For the past few months, I’ve been lucky enough to tour places like Indonesia talking about cutting-edge web development languages like HTML 5 and WAI-ARIA.
My new year resolution was to actually start using them, so made an HTML 5 test page to show that at least some those useful new elements can be used now.
But a test page isn’t real world, so the logical next step was to redesign this site to use the new technologies. While my blog is a set of old-school static documents with none of the “Web 2.0” Ajax sexiness that would best show off these technologies, it has one thing in its favour: it’s five years worth of often-dodgy markup (I was learning!) with 3000 or so comments, some containing unsanitised code. It’s a reasonable road-test for HTML 5, which was specifically designed for backwards compatibility. This is still a test; validation errors are part of that, although if you see any post with broken layout or unreadble content, please let me know.
We got a little Acer Aspire One notebook for Marina’s tenth birthday (ten!? where did that decade go?) and it’s very nice: webcam, Linux operating system (Linpus Lite, designed to be user-friendly), wireless, 120 Gig hard-drive, all for under £200. It’s such a good buy, my wife is getting one in what looks like a stealthy Linux invasion of my house.
Only downsides: it’s made in China (probably unavoidable), sometimes it boots a little slower than the advertised 15 seconds (!) and most seriously, it doesn’t have Opera installed.
That nice Mike Davis talked me through the process of installing Opera on it, given that I’m a Linuk n00b and would rather saw off my nipples with a rusty spoon than “compile a kernal” (whatever that means).
Set a root password (if not already set)
Switch it on and let it boot up. When the icon desktop is showing, hit F2
in the dialogue, enter ‘terminal’ which then brings up a command line. Here enter ‘sudo su’ which changes you to root (whatever that means)
enter ‘passwd’ which then prompts you for a new password (and gets you to reenter it to confirm). Even if it doesn’t agree with your choice of password (“that is a dictionary word”, it disparagingly points out) you can still use it. That is the root password. Remember it.
Download and install Opera
Close down dialogue and start up the default web browser. Wait ages for it to load.
(Note to Acer; it is ironic that you sell nice little Linux machines, but your website is table layout hell with the note “best viewed with Microsoft I.E. 6.0 or above at 1024×768 pixel resolution”. The Linpus website is equally 1997, too, with pages that are just images and seemingly no links to your documentation on your “Help and Support” page. This doesn’t inspire confidence in the quality of your products.)
In my inaugural monthly column for ZDNet UK, I speculated that 2008 would be remembered as the year the Web grew up, due to the publication of the HTML 5 public draft, and suddenly everyone’s talking about HTML 5. And I mean everyone.
(Skip the bullshit explanation and go straight to the test if you’re impatient. Then come back.)
There remains a lot of confusion about when you can use HTML 5. Some aspects are supported by browsers, and are therefore available for use now, such as the video element in Firefox, Safari and an Opera labs build and canvas which is available everywhere except IE (see canvas tutorial). (Here’s a more complete list: HTML 5 Implementations in Web browsers.)
Opera “knows about” canvas, datalist, embed, output, and the new input types except input type="color" and input type="search". All browsers will style elements they don’t “know about” (although IE needs to be helped).
Opera doesn’t yet have browser defaults for header, footer etc, because that rendering hasn’t been decided upon—eg how section or header influences the default rendering of h1. (More on Opera’s support.)
Anyway, Eric Meyer recently recoded An Event Apart to use the HTML 5 DOCTYPE, and one of the comments he received was “I thought I might see more of the new elements introduced – header, nav, article etc. – but then I guess the site still needs to be presentable in older browsers too.”
The page has undergone many incarnations from the first one, mostly due to the help of colleagues (David Storey, Jon Hicks, Lachlan Hunt), friends like Veerle Pieters and strangers who watched on Twitter as I developed and refined it. Thanks web community!
