Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
“HTML5: If You Bang Your Head Against The Keyboard You’ll Create a Valid Document!” at UK Web Focus talks about how simplified HTML5 is.
Dev Profile: Angie Byron at Port 25 is an interview with the Drupal webchick.
Why We Should Start Using HTML5 and CSS3 Today at Smashing Magazine argues for pushing the boundaries. I wonder what they think about the question of what style of syntax works as a best practice with the HTML5 DOCTYPE?
2010 was a fascinating and fast-paced year for tech. Some trends that have been around for a while reached the tipping point this year, and some new trends are emerging that will dominate 2011.
The price for an eBook reader dropped significantly this year. The number of device choices expanded. And the number of books available in that format grew and grew and grew.
Anyone who has the capability to buy an eBook instead of a printed copy is choosing that as the preferred option. There are several reasons for this, among them lower price, instant delivery, and lightweight portability for a reader’s entire library.
I see the eBook market continuing to expand as more and more users turn to digital delivery for all kinds of reading material.
This trend hit hard this year, and I think it’s going to continue to grow. Players like Apple TV, Google TV, Netflix and others have gone from interesting outliers to mainstream. Getting TV shows and movies from what used to be standard sources like cable and satellite subscriptions may become a phenomena of the dusty past. You can stream movies from Netflix to your iPhone!
Of course, you still need a broadband internet connection to your home to use gadgets like an Apple TV, but as Just The Right Things points out, it’s a gadget the whole family can love.
HTML is the code that is used to markup web page content into headings and paragraphs and lists and such. A lot of geeky drama went into getting HTML5 to the point where it is now – which is a still incomplete set of specs for creating web content. This year, some big players started investing time and development cycles into using HTML5 and making it work on the web. Apple announced it won’t use Flash on the iPad – which translates into using HTML5 video elements instead.
That’s a big ouchie for Adobe, the maker of Flash.
Google announced it supports HTML5 and posted some cool demos at HTML5Rocks. High traffic websites got retuned to run HTML5 with lots of hoopla around the changes. Most browsers are implementing support for HTML5 in at least some ways. Tech bloggers, like myself, are talking about HTML5 daily. HTML5 is important to developers for mobile and mobile apps, too. In spite of the fact that it’s still changing and isn’t going to be an “official” spec for quite a while, HTML5 is going to be rocking the tech world for quite a while.
In spite of all its flaws and all its privacy fails, Facebook now has over half a billion users. It expands and expands like some feature-eating swamp thing that will eventually envelop the entire planet.
Everything that could be considered social media – chat, email, multi-player games, status updates, blogging, file sharing, location based features, photo sharing – is part of Facebook. As soon as a new idea for social networking pops up, Facebook adds it to its feature set.
It’s. Just. Huge.
It’s even a movie. See reviews on Women and Hollywood, Gender Across Borders, and Tennessee Guerilla Women.
Here’s my prediction: for the next year, at least, Facebook is going to continue to grow.
Gmail, Flickr, Google Docs, Delicious, Dropbox, Blogspot, WordPress.com – your data, your work, your backups – but not on your hard drive. That’s the cloud, baby. Resources, software, and information somewhere out there in Internetland and separate from your computer. Accessible from any computer or mobile device. You and your information are now device and location independent. What could be more useful in today’s world? Not much, which is why the trend is growing.
The localized discount coupon service Groupon exploded this year. Everybody wants to save money and the local savings deals from Groupon are often over 50% off on things like restaurant meals and services. Groupon deals sizzle like flies to honey, like moths to a flame – big savings entices.
Groupon got so big, Google is trying to buy it for $6 billion. Groupon said no, at least for the moment. Whether Groupon stays independent or gets swallowed up by something bigger, services like this are going to grow in the next year.
Smart phone adoption shows no sign of slowing down. It’s penetrating every corner of the globe. In some countries, there are more mobile devices than people. Phones with apps continue to get hotter and hotter everywhere you look.
Tablets don’t make phone calls, but they run software and are eBook readers. The portability and connectivity offered by tablets achieves many of the same benefits as users get from smart phones, only with a bigger screen. Perfect for games and watching video.
Having the Internet in your pocket with a device running mobile apps is a trend that is not slowing in the next year.
What trends do you see that I overlooked? Where do you think we’re headed with tech?
Cross-posted at BlogHer in a slightly different version.
You can do many things with Tumblr, but I use it for something very specific. When I’m researching a topic and want to gather up a set of links over a period of several days or weeks about that topic, I save the link on Tumblr. When I’m ready to put the information together in some other form, I go to my Tumblr page and quickly find it all.
For quite some time, I’ve been researching the topic of HTML5 and accessibility. I thought I’d share the list of resources I’ve amassed on this topic at Tumblr. Here are Virginia’s HTML5 and accessibility resources.
All this studying and collecting on the topic of HTML5 and accessibility is going to be put to use soon in a workshop at AccessU West 2011. Hope to see you there.
Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator is one of the ColorZilla tools. It’s online as an app. It creates a pure CSS gradient using a Photoshop-like interface and provides cross browser code. The other ColorZilla tools are downloadable and include a color picker, an eyedropper, Firebug and more.
Disabilities Act may be expanded to Net and Beyond at SFGate only talks about the cost of extending accessibility to places like the Net and movie theaters and not the good such a move would accomplish. The fact is that every change made in the name of accessibility benefits everyone, not just the community of disabled Americans. Accessible is better for everyone, more options are better for everyone, clarity is better for everyone.
HTML5 Right here, Right now is an hour long talk by Tantek Çelik at a Yahoo! conference.
Find free images online! is a good resource list of many sites that provide free images. Seems like students always need images to create web sites for class projects, here’s a great list of places to send them to look.
Periodic table of HTML5 elements is handy. Lists every element in the spec, defines it, and lets you search for an example use in the wild. Nice. Note: This is a new version of the Periodic Table of HTML5, posted in 2014 by Robert Mening.
The list of HTML5 posts on Web Teacher is getting rather lengthy. Here’s a wrap up of the top posts.
That doesn’t include links to useful HTML5 resources that have been posted here. You can find many of those using the HTML5 category tag.
University of the People is moving into Haiti and it’s a big hit. Story from ReadWriteWeb.
Twitsper is an android app that allows you to tweet only to a Twitter list. I expect it to be popular–it’s definitely useful–and make its way to other app stores as well. Or maybe into Twitter itself as the developers are hoping.
Dijit is a library of widgets that can be used with HTML5 elements to make them more accessible in assistive technology devices.
20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web is an interactive web app built in HTML5. It looks like a children’s book. And it’s slick. Great for a class reading assignment.
Using HTML5’s New Semantic Tags Today. Terrific article by Emily Lewis at Script Junkie.
Blogging to Support Policy Goals: MomsRising Shares Lessons Learned. How one organization ran a social media campaign with a specific goal in mind. What worked and what could be done better.
Using the 7 Deadly Sins in Higher Ed Web Marketing at .eduGuru is a take-off on an article at Smashing Magazine, but this one is aimed at high ed.