Category: Asides

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.

The WHATWG have released the HTML5 Edition for Web Developers, which removes all of the overly-technical details aimed at browser makers and leaves the important stuff you need to learn — and with a nice readable stylesheet applied.

I just watched a great documentary called The Invention of Dr. Nakamats*, and loved the style of the titles and credits (Vimeo video) by The Ronin. I thought I’d have a go at doing them in CSS, and you can see my first attempt here:

Dr. Nakamats in CSS3.

It uses 3D Transformations so needs to be viewed in Safari for the full effect, but degrades quite gracefully. I had a go at adding some animations to it but it didn’t feel right, so I’ve left that out for now. That aside, I’m happy with the way it looks and it was really easy to make. CSS has come a long way.

* If you’re in the UK you can currently watch this on 4OD.

A few weeks ago I saw Anna Debenham at London Web Standards give a hugely inspiring talk on the state of web development education. She later gave a briefer version of the talk at the Drumbeat Festival. I urge you to at the very least look at the overview and slides of the shorter talk, but if you can put aside 25 minutes you should really watch the video of the full one.

A new version of jQuery has quietly been released over the weekend. It’s only a minor point release but has a couple of features which look amazing: some selector functions now work up to 8x faster than the previous release; and there is support — very clever support — for HTML5 data attributes. Take a look at the jQuery 1.4.3 release notes for more.

Also released was the first alpha of jQuery Mobile, a touch-optimised amalgam of jQuery and jQuery UI. It’s actually a little buggy on my Galaxy S Android phone, but as it’s an alpha release that’s perfectly forgiveable. It looks pretty smart and comprehensive.

Usually when I attend @media (that is, on two previous occasions) I write a follow-up blog post on what I saw there. Well I attended this year, and I’ve written the post, but it’s on the blog of my employer, Preloaded: HTML5, Mobile, and UCD: what we saw at @media.