Category: HTML5

HTML5 opportunities at AccessU West 2011

AccessU West 2011 is a Knowbility training event January 10-12, 2011 at San Jose State University. There are two days of sessions, with a full day of post conference workshops that go even more in depth with accessibility information.

As part of the normal two-day conference schedule, I’ll be teaching HTML5 and Accessibility. My class is a 3 hour, hands-on, lab session.

The other HTML5  event is a post conference day featuring a whole day with Derek Featherstone. Derek’s topic is Real World Accessibility for HTML5, CSS3 and ARIA.

If you’ve been looking for more information on HTML5, this is the place to get it. Registration is now open.

Useful links: Should you?, HTML5 syntax, Cooks Source, Before and After, 30 selectors

Should Web Designers Know HTML and CSS? at Six Revisions is by Michael Tuck. It’s a fascinating discussion and he does a fair job of presenting both sides of the issue. My 2 cents: there are layers to peel back as to what exactly you mean by “web designer” but no one can be a top expert at it who doesn’t know the foundation information.

Since HTML5 takes a free-choice approach to syntax – allowing camel case, all caps, lower case, quoted attributes, unquoted attributes, and other less-than-rigorous approaches to code – 456 Berea Street offers up some suggestions for best practice in HTML5 syntax guidelines.

Kathy Gill from Wired Pen has put together a terrific timeline of the Cooks Source Magazine plagiarism scandal that rocked Facebook, Twitter, and Slashdot last week. Read and learn. Don’t skip the conclusions at the end. Eric Meyer wrote Memetic Epidemology about watching it unfold. (Eric praised a story by Edward Champion about profiting from plagiarism.)

Accessible University is a before and after accessibility discussion about a fictional university home page. Enlightening.

30 CSS Selectors you must memorize goes through some lesser known CSS syntax, tells you how to use it, where it works and shows code examples. A handout waiting to happen in your CSS classroom.

Useful links: UX edu, HTML5, CSS3

The UX Design Education Scam at Design View is a hard edged look at the state of UX Design education. Comments are not allowed, which would have been interesting, but you’ll find plenty there to think about without comments.

HTML5 audio and video. Slides from Silvia Pfeiffer’s talk at Web Directions South showing several working demos of the <audio> and <video> elements are available.

Designing with CSS3 Effectively and Efficiently is a slideset from Zoe Gillenwater. She says, “Many CSS3 techniques can reduce your development times, decrease page loading times, improve usability, and increase the adaptability of your pages to different devices (including iPads, iPhones, and Android smart phones).”

Web Design Book Review: HTML5 for Web Designers

HTML5 for Web Designers

HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith is the first book under the A Book Apart imprint, published by Jeffrey Zeldman (2010). It’s available from A Book Apart.

It’s a small book, less than 100 pages, with only 6 chapters. The chapters are A Brief History of Markup, The Design of HTML5, Rich Media, Web Forms 2.0, Semantics, and Using HTML5 Today. If you watched the video of Keith in Jeremy Keith on the Design of HTML5, you have a basic idea what the first two chapters are about. The book, of course, contains more detail than the video.

The Rich Media chapter goes into some detail at the code level about the new <canvas>, <audio> and <video> elements. Code examples help clarify the Web Forms chapter, as well. Form enhancements he talks about include placeholder attributes, autofocus, the required attribute, the autocomplete attribute, the datalist element, and new input types and what they mean right now.

The Semantics chapter talks about microformats, new elements such as <mark>, <time>, <meter>, and <progress>. Everyone is most interested in the new structural elements or sectioning elements, and he explains each of them, including <section>, <header>, <footer>, <aside>, <nav> and <article>. The book ends with a mention of what can be used today and how to help the nonsupporting browsers use HTML5 by adding ARIA roles or scripts like the HTM5 shiv and modernizr.

The book is clear and well-written so it’s easy to read. You could probably read the whole thing in less than an hour. But the simplicity of the book is a bit deceptive, because there is a lot of depth to the material. If you are hesitant about starting to use HTML5, the book can give you the basic knowledge you need to being exploring and trying it out.

Summary: An excellent book for web designers who want to learn how HTML5 can be used now.

A review by Virginia DeBolt of HTML5 for Web Designers (rating: 5 stars)

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Jeremy Keith on the Design of HTML5

This brilliant talk by Jeremy Keith is licensed for sharing with attribution to Jeremy. It is the best explanation of how HTML5 grew to where it is now and what it means to web design that I’ve ever seen. It’s more about design principles than code.

Jeremy Keith | The Design of HTML5 | Fronteers 2010 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

The transcript and a link to the slides are at Adactio.

I think this material should be included in the InterACT curriculum as an introduction to HTML5 module. With the CC license Jeremy is using that is doable. I hereby volunteer to write the educational jargon like objectives and test questions to wrap it up in so it becomes a usable curriculum module for web educators.

Useful Links: HTML5 Video, OAuth, geeks

In the if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em category,  Adobe announces the HTML5 Video Player widget with this message: “Adobe has released an easy-to-use, totally CSS-customizable solution that shifts gracefully from the HTML5 <video> tag to the Flash Player when the tag is not supported.” The widget works with or without Dreamweaver CS5.

Introduction to OAuth is by Lorna Jane Mitchell at Think Vitamin. It seems OAuth is the reason why Twitterific suddenly stopped working on my iPhone and also explains why you can sign in to one site with information from another. Here’s a quote.

As a user, the experience of enabling accounts to use OAuth is quite seamless, and is designed to help you feel more secure about where your credentials are being stored and used. When you want to allow another application to access your data, you will be forwarded to the site that holds that data, and prompted to allow access.

This means that you never need to type your credentials for one account into the website for something else. Once you have granted access, you will be redirected back to where you were, so you can continue whatever you were doing.

Did you see this infographic for What Kind of Geek are You? It seems only guys can be geeks. Gals are invisible once again. The infographic is clever and cute. And it reinforces the prevailing social paradigm that keeps the “where are the women in technology” meme afloat from year to year.

Useful links: accessibility, HTML5 forms, gadgets

Web Accessibility – A Look Back and into the Future is a brief interview at WebProfessionals.org.

Fun with HTML5 Forms at Think Vitamin is by Richard Shepherd. Good stuff.

Americans and their gadgets is a new report from Pew Research full of tidbits like “fully 96% of 18-29 year olds own a cell phone of some kind.” Makes you wonder if some day educators will use phrases like “phone in your homework” and mean it.