Reading list
Some very meaty stuff this week, so it’ll last you 2 weeks (next week I’m in Las Vegas for Future Insights Live conference – use the discount code “Bruce to get 10% off the ticket price).
Web Standards
- HTML5 VIDEO bytes on iOS Mobile devices by Steve Souders: “Mobile devices ignore all values of PRELOAD in order to avoid high data plan costs, and instead only download the video when the user initiates playback … However, my testing shows that iOS downloads up to 298K of video data, resulting in unexpected costs to users.”
- blink-dev: Intent to implement lazy-block layout – “Developers can page in new content while the user is scrolling without fear of making the app slow as well … Our demo has a 4 second layout that’s reduced to 32ms with lazy-block.”
- Common Misconceptions About Touch – thoroughly researched, lots of references
- ptb/flexgrid: a flexbox-based CSS grid in 3.6k – “The flexbox layout is supported on Chrome, all versions of iOS, Safari 3+, IE 10+, Opera 12.10+, and Firefox 22+. Other browsers get the fluid Bootstrap 3 layout, except Internet Explorer 6 and 7 which use a fixed layout.”
- 4 new articles about working with HTML markup in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts by W3CInternationalisation maestro, Richard Ishida
- “Right click and save as needs to go away – just use the HTML5
downloadattribute users can just click the link to save it - Thank God We Have A Specification! – An excellent article by @rodneyrehm on the CSS transitions mess (how did we get here?)
- Testing WebP compression for app icons – “Looking at the ratio of WebP file sizes to PNG file sizes ratio, we can see WebP constantly provides better results”
- Talking of webP, Blink-dev discussion on implementing <picture> which would let devs send webP content images to capable browsers, with fallbacks.
- Don’t let the myths fool you: the W3C’s plan for DRM in HTML5 is a betrayal to all Web users.
- DRM at the W3C? Not such a Bad Idea – John Foliot on “The Unpopular Position”
- Stop standardizing HTML says Simon St. Laurent. It’s XML again, but without draconian parsing or schemas. Essentially, every web page has its own private vocabulary.
Industry
- Anarchists: We need to talk about Facebook
- It’s about time: RuneScape dumps Java for HTML5 – “With more than 200 million RuneScape accounts and thousands online at the same time, RuneScape is a big reason for a lot of people not to uninstall Java”
- Happy 20th birthday to Mosaic 1.0 browser
Misc
Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)
Hoping you can just answer a generic question from a ‘dumb’ recruiter. If someone professes to know HTML and XML, does that infer in anyway that they know XHTML? I need an independent opinion.