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.
With complaints about Microsoft’s lack of information regarding the next release of Internet Explorer surfacing again, I thought I’d do a quick trawl of the internet and find out what features we might expect from the next release, both speculated and confirmed.
Although they didn’t create the concept, Mozilla popularised tabbed browsing with the release of Firefox. Tabbed browsing is, of course, a very good thing; the old IE model of having a separate window for every instance of a site you open became unmanageable when computers got more powerful and websites no longer slowed down the whole machine. Now all of the major browsers feature the tabbed interface.
Which makes Mozilla’s latest invention, Prism, seem a bit of a weird step backwards;
I find all the fanboy attention being paid to the iPhone more than a little embarrassing. I mean, certainly it looks nice; but it’s just an object. A thing. Not something to fawn over to the degree we’ve seen today.
I’ve used Bloglines for a long time to organise the many (too many?) feeds I read daily. I’ve always been happy with it, resisting the charms of new kids on the block such as Google Reader, but recently there’ve been some changes I find have taken the service a few steps backwards.
Mozilla’s Chris Double has announced on his blog that he’s implemented the (proposed) HTML5 <video> element in a build of Firefox (demo screencast). The element will natively support OGG Theora files.
While I think this is great news and has a lot of potential, I foresee one major obstacle to this becoming standard: proprietary codecs. If they decide to implement it, Apple will want Quicktime in Safari, and Microsoft will want Windows Media Video in Internet Explorer.
As one commenter notes, the idea will be to have fallback options for anyone who doesn’t have an OGG player, probably in Java; there are some examples of how this will work on the Wikipedia Video page (caution: this caused Firefox on OS X to crash, although Firefox on Ubuntu played it perfectly).
Theora is obviously the most common-sense cross-browser, cross-platform, non-proprietary solution; but since when has the internet been governed by common sense?
Update: Since writing this post, I’ve found out that Opera also has an experimental implementation.
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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