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Items tagged html5, html

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Is there any consensus yet on link rel=shorturl vs rev=canonical?

It’s pretty clear from the answers that rev=canonical v.s. rel=canonical is way too confusing—so it’s down to rel=shortlink v.s. rel=shorturl.

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Paper 5 | Scribd (via) A more impressive example of Scribd’s new HTML/CSS document viewer: a mathematics-heavy LaTeX paper by one of Scribd’s engineers. # 7th May 2010, 12:12 pm

Scribd in HTML5. Outstanding piece of engineering work from Scribd—they can now render documents using HTML, webfonts and a ton of CSS absolute positioning (using ems rather than pixels) instead of Flash. Nothing to do with HTML5 of course, which is rapidly replacing Ajax as the most mis-applied terminology on the Web. That nit-pick feels pretty insignificant compared to their overall achievement though—being able to convert any formatted document (.doc, pdf etc) in to HTML and CSS that displays correctly is a real leap forward. # 7th May 2010, 12:09 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

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

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

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

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

Tim Berners-Lee: Reinventing HTML. “It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally.” W3C to work on HTML again. # 28th October 2006, 12:27 am