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 technical knowledge; a presumption that wasn’t true, in my case at least. I’m fairly new to Microformats but I have a pretty good idea of what they’re about; both talks went over my head anyway. And my poor wife, who’s learning about them for the first time, had no idea what was going on.
The description of the event said:
We hope that no matter your experience level, you’ll find the evening informative, enjoyable and inspiring.
I didn’t. In fact, it may well have been counter-productive for me; it took a subject I’m excited about, and made it sound complicated and boring.
I’m sure that some people would have got a lot out of it — the man next to me who’s studying for his pHD in artificial intelligence certainly seemed to enjoy it — but I think the organisers should have been more honest about the technical knowledge required, and saved some attendees a bit of time.
I did get a book for asking a question, however, so it wasn’t a total loss.
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.
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 advantage of.
Online applications have been given a huge boost with offline storage and new HTML 5 features, but where are the shiny graphical hooks for us to play with? Below are three new features I’d like to see implemented in Firefox 3.1 (which I’ve just made up).
NB: This might seem a bit previous, as Firefox 3 hasn’t actually been released yet, but I’ve been using the nightlies for a while and it seems unlikely that any of these features will be implemented before launch.
Update: There’s a more practical look at this subject in a later post, Using 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 (or wherever) and rotated, resized, and placed in the page as a background. Combined with multiple images, you could create layers of effect, almost like collages… pretty revolutionary.
div { background-image:
url('layer1.svg') left top,
url('layer2.svg') left top,
url('layer3.svg') left top;
}
It looks like Opera will be first to implement this feature with their 9.5 release, previews of which should be available soon. No definitive word on whether they’ll implement multiple backgrounds, but I’m hopeful.
I’m back from my holiday, with a quick look at some of the links I would have discussed in more detail had I been here…
One technology that’s ready to take the step up onto the big stage is SVG. If you’re not sure what that is, its Wikipedia entry provides a good summary:
SVG is an XML markup language for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and animated.
That’s a pretty big deal; static or animated images which are marked up with XML, meaning you can use the DOM to manipulate them. Interactive images; imagine the possibilities!
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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