—this will be incredibly useful for unobtrusive JavaScript where there’s no sensible place to store configuration data as HTML content. It will also mean Dojo has an approved method for adding custom attributes to declaratively instantiate Dojo widgets.
hash. Douglas Crockford: “Any HTML tag that accepts a src= or href= attribute should also be allowed to take a hash= attribute”—to protect against file tampering and (more importantly) provide a truly robust caching mechanism.
2007
I don't even use Firefox and Firebug anymore, the revised Web Inspector in Leopard has been incorporated in Coda and that does everything I need and more.
SVG and text/html. Anne van Kesteren discusses the need for SVG and MathML to be embeddable in HTML 5, not just XHTML.
The longdesc lottery. Mark Pilgrim is now writing for the WHATWG blog. Here he makes the case for replacing the longdesc attribute with a better solution, based on ten years of developer ignorance and misuse. As always with that site, check the comments for a microcosm of the larger debate.
html4all. New mailing list / advocacy group focusing on accessibility issues relevant to HTML 5. This is something that the core HTML 5 group have taken a lot of criticism for, although it’s unfair to say that they don’t care about accessibility (they are however challenging a lot of sacred cows).
Restructured Text to Anything. Slick set of online tools for converting Restructured Text (one of the more mature wiki-style markup languages) to HTML or PDF. Includes a nice looking API. Powered by Django.
jQuery 1.2. Lots of neat new stuff; my favourite new feature is “Partial .load()” which lets you pull in HTML with Ajax and then use a CSS selector to grab a subset of that page and inject it in to the DOM.
Why the Alt Attribute May Be Omitted. “The benefit of requiring the alt attribute to be omitted, rather than simply requiring the empty value, is that it makes a clear distinction between an image that has no alternate text (such as an iconic or graphical representation of the surrounding text) and an image that is a critical part of the content, but for which not alt text is available.”
I've been in this web standards game for five years now and probably have over 100 standards-based sites under my belt. I can count the number of times I've be involved in a redesign where no changes were made to the markup on one finger.
WebCore Rendering I—The Basics. Dave Hyatt has started a series of posts explaining the internals of WebCore’s rendering system.
The CSS Redundancy Checker. A tool for checking your markup for outdated CSS rules that don’t match any of your HTML. We were discussing the need for something similar to this at Torchbox a few weeks ago.
HTML Entity Character Lookup. Look up HTML entities by characters that are a similar shape.
HTML5 differences from HTML4. Useful guide, collated by Anne van Kesteren.
start.gotapi.com. Lightning fast lookups of API documentation; includes Python docs, YUI, HTML, CSS and lots more.
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.
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."
What the heck is HTML 5? Slides from my five minute HTML 5 talk at Oxford Geek Night 2.
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.
W3C Relaunches HTML Activity (via) “XHTML has proved valuable in other markets” == XHTML on the public Web has failed. Long live HTML!
2006
Tim Berners-Lee: Reinventing HTML. “It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally.” W3C to work on HTML again.
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.
[... 841 words]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:
[... 198 words]2002
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):
[... 193 words]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.