So, it turns out that the good old Facebook ‘Like’ buttons and Google’s ‘Plus one’ buttons don’t behave well on HTML5 format websites. That’s because they make use of XHTML and namespaces. Sure, mixing XHTML and HTML5 together on a single page works just fine for the end-user, but when it comes to validating your pages on the W3C, it just won’t work.
What’s the ‘solution’? Why, hacking it, of course. Take the code for those elements out of the source, and embed it with JavaScript instead. And it doesn’t have to be complex either – you can use inline JavaScript code.
Wrap your button embed HTML in a <script> tag, add a CDATA block, and encompass it in a document.write() function, and you’re done.
So this code:
Becomes this code:
Of course, this being a hack, I can’t really speak for this being good practice, but it works. Evaluating the pitfalls will come later, I’m sure!
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.
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.
You mightn’t think it was possible, the lack of implimentations you see for it on a day-to-day basis, but actually you can create Calendar events for a wide range of email / organiser clients using the iCalendar file format.
From the users’ point of view, your Calendar event appears as every other hyperlink does in your html pages – but when they click on the link, instead of being taken to a new page, Outlook opens up an ‘add event’ just as if they’d clicked on a meeting request (in Outlook).
From the developers’ point of view, once you have your server configured correctly, it’s just a case of creating and linking to an .ics file instead of a .htm file – at which point the client’s email software should take over.
I don’t know – try clicking on this link. If MIME types are incorrectly set you’ll probably see a plain text file, and if you don’t have an application setup that’s compatable with iCalendar events, you’ll probably just be asked to save the file to your hard drive.
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