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Psyked *

it’s easy once you know how.

Link: Flash, Google, VP8, and the future of internet video

Posted by James - 12/05/10 at 01:05:09 pm

Interesting and very thorough post on the history, state of play and possible motivations for the row over Flash and HTML5 video – formats, patents, support; that kind of thing.

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292

So, what can you do with HTML5?

Posted by James - 14/04/10 at 09:04:57 am

For all the buzz it’s getting, you’d think HTML5 was an avalanche of new features crashing around the web.  Seems more like the first snow of the year – you know; the one everyone hopes will herald days off work and snowball fights, but then melts away overnight.  So I thought it was time I got off my ass and learned a bit more about HTML5 to see if it’s really all people say it is.

First things first – what features actually make up HTML5, and how widely supported are they?
Turns out, there’s already a site which tracks the features and their browser support:

http://www.findmebyip.com/litmus

HTML5 is made up of a lot of things – storage, offline modes, video, audio, dynamic drawing, clever forms.  Make sense I guess – HTML5 is a cherry-picked set of features we can implement already with plugins and javascript.  Reading through the checklist it’s clear that there’s a couple of hands down winners on the adoption front, and total losers too.  None of them implement everything just yet though.

Continue reading So, what can you do with HTML5?…

XHTML, Hyperlinks and separating content from style.

Posted by James - 15/10/07 at 09:10:51 pm

XHTML is the attempt to purify the traditional mishmash of HTML standards, separating content from appearance, and to create a more elegant solution, for a more civilized age.

That’s great in theory – but unless you’re armed with a plethora of cross-browser scripts and an iron will, moving to XHTML 1.0 Strict is a hard, bumpy road. And often one with little discernable gain. Did you know you can’t use target attributes in link tags? Or alignment tags? Ok, so the alignment tags is a non-issue – we can do the same with CSS styles. But how, pray tell, do we achieve the feats we take for granted in HTML – target=”_blank” ?
Continue reading XHTML, Hyperlinks and separating content from style….

Little HTML mysteries… alt vs. title

Posted by James - 18/07/07 at 08:07:20 pm

This is something that I’ve had a wee bit of an issue with recently, but I thought I’d mention it now. Why not, eh?

For the uninitiated, alt tags are alternative text, a label if you will, that is used to explain the content of an image, when images are blocked or you’re on some rubbishy connection. (or a non-standard or non-desktop browser like mobile web) Alt tags are also a basic requirement of the W3C WAI guidelines, and must be included for Accessible websites – something that is most important for UK based websites – which have to be accessible, under UK Disability Discrimination laws.

Title tags on the other hand, Continue reading Little HTML mysteries… alt vs. title…

More than just validation…

Posted by James - 01/06/07 at 10:06:25 pm

Validation. It’s an important element to production of those pesky websites. Probably more important and more awkward than it should be. No, scratch that, deffinately more awkward than it should be. But that’s not all there is to making a decent website, oh no sir. Content, variety, conformity, tracking. I wish we got to work with clients who grasp this stuff a little better. – But then, perhaps we need to explain things better?

Sitescore, from Silktide, has just appeared back on the scene. (they were ‘down’ for a few weeks while they upgraded their services) Few online validation tools can be used on their own, and Sitescore is one of those. Continue reading More than just validation……

Obscure Markup

Posted by James - 26/02/07 at 05:02:50 pm

This is probably the least tipworthy tip i can find, but here’s some of the weirdest, most unusual tags and functions you can use in your basic HTML.

http://obscuretags.com/

What interests me most is the encoding of base64 data in your text code. (Check previous posts and you can see i’ve touched on this before) But now thanks to this article you can have a look at these links; One for the wiki on it and t’other for a website that can generate this base64 code for you from your images. How about that?