HTML5 in Action is the Manning Deal of the Day!
Apr 9th
Half off my book HTML5 in Action. Use code dotd0409au at manning.com.
If you want to ask questions about the book, or anything to do with HTML5, Java Ranch have a companion promotion this week.
Links for June 2011
Jun 27th
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Clip your hidden content for better accessibility | Yahoo! Accessibility Library - How you hide your extra content for screen readers can make a big difference to accessibility, this post gives a run down of all the techniques and examines clipping in detail.
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Google Testing Blog: Introducing DOM Snitch, our passive in-the-browser reconnaissance tool - A Chrome extension that enables developers and testers to identify insecure practices commonly found in client-side code.
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How To Run A News Site And Newspaper Using WordPress And Google Docs - 10,000 Words - An interesting approach to building a newspaper, using free tools to generate and publish the content online, then feeding that same content into InDesign for the print edition.
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Microformats 2 and RDFa Collaboration | The Beautiful, Tormented Machine - Finding common ground in the quest to express semantic data in web pages.
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The 11 JavaScript Mistakes you’re Making | Nettuts+ - Well written introduction to several things you really ought to know before doing any serious JavaScript.
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Useful :nth-child Recipes | CSS-Tricks - Several good examples with clear illustrations.
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publicdata.eu: Data, Apps and 800,000 Triples at lod2.okfn.org - The Open Knowledge Foundation announce the launch of a European-wide registry of semantic web data.
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pdf.js: Rendering PDF with HTML5 and JavaScript | Andreas Gal - A JavaScript library for rendering PDFs into a canvas element without any server side support, future plans include rendering to SVG.
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Cascading Style Sheets Standard Boasts Unprecedented Interoperability - After just a single, short decade of development the CSS2.1 standard is now a W3C Recommendation.
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Where are my rounded corners? « Boagworld - "Sometimes we see confusion among our clients when they see their new site in their browser and it looks different to the design they signed off. In this fact-sheet we explain why accepting these differences has many benefits and doing so outweighs the limited drawbacks."
Links for May 2011
May 21st
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Font sizing with rem - Snook.ca - The rem unit offers an excellent alternative to relative font sizing with em an percentage units.
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Javascript Mistakes You Must Avoid - Good list of JavaScript gotchas, the event delegation tip was particularly timely for me.
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Adactio: Journal—Content First - Don't design 'canvas in', starting with a few specific pixel widths, design 'content out'.
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Thoughts on when to use Canvas and SVG - IEBlog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Nice article summarizing the sweet spots of the two technologies with use cases.
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Basic SVG Animation - The first in a series of MSDN articles on animating SVG with JavaScript.
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The Semantic Web, Linked Data and Drupal, Part 1: Expose your data using RDF - "Drupal 7 is the first mainstream content management system to support Semantic Web technology in its core. Readily usable, Semantic Web technology lets you push the web from a web of documents to a web of data. In this article, learn to make your web data more interoperable and your data sharing more efficient."
Links for April 2011
Apr 13th
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Maqetta - "Maqetta is an open source project that provides WYSIWYG visual authoring of HTML5 user interfaces. The Maqetta application itself is authored in HTML, and therefore runs in the browser without requiring additional plugins or downloads."
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The Cicada Principle and Why It Matters to Web Designers » HTML & CSS, Layout » Design Festival - Have you been looking for a example which takes advantage of CSS3's multiple background images that isn't a re-hashing of the sliding doors technique? Here it is...
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HTML5, ARIA Roles, and Screen Readers in March 2011 | Research | Accessible Culture - With the release of Firefox 4 and IE9, how much has screenreader support for ARIA improved since last year?
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Keyboard Accessibility for Web Applications - Snook.ca - JavaScript isn't always bad for accessibility, it can be really useful in providing a consistent experience for keyboard users.
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Longdesc Misuse: How Prevalent? at Karl Groves - Is longdesc really universally misused? New research indicates: no.
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Designing For The Future Web - Smashing Magazine - "If a single consistent experience is our goal, this begs the question, should we create a mobile website that scales up or a desktop website that degrades? The answer is neither. We should try to create a single design that can be used across all devices without alteration. But in practice, at least for the moment, we should start with the simplest website and work up."
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The CSS3 Flexible Box Layout (flexbox) | 456 Berea Street - Centring elements vertically with flexboxes.
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Give Floats the Flick in CSS Layouts » Web Tech » SitePoint Blogs - Andrew Tetlaw discusses several CSS layout techniques which are far more reliable than floats (if you don't have to support IE6/7).
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HTML5 does NOT allow “self-closing” tags … • Tiffany B. Brown - Just because you can use opening tags without closing tags in HTML5 doesn't mean you should.
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The Current State of HTML5 Forms · Wufoo - A comprehensive guide to HTML5 forms support in current browsers, consisting of a nice summary and a collection of detailed pages.
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Can Hated Design Elements Be Made to Work? (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) - Once a design element becomes universally hated (eg. flashing banner ads, popups) then if you implement a similar looking design element, even if you implement your feature in a usable and intuitive manner, most people will dismiss it immediately based on their past experiences. There are signs this is starting to happen with lightboxes.
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Wallaby | Adobe Flash FLA to HTML - Adobe Labs - Convert Flash animations to HTML5 with this AIR app.
Links for March 2011
Mar 7th
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David Baron's weblog: What does a blur radius mean? - You may have been hearing for several years that all browsers support box-shadow and we should just drop the vendor prefixes already. If you've been wondering why they haven't, this post indicates the level of interoperability the browser vendors have been aiming for.
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Rangnarök - HTML 5 compliance: the next step - Try out Opera's new HTML5 parser in an 11.50 alpha build, consistent cross browser parsing for bad markup.
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The Tink Tank » London Web Standards presentation - Although nominally about the current lack of screen reader support for HTML5 semantic improvements, this talk also includes an excellent introduction to screen readers in general.
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Cross Platform Scalable Vector Graphics with svgweb - "Despite all the attention being paid to canvas, there’s still a place for good ole SVG, particularly for developers looking to replace plug-ins like Flash for data visualization."
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isolani - Javascript: Breaking the Web with hash-bangs - Should websites work without JavaScript? Twitter and Gawker apparently believe that they shouldn't.
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Draggables - Using Microformats and HTML5 drag and drop to build a new, user friendly model for data exchange between websites.
Links for February 2011
Feb 6th
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jQuery: » jQuery 1.5 Released - JQuery 1.5 boasts significant performance improvements and an all new wrapper for AJAX requests.
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Bibliographic Data Licensing Sample Files - Sample RDF data from the British Library.
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Julia Map - A nice Mandelbrot/Julia renderer in a Google Maps style interface where canvas elements are used as the map tiles.
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HTML5 vs. HTML – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report - Is it HTML5? Is it HTML? Does it matter? Zeldman weighs in on the debate.
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What the Heck is Shadow DOM? « Dimitri Glazkov - If you're building a library of rich UI widgets out of HTML components you might want to encapsulate all that complexity so that users of your widgets only have to deal with a single element, this is called shadow DOM and the public-webapps group is currently discussing how to make this available to scripts.
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Internet Explorer UA Style Sheets - Details of the default styles for different versions of IE.
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Adactio: Journal—The design of datalist - How to use datalist in browsers that support it, but fallback to a regular select in older browsers.
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Computer Science Unplugged | - "CS Unplugged is a collection of free learning activities that teach Computer Science through engaging games and puzzles that use cards, string, crayons and lots of running around."
Links for January 2nd
Jan 2nd
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HTML Lint - Your code may validate, but in the HTML5 world that doesn't mean as much as it used to. This tool lets you check HTML5 to similar levels of conformance as XHTML validation.
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London's Abandoned Tube Stations - Fascinating photos of London's underground history.
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Staging Servers, Source Control & Deploy Workflows, And Other Stuff Nobody Teaches You: MicroISV on a Shoestring - If your deployment workflow generally involves a whole lot of bubble gum, duct tape, and praying then reading this is a good place to start improving things.
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MS Excel: Delete all hyperlinks on a sheet in Excel 2003/XP/2000/97 - At work I sometimes use Excel as a sort of hand driven screen scraper to get tables of data off a web page and into a useful format, one issue with this is that the resulting data is littered with hyperlinks which are a pain to remove manually. This is the most straightforward way I found to get rid of them all, works in Excel 2007 too.
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Troy Hunt: OWASP Top 10 for .NET developers part 6: Security Misconfiguration - Some tips on configuring ASP.Net in a more secure fashion on production environments.
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Pinboard - antisocial bookmarking - With the news that del.icio.us is getting shut down by Yahoo!, I've switched my bookmarks to pinboard.in.
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HTML 5 Outliner - See the results of running the HTML5 outlining algorithm on your pages.
Links for December 5th
Dec 5th
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A List Apart: Articles: ARIA and Progressive Enhancement - ARIA can potentially offer great accessibility benefits in rich internet applications, but support is inconsistent and patchy - can ARIA be implemented in a way compatible with progressive enhancement?
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A List Apart: Articles: The Accessibility of WAI-ARIA - A look at the practical issues around testing accessibility and implementing ARIA in the sort of browsers and assistive technologies currently in use.
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WebAIM: Blog - The Ghosts of ARIA Present and Future - Some excellent commentary on the two ALA posts, suggesting a slightly more forward thinking approach.
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Getting to work with new web technologies - An excellent introduction to HTML5 and CSS3 and lots of practical advice on implementing it in today's browsers.
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Microformat Shiv - "The microformat shiv is based on the microformat API for Mozilla's extensions. This is the same code base as the popular Operator plug-in."
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Imran Nazar: GameBoy Emulation in JavaScript: Interrupts - The latest in a series of posts as Imran builds a GameBoy emulator in HTML5.
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Inline-Block whitespace workaround | Life @ High Road Communications - If you've switched from floats to inline-block for your layouts then this article has some useful tips.
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h5Validate | jQuery Plugins - A jQuery plugin that understands HTML5 forms and knows how to validate them based on new input attributes such as "required" and "pattern", even in browsers that don't yet support HTML5.
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Philosophtly: The web is not a sheet of paper - An important message for print designers seeking to transition to web design.
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isEventSupported - Handy script for detecting if a browser supports particular events.
Links for November 21st
Nov 21st
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A List Apart: Articles: CSS Positioning 101 - An excellent introduction to the often misunderstood position property.
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Styling Form Controls – WebKit - The new HTML5 meter and progress elements can be styled through CSS in Chrome and Safari.
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Learning to Love HTML5 - Smashing Magazine - Great introduction to some of the new features in HTML5.
Links for November 7th
Nov 7th
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CSS Vocabulary | Nimbupani Designs - Handy guide to CSS terminology.
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Things Worth Noting About CSS Attribute Selectors - A good introduction to the various possibilities available to you with attribute selectors.
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CSS3 :target based interfaces - Opera Developer Community - Use the :target selector to create slideshow style interfaces.
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Wealthfront Engineering: jQuery the Right Way - An easy to follow summary of things you should learn as you move from novice towards jQuery master.
Links for October 24th
Oct 24th
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video + canvas = magic | HTML5 Doctor - Combine the video element with the canvas element for fun and profit.
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Web Teacher › ARIA States 101 - A look at ARIA roles for describing widget state.
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Web Teacher › ARIA Roles 101 - A look at ARIA roles for describing page structure and widget types.
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Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator - ColorZilla.com - Easily generate CSS markup for gradients in Firefox, WebKit and IE.
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MIX Online:Ai to Canvas Plug-In - Export your Illustrator drawings directly to HTML5 Canvas, including support for animations and hooking into scripts.
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svg-edit - Project Hosting on Google Code - SVG-edit is a fast, web-based, Javascript-driven SVG editor that works in any modern browser.
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An introduction to using WAI-ARIA to enable Web 2.0 accessibility - Coverage of Presentation of document structure (landmarks), Dynamic content updates (live regions), Keyboard accessibility enhancements (tabindex), and Widget accessibility (role, name & state).
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