Adding Islamic calendar support in HTML5 – a request from IBM to add new types of HTML <input> to cater for the three Islamic calendars. I agree with Lars and Lachlans’ comments that this is a browser enhancement and not an addition to the language.
EcmaScript 6 versioning. Dutch Specmeister Anne van Kesteren writes “this still strikes me as a slippery slope towards the mess Internet Explorer is dealing with (and Word has in the past). Not very webby, ECMAScript”
Backbone.js mini-book by Addy Osmani, who says "any contributions welcome. Plan to keep adding more everyday".
Regular readers will be familiar with my unique blend of misanthropy and parsimony, and will no doubt blame that for the fact that no festive card from me has dropped through their letterbox, especially if you’ve sent me one (thank you for that).
But they’d be wrong. It just seems to me a little wasteful to transport bits of paper to faraway towns or distant countries (half of our family is overseas) just to send you pre-printed religiously-based greetings which then go in a landfill.
So I don’t send cards. Instead, I donate what I’d usually spend on paper and postage to a charidee where it does good instead of polluting the place.
So, your Xmas card this year is a small part of a donation to Medecins Sans Frontieres which is “an international, independent, medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, healthcare exclusion and natural or man-made disasters.”
I hope that’s OK with you. And, even if it isn’t (you miserable sod), I hope you and those you care about enjoy your holidays and have a happy, healthy and peaceful 2012.
MPEG-DASH is the first International Standard for dynamic adaptive streaming of multimedia content over HTTP. It will be interesting to see what the royalty/ licensing situation will be.
I don’t agree with everything Faruk says in The Threat Against the Web, but wholeheartedly applaud “The web will only thrive as long as the web is not owned by any one entity; not owned, not controlled, and not defined”.
On the subject of the constantly-embattled Open Web, Google offered patches to allow their super-whizzo! invented-in-secret Dart language to be in WebKit. Oliver Hunt of Apple objected: “As the 90s demonstrated such “features” are bad for developers, and bad for the open web. This may not be apparent to people who have not spent years working in the environment but random additions frequently cause significant pain down the road” and adding adding “it fragments the web” and risks “turn[ing] webkit into the engine that everyone hates because of all its unique “features” that break the open web, a la certain browsers in the late 90s”.
All the cool kids are doing responsive design, it seems. This means fluid designs, having some hot media query action to reformat your layout depending on screen size, and ensuring your images are flexible so they don’t break out of container, generally by setting them to {max-width:100%;}.
Having images scaling down presents a problem though, if you’re a performance-minded sort of chap(ette). Why send a 300K 400 x 800 image that would look lovely on tablet device attached to wifi, but which takes ages to download on a 3G phone, and which gets resized by the browser to fit a 320px wide screen? Not only are you wasting your user’s bandwidth and time, but not every browser is created equal and not every resize algorithm makes pleasing end results. The CSS 4(!) image-rendering property can help with this but it only hints to the browser.
Sending the right-sized image to devices without wasting bandwidth is one of the knottiest problems in cross-device and responsive design at the moment. In the 24ways advent calendar series of articles, the subject has been discussed twice in eight articles (by Matt Wilcox and Jake Archibald). There are numerous other techniques, as well, such as tinySrc and the Filament Group’s Responsive Images.
All these are very clever, different solutions to solve the same problem, and they all rely on scripts, or cookies, or server-side cleverness or (in the case of Jake’s ideas) dirty hacks and spacer GIFs. I’m reminded of Image Replacement techniques from more than 6 years ago, which were over-engineered solutions to the problem better solved by CSS web fonts.
Let’s recap. We have several images, of different sizes, and want to send only the most appropriately-sized image to the browser. The circumstances differ. The canonical use case is to send smaller, lower-resolution images to smaller screen-sizes on the assumption that connection speed is slow and they have low-resolution displays. This isn’t the case, though. Some people are using retina displays on fast wifi networks. SO, while currently CSS Media Queries allow us to detect screen width and pixel density, we need new media features such as network speed/ bandwidth.
The DAP is working on a Network Information API, there’s a Phonegap version for native apps, and a Modernizr detect, but using script for this seems much harder than being able to access it via Media Queries, and if you just want to rearrange CSS layout, CSS is the place to detect it. (Purists may argue that network connection isn’t a characteristic of device, but in your face, purists!)
Once you have a media query, you can swap images in and out using the CSS content property:
<img id=thingy src=picture.png alt="a mankini">
…
@media all and (max-width:600px) {
#thingy {content: url(medium-res.png);}
}
@media all and (max-width:320px) {
#thingy {content: url(low-res.png);}
}
@media all and (network-speed:3g) {
#thingy {content: attr(alt);}
}
A browser that doesn’t support Media Queries, or doesn’t report “true” for any of the Media Queries shows the picture.png, which is the src of the img. A browser that is less than 600px replaces picture.png with medium-res.png. A 320px or narrower browser replaces picture.png with low-res.png. A browser that is only connected via 3g replaces the image with its alt text.
I first researched this technique in 2008 as a way of doing image replacement without extra markup (ironically enough). The first two media queries only works in Opera and Chrome at the moment, as they’re the only browsers that fully support content without :before or :after. (The network-speed media query works nowhere as I just made it up).
Recently, Nicolas Gallagher experimented with generated content for responsive images, and unfortunately discovered that there are no advantages to the technique because browsers always download picture.png, even if they never show it because they immediately replace it. Perhaps this could be optimised away by browsers, but there would still be the double-download problem with current browsers.
My mind turned to HTML5 video. Here we have an element that has the ability to specify multiple sources (because of different codecs) and can also switch sources according to media characteristics. It borrows syntax from Media Queries but puts them in the HTML:
I firmly believe that if something as new-fangled as video can be responsive in a declarative manner (without needing script, APIs, cookies or server magic) then responsive images should be similarly simple.
Previously, on the mailing list, a new <picture> element was proposed. I mashed up that idea with the already-proven video code above and came up with a strawman:
<picture alt="angry pirate">
<source src=hires.png media="min-width:800px">
<source src=midres.png media="network-speed:3g">
<source src=lores.png>
<!-- fallback for browsers without support -->
<img src=midres.png alt="angry pirate">
</picture>
This would show a different source image for different situations. Old (=current) browsers get the fallback img element. As I said, this is a strawman; it ain’t pretty. But it would work. (It’s discussed in my recent Smashing Magazine article HTML5 Semantics.)
I prefer the media queries to be in the HTML for two reasons: you don’t need to have ids or complex selectors to target a particular image, and (more importantly) many content authors use a CMS and have no ability to edit the CSS. (Although the nasty <style scoped> could solve this.)
On the other hand, I might be over-engineering the whole problem. I chatted informally with my colleague Anne van Kesteren, glamorous Dutch WHATWG inner circle member. There’s a school of thought that says everything will be 300ppi and networks will be fast enough, so this is really an intermediate problem until everyone starts using highres graphics and all displays go from 150 to 300. Standards are long term, and by the time we have a standardised version, the problem might have gone away.
PrefixFree: Break free from CSS prefix hell – Lea’s script parses CSS on the client and adds only the vendor prefixes that the browser requires. A sort of Modernizr for CSS, but note it adds a dependency on JavaScript.
One of the many joys of going to Fronteers 2011 (even more than seeing Jake Archibald in a mankini) was Seb Lee-DeLisle’s presentation “CreativeJS – beauty in the browser”. Watching sexy particle systems, using mobile phones as pixels and playing NyanCatch was fun and exciting.
I’m a JavaScipt n00b, but an old hand at programming, which I taught myself in the 80s by coding visual games like space invaders and lunar lander. So when I heard that Seb was giving a two-day workshop in Leeds on how to code creative visual effects and games, I decided to go along.
Seb didn’t start at the very beginning; it’s assumed that we have a text editor, a web inspector (I was using Opera Dragonfly, of course) and that we know what variables and loops are. There wasn’t much talk of prototyping and inheritance either – the emphasis was on the making rather than the theory.
We looked at canvas, how to make simple shapes and simple animations. Then we used Seb’s simple library to add drag, velocity, gravity and randomness to particles, all the while building pretty effects that responded to the mouse. We learned canvas rotations and transforms (which I hadn’t really bellyfelt before) by making a generated tree (which I topped off with random cherry blossom).
We learned how to code the game Asteroids, with a reminder of trigonometry that shocked me: who knew I’d ever need SOHCAHTOA or the Pythagorean theorem in real life? This also helped us learn how to make natural-seeming physics.
We all had a brief foray in webGL, albeit abstracting away most of the horrors via Mr Doob’s THREE.js.
It was a great fun course. Seb’s an engaging and effective teacher and I feel much more confident with my JavaScript now (I even suggested an optimisation to Seb’s collision detection code!). Thanks to Seb, Clare who co-organised it, and my fellow attendees.
If you’re looking for an “in” to JavaScript, and you learn by mucking about and seeing what comes out the other end, sign up to Seb’s next course.
When the Nazi-woman-on-a-tram video came out, I was one of the twitter-chattering classes who bemoaned what she was saying.
In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the foul-mouthed and utterly inarticulate rant by a woman with her toddler on her lap bemoaning that “my Britain is fuck all” because of immigration, asking other passengers where they come from, telling them to go back (one person is told to go back to “Nicaraguaberra”)
It’s horrible, but it represents the views of many, many people who don’t yell it in public and who aren’t daft enough to do it in front of a camera.
But then I read that “Emma West (34) of New Addington was charged with Racially Aggravated Section 4a on Monday. She was remanded in custody overnight.”
It makes me uncomfortable that she was arrested and spent the night in a police cell. Before you call me a racist, let’s be clear: I disagree with everything she said, and the manner in which she said it. And, had she and a few of her friends surrounded a black person and started shouting at him, they would be obviously threatening and should be arrested.
But Ms West wasn’t threatening anyone. She remained seated, with her child on her lap. While her words are abhorrent, they’re only words. No-one was physically threatened. She wasn’t inciting anyone else to violence. So what’s her crime? Being a horrible idiot isn’t a crime. She’s offensive, but being offensive isn’t a crime. And no-one has the right to be protected by law from being offended.
It seems to me that those of us who believe in free speech must support the right for people to spout offensive nonsense.