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.
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.
Luckily there are a few tools out there which will help you show off the benefits of using Microformats, and involve little work from you.
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.
So that’s why I was delighted to hear about the 3.1 release of my favourite browser, and doubly delighted when I found out which features the team are planning to work on for inclusion in it:
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.
What I do instead is much simpler; I use an extra stylesheet just for testing, and a single PNG image tiled across the background.
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.
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 I find more presentations.
For no particular reason other than idle curiosity, I made a demo of a broken neon sign, using CSS Animations (you’ll need Firefox 5, Safari or Chrome to see it). It doesn’t degrade well at the moment, the root cause of which is down to what I think is a bug in Firefox’s implementation — I’ll need to confirm that.
One quick learning from making this: it would be really useful to have CSS Mixins when using a lot of repetitive keyframes, as I do in this animation. The W3C seem to be quite against them, however.
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