OpenID60 items tagged “html5”
Internet Explorer Platform Preview Guide for Developers (via) Lots of SVG and CSS3 stuff, no mention of canvas here either though. 
16th March 2010, 6:36 pm
An Early Look At IE9 for Developers (via) Surprisingly, no mention of SVG or canvas and only a note in passing about HTML 5. 
16th March 2010, 6:11 pm
Some questions about the “blocking” of HTML5
Some background reading. I was planning to fill in answers as they arrive, but I screwed up the moderation of the comments and got flooded with detailed responses—I strongly recommend reading the comments. [... 136 words]
The Widening HTML5 Chasm. Simon St. Laurent’s commentary on the HTML5/Adobe situation. The most interesting piece I’ve read on it so far. 15th February 2010, 9:51 pm
No part of HTML5 is, or was ever, “blocked” in the W3C HTML Working Group -- not HTML5, not Canvas 2D Graphics, not Microdata, not Video -- not by me, not by Adobe. Neither Adobe nor I oppose, are fighting, are trying to stop, slow down, hinder, oppose, or harm HTML5, Canvas 2D Graphics, Microdata, video in HTML, or any of the other significant features in HTML5. Claims otherwise are false. Any other disclaimers needed?
— Larry Masinter 15th February 2010, 9:31 pm
At this point all I could honestly tell you from the point of view of the editor of several of the HTML5 documents being held up is that the W3C have said they’re won’t publish without the objections being resolved, and that the objection is from Adobe. I can’t even tell what I could do to resolve the objection. It seems to be entirely a process-based objection.
— Ian Hickson 15th February 2010, 7:38 pm
HTML5 video markup, compatibility and playback. Everything you need to know about embedding HTML5 video on a page, complete with multiple codecs to cover the various supporting browsers and a fallback to Flash. 11th February 2010, 5:49 pm
Plupload (via) Fantastic new open source project from the team behind TinyMCE. Plupload offers a cross-browser JavaScript File uploading API that handles multiple file uploads, client-side progress meters, type filtering and even client-side image resizing and drag-and-drop from the desktop. It achieves all of this by providing backends for Flash, Silverlight, Google Gears, HTML5 and Browserplus and picking the most capable available option. 10th February 2010, 12:53 pm
Lou’s Pseudo 3d Page. Spectacularly detailed exploration of the road graphics used in racing games prior to true 3D. This is a potential gold mine for anyone looking for a fun project to try out with canvas. Bonus points for comet integration—I’m still looking forward to the first real-time multiplayer game in the browser using comet and canvas. 8th February 2010, 11:21 am
svg-edit. Click the “Try out SVG-edit 2.4” link—this is an impressive, full featured open source vector graphics editor that runs in the browser. 7th February 2010, 10:30 am
SublimeVideo—HTML5 Video Player. Still a fair way to go (no Firefox support yet, and they plan to add a Flash fallback for IE) but in Safari this is pretty extraordinary. Smooth video, beautiful UI, full window mode and full screen mode in the latest WebKit nightlies. I’d go as far as saying that this is the nicest online video implementation I’ve seen (at least on the Mac). 2nd February 2010, 9:50 am
HTML 5 audio player demo. Scott Andrew’s experiments with the HTML5 audio element (and jQuery)—straight forward and works a treat in Safari, but Firefox doesn’t support MP3. Presumably it’s not too hard to set up a fallback for Ogg. 1st February 2010, 9:58 am
Real time online activity monitor example with node.js and WebSocket. A neat exploration of Node.js—first hooking a “tail -f” process up to an HTTP push stream, then combining that with HTML 5 WebSockets to achieve reliable streaming. 8th December 2009, 11:07 pm
HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.
— Mark Pilgrim 3rd November 2009, 7:20 am
Dive Into HTML 5. Mark Pilgrim’s free online book on HTML 5—currently just one chapter on canvas (which neatly illustrates the coordinate system using a diagram rendered using canvas itself) but certain to become an invaluable resource for anyone looking to take advantage of HTML 5. 20th August 2009, 2:40 pm
On HTML 5 Drag and Drop. Francisco Tolmasky investigated HTML 5 drag and drop, which allows web apps to implement drag and drop between windows and between the browser and the desktop. He found a number of problems with the spec and proposes detailed solutions. 
17th August 2009, 12:31 pm
HTML 5 Parsing. Firefox nightlies include a new parser that implements the HTML5 parsing algorithm (disabled by default), which uses C++ code automatically generated from Henri Sivonen’s Java parser first used in the HTML5 validator. 11th July 2009, 11:36 pm
In defense of web developers. Zeldman: “The social benefit of rethinking markup sealed the deal. XHTML’s introduction in 2000, and its emphasis on rules of construction, gave web standards evangelists like me a platform on which to hook a program of semantic markup replacing the bloated and unsustainable tag soup of the day.” 7th July 2009, 3:52 pm
Turns out, a lot of people are saddened by the loss of a spec they don’t understand, and if they did, would not bother using.
— Assaf Arkin 6th July 2009, 9:02 pm
An Unnofficial Q&A about the Discontinuation of the XHTML2 WG. By Henri Sivonen. 6th July 2009, 12:27 pm
Yes, it’d be nice if everyone kept up to date on the progress of the various W3C working groups. They don’t. There are a lot of people who asked what professional markup looked like and were told (right or wrong) that XHTML was the future. So they went ahead and learned XHTML, built their websites and chose watching a DVD or spending time with their kids over watching Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby do battle over Postel’s Law. Now all of a sudden they’re told XHTML is dead. Some wailing and gnashing of teeth is to be expected. What’s needed is less “boy aren’t I smarter than them” snideness, and more Hey, here’s what’s up.
— Alan Storm 
4th July 2009, 12:51 pm
Jeffrey Zeldman: XHTML WTF. Reading the comments, it’s scary how many people are totally ill-informed about HTML5 and XHTML5. 
4th July 2009, 1:22 am
Video for Everybody! Reminiscent of the early days of Web Standards, Kroc Camen has created a fiendishly clever chunk of HTML which can play a video on any browser, starting with HTML5 video then falling back on Flash and eventually just an HTML message telling the user where they can download the file. No JavaScript to be seen, but conditional comments abound. Requires you to encode as both Ogg and H.264, but Kroc includes details instructions for doing that using Handbrake. 2nd July 2009, 7:33 pm
Modernizr (via) Neat idea and an unobtrusive implementation: a JavaScript library that runs feature tests for various HTML5 features (canvas, box shadow, CSS transforms and so on) and adds classes to the HTML body element, allowing you to write CSS selectors that only apply if a feature is present. Detected features are exposed to JavaScript as boolean properties, e.g. Modernizer.multiplebgs. 2nd July 2009, 10:56 am
Codecs for <audio> and <video>. HTML 5 will not be requiring support for specific audio and video codecs—Ian Hickson explains why, in great detail. Short version: Apple won’t implement Theora due to lack of hardware support and an “uncertain patent landscape”, while open source browsers (Chromium and Mozilla) can’t support H.264 due to the cost of the licenses. 2nd July 2009, 10:16 am
Firefox 3.5 for developers. It’s out today, and the feature list is huge. Highlights include HTML 5 drag ’n’ drop, audio and video elements, offline resources, downloadable fonts, text-shadow, CSS transforms with -moz-transform, localStorage, geolocation, web workers, trackpad swipe events, native JSON, cross-site HTTP requests, text API for canvas, defer attribute for the script element and TraceMonkey for better JS performance! 30th June 2009, 6:08 pm
Interview with Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification. By Bruce Lawson of the Web Standards Project. Worth reading. 14th May 2009, 4:07 pm
[whatwg] Annotating structured data that HTML has no semantics for. Hixie’s proposal for microdata, a simplified RDFa to be included in the HTML5 spec which allows self-contained communities to invent their own microformat-style spec and use it to add structured semantics to their markup. Whether or not you like the proposal itself the explanation is a fascinating read. 
11th May 2009, 2:41 pm
We did some studies and found that the attribute was almost never used, and most of the time, when it was used, it was a typo where someone meant to write rel=“” but wrote rev=“”. To be precise, the most commonly used value was rev=“made”, which is equivalent to rel=“author” and thus was not a convincing use case. The second most common value was rev=“stylesheet”, which is meaningless and obviously meant to be rel=“stylesheet”.
— Ian Hickson 
14th April 2009, 4:34 pm
Making the HTML5 time element safe for historians. PPK presents a detailed history of dates and calendars and points out that the HTML5 time element is ill prepared to faithfully represent the kind of dates historians are interested in. 6th April 2009, 2:01 pm
The HTML5 parsing specification contains rules to transform any possible sequence of characters or bytes into a standard document object model. From conversations with Ian, I believe this was one of his primary goals for the initial HTML5 specification.
— Benjamin Smedberg 15th January 2009, 10:19 pm
Someone asked for onbeforeunload, so I started fixing it. Then I found that there was some rot in the drywall. So I took down the drywall. Then I found a rat infestation. So I killed all the rats. Then I found that the reason for the rot was a slow leak in the plumbing. So I tried fixing the plumbing, but it turned out the whole building used lead pipes. So I had to redo all the plumbing. But then I found that the town’s water system wasn’t quite compatible with modern plumbing techniques, and I had to dig up the entire town. And that’s basically it.
— Ian Hickson 19th December 2008, 1:58 pm
This Week in HTML 5—Episode 7: Clickjacking. Clickjacking is when a third party site is embedded in an iframe with opacity 0 and positioned such that a click on the page actually hits a button on the now invisible third party site. Mark Pilgrim explains how the NoScript site uses this in a non malicious way to for the “install now!” button. 1st October 2008, 1:48 am
html-whitelist (via) DeWitt Clinton’s web service wrapper aroud the html5lib HTML sanitiser, hosted on AppEngine. 24th September 2008, 11:54 pm
The alt=“” attribute from Ian Hickson. In case you were wondering how it all ended, Hixie has a mammoth summary post explaining the facts and the potential alternatives. 11th September 2008, 5:45 pm
Interview with Ian Hickson about HTML5. Good questions, interesting answers, including an explanation and breakdown of the planned 2022 date for the final recommendation. 11th September 2008, 5:29 pm
This Week in HTML 5—Episode 1. It looks like the most controversial aspect of the HTML 5 spec has been addressed—now, instead of omitting the alt attribute for user generated content that has no relevant information available, sites are advised to provide an indication of the kind of image expected surrounded by braces, for example alt=“{uploaded photo}”. 7th August 2008, 7:57 am
Independence Day: HTML5 WebSocket Liberates Comet From Hacks. The HTML5 spec now includes WebSocket, a TCP-style persistent socket mechanism between client and server using an HTTP handshake to work around firewalls. The Orbited comet implementation provides a WebSocket compatible API to existing browsers today, and can also act as a firewall/proxy between WebSocket and regular TCP sockets, allowing browsers to talk to things like XMPP servers using Orbited to bridge the gap. 4th July 2008, 9:54 am
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. 
5th June 2008, 9:25 pm
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. 19th April 2008, 10:58 pm
HTML 5 vs. Yadis. The draft HTML5 spec currently disallows values for http-equiv and link rel which aren’t listed in the spec—meaning both methods of specifying a link to an OpenID server are invalid for HTML5. This should probably be fixed... 19th April 2008, 4:35 pm
Draconian failure on error is not the answer problems of Postel’s law. Draconian error handling creates an unstable equilibrium in Game Theory terms —it only lasts until one player breaks the rule. One non-Draconian XML5 implementation in key client product and the Draconian XML ranks would break. Well-specified error recovery is the right way to implement the liberal part of Postel’s law.
— Henri Sivonen 20th March 2008, 2:43 pm
For the record, my site is valid HTML 5, except the parts that aren’t. My therapist says I shouldn’t rely so much on external validation.
— Mark Pilgrim 10th March 2008, 2:01 pm
xssinterface (via) Clever JavaScript library for implementing opt-in cross-domain messaging in JavaScript (allowing communication between pages and iframes on different domains). Uses HTML 5’s postMessage API if available, otherwise falls back on either Google Gears or a clever cookie hack. 5th March 2008, 12:08 am
Cross-Window Messaging. Now in Firefox 3 trunk, the HTML 5 specified ability for JavaScript to send messages between windows (or iframes) hosted on different domains. Fantastically powerful, but must be implemented with care to avoid accidentally processing bad messages from malicious third parties. 10th February 2008, 12 pm
Sunsetting Quirks Mode. Apparently proper standards support in IE (or at least the IE8 renderer) will be triggered by the HTML5 doctype, providing an alternative to those who don’t wish to pollute their markup with an IE-specific meta tag. 23rd January 2008, 2:56 pm
HTML 5 published as W3C First Public Working Draft! A significant step, almost completely overlooked in the hubbub over IE8. 23rd January 2008, 2:15 am
HTML5 Media Support in WebKit. WebKit continues to lead the pack when it comes to trying out new HTML5 proposals. The new audio and video elements make embedding media easy, and provide a neat listener API for hooking in to “playback ended” events. 
12th November 2007, 11:21 pm
WebKit Does HTML5 Client-side Database Storage. SQLite strikes again. The WebKit team have included a neat update to their Web Inspector that lets you browse and modify your client-side databases. 20th October 2007, 12:03 pm
SVG and text/html. Anne van Kesteren discusses the need for SVG and MathML to be embeddable in HTML 5, not just XHTML. 17th October 2007, 4:06 pm
Tabula Fracta. Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan offers advice for anyone aiming to create a new rendering engine from scratch. The WHATWG’s work on specifying real-world browser behaviour and error models gets a well deserved mention. 9th October 2007, 1:20 am
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. 14th September 2007, 11:44 am
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). 14th September 2007, 11:35 am
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.” 
25th August 2007, 1:11 pm
HTML5 differences from HTML4. Useful guide, collated by Anne van Kesteren. 16th June 2007, 12:31 am
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
HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web. Covers similar topics to my talk, but in much more detail. 12th April 2007, 3:09 pm
Improve your forms using HTML5! (via) Anne Van Kesteren demonstrates the Web Forms 2 support in Opera 9—new form attributes include autofocus, required and type=email. 13th March 2007, 2:08 pm
html5lib (via) A python library for working with HTML5 documents. 22nd December 2006, 11:58 pm
Tim Berners-Lee: Reinventing HTML. “It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally.” W3C to work on HTML again. 28th October 2006, 12:27 am
