Let’s start this one off without a bang… As in, no explosion, no combustion, just air, powering a car… Not perfect, but a darned-site better than the puffs of exhaust coming out of cars, vans and trucks currently!
For some time now we’ve been reading about large companies slowly dropping support for IE6, but most of us are still left in the dark ages, making our pages look brilliant in FF or Chrome, then spending countless hours trying to harangue things into shape for IE6 or 7… Well, from that front comes even darker news regarding our future browser matrices…
Thanks go out to Dan Mendelsohn for pointing me to a couple new Paul Irish videos about new Dev Tool features. Paul is always fun and easy to listen to, he has a great way of explaining things so they sound really simple, but he’s also always filled with useful tidbits. There’s a lot in these vids that will help speed-up your coding & debugging practices!
On a recent Acela ride from NYC to Boston, for the 2011 jQuery Conference, I was temporarily annoyed with the horrible download speeds and losing my connection regularly. Then I remembered: you’re on a train, flying down the tracks, surfing the Internet!. I then told myself to shut-up.
I had noticed a URL pattern in various sites I’d been too (clearly I’m a geek for noticing things like this), such as LinkedIn, where certain URLs have a /#! in them (apparently this is being referred to as a “hash bang”… if you insist). There is a long-standing pattern of passing dynamic content indicators around via the # sign since it does not cause a page refresh, so I assumed this was their a personal pattern preference. Turns out, not so much. It’s actually a way to “talk” with GoogleBot and get your dynamic content indexed! Hey Lucy, you got some re-factoring to do…
Anyone else find the irony in the headline of the highlighted article appearing within this page design (Figure 1, click to enlarge)? How about ADHD in web designers?? :-) What you can’t see in this static image is that half of those ads are blinking and changing and blinking and changing…
Not very practical, but as an experiment, a pretty slick combination of CSS to create a Tilt-Shift effect, and it actually does degrade nicely… Note the “Looks best in Safari” line. Some other great lab experiments also available…
A couple nice compatibility charts for you, one for HTML5 in mobile devices and one for frameworks in mobile devices. Now, I know FF3.6 is relatively old (but it’s still in my browser matrix, so I still use it at home), but you wouldn’t think it would be too hard to make these charts work there, would you??
Most of you probably already know how to code, but this was fun for about 20 seconds. It’s also another fine example of the above-mentioned “hash bang” technique, AND another fine example of a site not rendering properly in lowly FF3.6… Sheesh, I get it already!!
There are lots of Quote of the Day and Fact of the Day websites and widgets out there, and they always make me wonder how true the information they push is. This one made me wonder too. No answers, just more wonder…
And finally, one of the better quotes I read recently was from none-other than Mr. Quotable himself, Bruce Lawson:
“Saying that we can’t use HTML5 because it isn’t finished is like saying we can’t speak English because it isn’t finished.”
Abso-tively love it! This comes from a great blog post about “defining” and “explaining” HTML5, HTML5: briefing notes for journalists and analysts.
Happy reading,
Atg