A rather good article comes from 24Ways about what makes a website successful. My fave comment is “Do you ask your clients why they have a website?” When I first started in this business, if anyone asked me about making a site for them, I dove right in, happy to oblige! Friends, families, classmates, didn’t matter. But later, as trying to get anything for a portfolio didn’t matter as much, this is a question I started asking quite regularly. And, as the author, Paul Hoag, states surprisingly often the person asking for a site has no idea why, they just assume they have to have one… A website is like any other form of advertising or service a business provides: if you don’t need it, you shouldn’t be putting time and money into it! That said, Paul goes on to give some great methods for quantifying and justifying a website for a client. You might be surprised how many more clients turning down one client can bring you…
Well, I’m a little behind the times talking about the release of jQuery 1.4 Alpha, which was released in the wild December 4th, but I wanted a chance to have a look at the post and read a few comments; additional info about the new release can also be found in this video from the 2009 jQuery Conference. It appears, as expected, there has been a great deal of optimization, as well as a few new features. My biggest pet-peeve is the .remove() function which doesn’t actually remove elements from the DOM, causing confusion some times with two elements having the same ID, let’s hope that has been cleaned up! Most comments appear to be positive, but this one might cause a few to pause:
- csulok says: “new minified jquery 1.4a1 is 88kb, while 1.3.2 was 52kb”
- to which John Resig replies: “We’re checking out the Closure Compiler – it looks like with the simple compile options on it takes it back down to about 64KB minified, 21.6KB gzipped (a very modest increase over the last release, about 2-3KB).”
And it has been way too long since I rambled on about HTML5, so, here we go! Another article from 24Ways (I love December!), titled HTML5: Tool of Satan, or Yule of Santa? (that’s Bruce Lawson, always trying to get a rise… :-), has a great write-up about canvas and forms! You will not believe what is coming in forms!! (Check an earlier 24Ways article from Inayaili de León if you want to see a killer example of the strength of HTML5 forms, loaded with HTML5, progressive enhancement CSS3!) And yes, IE needs help from JS for pretty much all of HTML5, but honestly, I think it is worth it! Give it a read and see for yourself. I am coming closer and closer to justifying the additional weight of Modernizr (I mean, it’s 7kb, come on!) with every HTML5 article I read… Any takers out there?
Adaptive Path points out two TED Talks that are well-worth watching. Because then you will be able to tell everyone that you have seen the future…
Happy reading,
Atg