2008 was pretty exciting on the web, wasn’t it? The continuing rise of social media, mobile internet, APIs, frameworks… it’s getting harder to keep up with it all.
I won’t be so bold as to make any specific predictions about the year ahead – more of the same is my best guess! – but here are a few articles I’ve read recently which have an eye on the future.
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:
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.