Jonny Axelsson

Posts tagged with "HTML5"

Into the bog

Sunday, 6. September 2009, 12:18:32

This entry was actually made, well conceptualised, back in early July when I wrote several entries on HTML5 and XHTML2. If I made it then it could be considered prophetic, though it would only show a Nostradamus-style prophetic ability ("there will become a war, and in that war some people will suffer badly"). I lost that opportunity, but if something is worth doing, it is worth doing very, very slowly. And trust me, there will become a war, and in that war some people will suffer badly.

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Minimal Markup

Saturday, 22. August 2009, 22:02:00

web 2.1, HTML5, markup, access

I have earlier proclaimed markup an [necessary] evil. A more constructive way of putting it is to say that markup should always be minimal. You should use as much markup as you need, and no more. Markup is something we add to aid machines. Too much or wrong markup can do more damage as too little or too vague.

This design principle determines how to standardize markup. Unless the author knows something the user doesn't, the markup should not be there.

This principle obviously caters to the author's laziness, the admirable human trait not to do more than necessary. It is less obvious, but no less important, that it also empowers the user. More minimal markup means more flexible and accessible markup, assuming that the user agents do their job and actually act on their users' behalf.

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Conditional Comments in HTML5?

Tuesday, 18. August 2009, 20:33:22

css, HTML5, markup

Where we are

Four years ago I wrote a small piece on conditional comments in IE7, and whether there should be an institutionalised Opera CSS hack, in the style of @opera or @browser opera. While IE's standards support isn't stellar, it is still better than it was four years ago, and the desire to make specific hacks for the shortcomings of IE, Opera, or any other browser hasn't gone away and is unlikely to go away in the next decade either. This entry is triggered by a comment this Friday asking for Opera conditional comments. For all the talk about the ills of browser sniffing, and using capability detection instead, it is not going to go away. In that case wouldn't it be better to make browser sniffing less bad?

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HTML5 token support

Saturday, 1. August 2009, 11:53:29

HTML5, standards, markup

One common situation when registering a new account with a service (say my.opera.com) is that it requires email confirmation from you to activate that account. This is part of a handshake, where both parties present their credentials and confirm who the other one is. It is also a neat way for the service to make sure that the user has a valid email (to be blocked if a troll or spammer) which is also a universally unique identification. Two independent parties will never have the same email address while they could have the same username on different services (I am "jax" here, but on other sites someone else could have taken that username).

Unfortunately as often as not the confirmation request message to make sure that the user is not a spammer will itself end up in the user's spam folder since the mail program or service can't know that the email isn't from a spammer.

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Can HTML5 make accessibility usable?

Monday, 27. July 2009, 08:03:12

functional equivalent, ARIA, HTML5, markup ...

Following up the discussion on Accessible drag and drop using WAI-ARIA, I think HTML5 may be a huge win for accessibility. HTML4 was filled with good intentions, HTML5 should be filled with good implementations.

HTML4 became a W3C standard 11 years ago. By now we should have plenty of implementation experience with the standard, user agents, web developers, and authoring tools and what has actually made the Web more or less accessible. Ideally there should be an audit of all the HTML4 features for their impact on accessibility, whether they were designed for the purpose or not.

We also have extensive implementation experience. Accessibility was central to the design of Opera from the very beginning and part of the company culture, but that doesn't mean every initiative was a success. Other browsers and tool makers should have learned something the last decade as well. Accessibility enjoys considerable goodwill among developers, most want the Web to be accessible, but to turn good will into good products first we need to make the implicit knowledge explicit, what failed as much as what succeeded and why it failed.

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Bending or breaking the tree: Extensibility in HTML

Tuesday, 21. July 2009, 09:55:15

past, markup, standards, w3c ...

A link to the past

HTML is the Hypertext Markup Language. Hyperlinks is what made HTML special. When I came to the HTML Working Group, shortly after the browser war was over, the feud of the day was with XLink 1.0, which quickly had become a Recommendation through a flawed process. The HTML group wasn't happy about it, as they didn't think the specification fulfilled its design goals.

XLink had a complex history, originally it was meant to be an Extensible Linking Language to complement the Extensible Markup Language (XML). The specification ended up creating a number of attributes in the XLink namespace, 'link:type', 'xlink:href', 'xlink:role', 'xlink:arcrole', 'xlink:title', 'xlink:show', 'xlink:actuate', 'xlink:label', 'xlink:from', 'xlink:to'. The idea was that any XML language needing hypermedia functionality would mix in the appropriate XLink attributes.

When I left the HTML Working Group a few years later XLink was forgotten, but the HTML working group had made a very similar collection of floating attributes for XHTML2, 'xhtml:href', 'xhtml:role', 'xhtml:src', 'xhtml:about' and so on. The idea now was that any XML language needing hypermedia functionality would mix in the appropriate XHTML2 attributes.

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HTML5 — XML's Stealth Weapon

Monday, 20. July 2009, 08:04:19

xhtml, w3c, markup, www ...

Even after the death-of-XHTML2, syntax debate still dominates the day. Here is my contribution.

The XML story

In the beginning was SGML. There is a lot to be said about SGML so I won't. HTML was specified to be an application of SGML, but that never happened in practice. Among browsers Opera kept the pretence of supporting SGML for the longest time, causing us a lot of trouble because Opera behaved differently from every other browser. DocBook is another known SGML application, but in general SGML was no success.

About a decade ago a small group of people started a reformulation of the old SGML standard, First they did it outside of the W3C and later, when the success became apparent, within the W3C. The story of this simplified SGML, now known as XML, may be best told via the annotated XML, by Tim Bray, one of the principal authors. Essentially XML is angle brackets and a number of production rules on top of Unicode (for a fuller description see Comparison of SGML and XML).

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PROWAS time again

Thursday, 6. November 2008, 11:32:34

Praha, PROWAS, HTML5

For anyone in Prague with an interest in Internet standards, it pays to look up the PROWAS site for the next event.

Which happens to be today. The topic is HTML5 is happening, the speaker is Martin Hassman, and the talk will be held in Czech, with discussion in any language you like. The place is the Chinese restaurant Dobrý Den nearby the Flora metro station, the time is 18:00.

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