Thoughts on web development and technologies by Peter Gasston
2008 June Archive
IE8’s WebSlices - another practical Microformat
One of the new features already announced for IE8 is WebSlices; essentially, the ability to subscribe to any part of a web page, even if it doesn’t have an RSS feed. It sounds somewhat similar to Firefox’s Microsummaries feature*, although it’s a) easier to implement, b) more flexible, and c) not buried in the browser where no-one could ever find it.
Immediate uses for Microformats
One of the hardest things about Microformats is explaining their benefits to people. You can say “It’s a standardised format of marking-up content, which is both human and machine readable!” until you’re blue in the face, but until you can show people a practical benefit they usually remain unmoved.
New features in Firefox 3.1 & beyond
While Firefox 3 is a really fast & usable browser, I was a little disappointed by the (comparative) lack of really new features in the rendering engine; that’s not to say there aren’t any, as there are plenty, but that Safari 3.1 and Opera 9.5 have set the bar very high in their latest iterations.
Grid alignment without frameworks
When building a small site or blog template with a grid-based layout I find ‘CSS frameworks’ such as Blueprint and YUI Grids are overkill; they contain a lot of extra CSS rules which I don’t use. They are (in the vernacular) like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
CSS3 selectors implemented in Firefox 3.1
Not only did I correctly predict Firefox 3.1, but one of my visions was that they implement the remaining CSS 3 selectors - which has just been announced. My uncanny powers are beginning to scare me.
What I saw at @media 2008
As is customary (or as customary as ‘twice’ can be), here is a quick round-up of the sessions I attended at @media this year, with links to slides where available (which, as I type this, is pretty much unavailable).
Sessions which I found particularly interesting should be covered in more detail later, and I’ll update here as […]
Aside
Mark Boulton Design have been selected to redesign drupal.org, the website of the Drupal CMS. I’m a big admirer of Mark’s writing about design and typography, and I think it’s exciting that a big open-source project is going in this direction.
Now, if we could get him to design the Drupal user interface (as Veerle Pieters is doing with Expression Engine), that would really be something.
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