The importance of semantics on the web

We, as website makers, quite often advise our clients to avoid generic link text (read more,click here, etc.), and explain that more verbose descriptions help give context to users with screen readers. But using semantic link descriptions actually helps everyone.

I recently read Peter Morville’s fantastic book, Ambient Findability, which defined really well the motivation to use semantic descriptions for links: they give the target page aboutness.

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This post discusses the redesign project of my employer’s own website, Preloaded.com, and is cross-posted from there with permission.

At the beginning of the redesign project we agreed some design tenets: the new site should be a best-practice showcase and an opportunity to learn and use some of the latest web technologies; and it should employ existing services where practical.

Last month the W3C released a working draft of the File API, which defines the basic representations for files, lists of files, errors raised by access to files, and programmatic ways to read files. The Firefox team have already implemented much of it, and have released a series of impressive demos on hacks.mozilla.org, which you can see if you have a recent beta of Firefox 3.6 (or a nightly trunk build).

In the first part of this post I gave a potted history of the differing syntaxes, and provided an overview of how that affected linear gradients. In this second part I’m going to look at radial gradients.

Here the syntaxes diverge slightly more, with WebKit requiring more values than Mozilla; while that adds some flexibility, it also increases the complexity.

CSS Gradients were originally proposed by the WebKit team in April 2008, modified from the syntax proposed for the Canvas element of HTML5. In August of this year, Mozilla announced an implementation slightly modified from that of WebKit would be in the next version of Firefox (3.6).

Since then, however, the CSS WG have discussed a different syntax, and a resolution passed to add this to the Image Values module. Mozilla have decided to implement the new syntax, which is simpler than WebKit’s but less flexible.

In this article, which will be split into at least two parts, I’m going to compare the two syntaxes.

With the rapid growth of the mobile web, location-aware services are very much in-demand; the GeoLocation API was proposed to cater to this need.

Implementation is spotty at the moment; Firefox 3.5 supports it, as does Safari for iPhone (although not on the desktop, AFAICS). But it’s so simple to use, I’ve no doubt it will be adopted rapidly.

Support for the CSS Transitions module, originally proposed and implemented by the WebKit team, has just landed in the nightly builds of Firefox; it’s unsure whether this will make it into 3.6, as this is due to be released in the near future, but should be a feature in 3.7 at least.

The experimental feature will use the proprietary –moz– prefix; I’ve updated the demos in my previous post, Anime with CSS and WebKit, to reflect this.