The video from the “Developing With HTML5” session at Google IO is finally online. Check out t the CSS3 demo at 27:30 to see the Font API in action.
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The video from the “Developing With HTML5” session at Google IO is finally online. Check out t the CSS3 demo at 27:30 to see the Font API in action.
“Scribd:”http://www.scribd.com/ is a service for sharing and colaborating on documents online. And they have just switched the technology used for displaying documents online from Flash to open standards like html5 and webfonts.
On their website they’re explaining the reasons for switching with a presentation that’s worth mentioning. It sums up why open standards and the use of webfonts are important.
Read the presentation here: http://www.scribd.com/documents/30964170/Scribd-in-HTML5
Newspaper companies are having a hard time adjusting to a world in which people use the internet. And especially since Rupert Murdoch accused Search Engines of stealing their content and announced that he would make people pay to read News Corp. content there is a lot of discussion about how the future of the news industry will look like.
Yesterday Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google posted his view on things in an article on Wall Street Journal , envisioning the future to look like this:
It’s the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load.
Apparently newspaper companies are indeed working on that future right now. Time Inc. have just released a demo of a tablet-targeted version of Sports Illustrated which gives a good impression of how they want to justify taking money for content in the digital age:
Also, the New York Times have recently released their Times Skimmer which is an alternative Interface for their headlines. What they’ve come up with is really nice I think. It is especially nice to see that they did not implement it in a proprietary format like Flash or Silverlight but instead used open standards like HTML and CSS (with some nice HTML5 and CSS3 highlights sprinkled on top). And they’re using @font-face through Typekit as well.
For those of us who couldn’t make it to Future of Web Apps, here is Bruce’s talk about HTML5 on Vimeo:
The Future of HTML5 by Bruce Lawson from Carsonified on Vimeo.
People writing html should all be aware by now that the html heading elements (h1 – h6) should be used in a semantic manner. Meaning you shouldn’t use an h2 element without using an h1 first for example. This is quite important for search engines and assistive technologies as well as the overall semantics of your markup.
html5 will treat headings a wee bit different to what we’re used to. Any section (section in this does not necessarily have to mean the section element but rather ‘sectioning element’) will be able to have its own hierarchical order. Meaning that you can use h1s at the start of each section. As all sections will be aware of their own hierarchy in the document the heading element will be treated accordingly.
For example in a section element with an h1 heading containing a nested section element with its own h1 that nested h1 would be treated as an h2. Because it’s lower down in the overall hierarchy. Look at this example by Bruce Lawson to get a better understanding how that works.
It becomes even clearer if you look at the generated outline for Bruce’s example
Without question this will add a lot of complexity to how we use headings (think of the CSS we will have to write for that). The benefit on the other hand will be that you can include markup from other sources into you document more easily.
There’s an accessibility issue here as well. The current html5 spec has this to say about the usage of headings:
Sections may contain headings of any rank, but authors are strongly encouraged to either use only h1 elements, or to use elements of the appropriate rank for the section’s nesting level.
If we were to start using just h1 elements for all our headings without makers of screen readers and other assistive technologies first preparing their software for it, we’re basically destroying the semantic value of headings for these tools.
Another novelty in html5 concerning headings is the hgroup element
There has never been a good way of just adding a subheading to an h1 element for example. If you use an h2 for that you’ll be having trouble setting that apart from the other h2s. You can’t use an h3 either because that would mean skipping one level.
So the brainy people working on the html5 spec came up with hgroup:
The rank of an hgroup element is the rank of the highest-ranked h1–h6 element descendant of the hgroup element, if there are any such elements, or otherwise the same as for an h1 element (the highest rank).
This means that in this example
<hgroup>
<h1>main heading</h1>
<h2>sub heading</h2>
</hgroup>
the entire hgroup would be weighted as an h1 (if it is in the root, otherwise the weighting will be done according to the nesting level of the parent element of the hgroup).
Personally, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad idea. The html5 super friends on the other hand would rather see this in the spec:
We don’t see the added value of this element and would instead add a boolean attribute to the heading element which allows content authors to specify if that particular heading should be included in the outline.