Thoughts on web development and technologies by Peter Gasston
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.
The Microformats vEvent that wasn’t
Having missed the opening party, my introduction to London Web Week was last night’s Microformats vEvent. Unfortunately it wasn’t a good introduction, for two reasons;
First (and foremost), it wasn’t really about Microformats. The first speaker talked about RDFa and GRDDL, the second about RDFa and FOAF.
Second, the presumption was that we had an extremely high level of […]
More findings from IE8: XHTML and @import
Had the chance to run a few more tests to find out what’s new (and what’s not) in IE8. Good: @import media types seem to be implemented; Bad: XHTML still isn’t parsed, so everyone who thinks they are coding XHTML are still kidding themselves.
Three things I’d like to see in Firefox 3.1
Let me say up front that from what I’ve seen of Firefox 3 so far, it really looks to be a knockout browser; it’s light, fast, extensible, and the interface is flawless. The one and only thing that’s disappointed me slightly, however, is the lack of new front-end features for developers like myself to take […]
SVG in background-image
If adopted widely, the use of SVG in <img /> and background-image could be responsible for some big changes in website design.
Take a look at this example of images in SVG (you’ll need an SVG-capable browser), which displays four photos at random positions and sizes on the page. Images could be pulled at random from Flickr […]
Aside
I’m slightly late with this, but I was happy to see that Opera have launched their first Web Standards Curriculum for teaching best practice in client-side development. With developers in the Netherlands setting up what could well be the world’s first front-end professional guild, and a full British Standard for accessibility in the works, the signs are promising that we’re entering into a new phase of professionalism in web development.
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