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.
As you’re no doubt aware, HTML5 video is this year’s big thing – but there’s a dispute going on about which should become the default standard video codec. The current nascent de facto standard is H.264, but recently the new WebM format is gaining traction.
I’ve no idea how the web video format war will end. My preference is that a free, non-patent encumbered, high-quality video codec will become the standard, and WebM is the best fit for that description. Despite the recent announcement by the MPEG LA, the patent pool which controls licensing of H.264, that it will always be free for ‘video delivered to the internet without charge’, that still doesn’t make it free-as-in-speech, and still not free-as-in-beer for anyone wanting to build a business around video encoding/decoding (which includes, if I’m not mistaken, bundling it with a browser). All that said, my preference is meaningless in the face of so many vested business interests.
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While having a look through the list of features for developers planned for Firefox 4 earlier today, I noticed this:
You can now use SVG with the img
element, as well as the background image in CSS.
I know you can already use SVG in background-image
with Safari, Chrome and Opera, and this, coupled with Internet Explorer’s push towards SVG and the strong chance this will be available in IE9, made me decide to take a closer look.
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With the rapid growth of the mobile web, location-aware services are very much in-demand; the GeoLocation API was proposed to cater to this need.
Implementation is spotty at the moment; Firefox 3.5 supports it, as does Safari for iPhone (although not on the desktop, AFAICS). But it’s so simple to use, I’ve no doubt it will be adopted rapidly.
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The recent release of the Safari 4 Beta saw a new standards proposal from the Webkit team, for controlling animation using CSS. While there’s still a debate to be had about whether CSS is the right language for this (I still fall on the side that it doesn’t, strictly), I do think their implementation is well handled. I wanted to try it out, so I went back to the earliest form of digital entertainment: Pong!
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I’ve become one of the ranked masses of iPhone users, and now that I’ve come to terms with its limitations I’m generally pretty happy with it. One thing that strikes me as pretty strange, however, is the lack of support for the common data formats iCalendar and vCard – and, as a result of that, the non-existent support of the hCalendar and hCard microformats – in Safari.
It seems to me that a device such as the iPhone, with its built-in calendar and address book, would be able to make great use of the above microformats to pull contact data and events from web pages; it is, in fact, almost the perfect device for doing so.
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