Bruce Lawson's personal site

Rant: HTML5 != CSS 3

Bruce — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 10:27:15 +0000

Trying out my new Ranting Hat, a present from Japan from Nedjma. Please note that rants are just that, and not necessarily eloquent or factual. (And I know that Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman are not the only two social liberals in the USA; I’ve actually met the other three.)

Oh, and do I have to say that this is a joke, is personal and nothing to do with my lovely employers at Opera? Unfortunately, I probably do.

(I’ll transcribe it when I’m not so tired)

Turkey, and old friends

Bruce — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:20:46 +0000

My family and I had 10 days in Hisarönü, near Fethiye where I used to live in the early 90s. The resort itself was as I remembered it: a depressing mass of restaurants offering “full English breakfasts with real pork sausage!” but the hotel had a swimming pool, the mountains gave some cooling breeze, and it was easy to get to Fethiye, Ölüdeniz or the melancholy beauty of the deserted Greek village, Kayaköy.

I tracked down my old friend Asiye, who taught me lots of Turkish in 1993, and who I hadn’t seen since the year 2000 when we bumped into each other, utterly by chance, in the street in Bangkok. (Her Fethiye clothing shop, Şaman, has the strapline “there are no coincidences”.)

I think we can safely say that in 17 years neither Asiye nor I have changed one jot. Then:

Now:

And I’m delighted that there was no reason for my earlier holiday trepidation.

How to make websites that are mobile-friendly

Bruce — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 14:34:47 +0000

I’ve written an article on making sure your websites have a fighting chance of working across devices (mobiles, consoles etc).

It’s for web designers used to making desktop sites, rather than for people designing iThing apps.

The article was originally called “The ultimate guide to mobile optimisation” but the boss rightly said no (you could write a book about the subject, but all the main points are introduced in the article).

So now it’s called Mobile-friendly: The mobile web optimization guide. Enjoy.

Holiday trepidation

Bruce — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:30:38 +0000

It’s with some trepidation that I look forward to my holiday soon.

There’s the usual worry of booking a package tour—will the hotel be as nice as it seemed on the Web? will the transfer taxi be there? (Actually, I only imagine these are the “usual” worries; we’ve never done a package before).

But I have an extra worry. The last time I visited this town was in 1993 -1995 when I lived there, working as a musician and tarot card reader, and I left because I was run out of town.

The story goes like this.

Opposite the bar that I was working in was a small area where three female students would spread out a cloth on the floor which they covered with hippie jewellry that they’d made in the hope of selling it to tourists. During the quiet parts of the day I’d hang with them, and we’d smoke cigarettes and improve our command of each others’ languages. As occasionally happened when I was young and slim, one of the girls and I became especially friendly.

Towards the end of the season, I was playing my guitar in the bar, and an well-dressed gentleman in his early 40s came and stood by my stool as I took off my guitar for my smoke-beer-pee break. This often happened; people came up to request favourite songs for the the next set. He waited while I carefully put the plectrum under the corner of the scratchplate and put the guitar securely on its stand. And then he punched me in the face.

As I regained verticality, I asked him why he’d done that. “For sleeping with my wife”, he replied. I assured him that he was mistaken, and pointed out my girlfriend who was looking horrified and backing towards the door rather than racing forward to cradle me in her arms. “Yes, he replied. That’s my wife.”

Ignorance is no defence and although true, objecting that that she had neglected to inform me of her nuptial status was unlikely to mollify him. But he didn’t come back with a follow-up punch but instead walked out of the bar, leaving two of his friends behind who very politely informed me that the usual penalty for wronging someone’s honour in such a way is to stab them in the buttocks. The reason is that there are no major blood vessels there, so the victim is very unlikely to die. However, it’s the largest muscle in the body so would take months to heal and lying down, sitting or walking would be agony. It was emphasised that if I were to remain in town more than one night, this might very well happen to me.

I left the next morning for Istanbul.

Seventeen years later, I suspect that none of the protagonists still live there. And I suspect that the years have suitably transformed me from the slim, bronzed beach bum that I was then into an unrecognizable and expanded figure.

But if I’m back early, after begging for a standby ticket at the airport, you’ll know why.

A Minimal HTML5 Document

Bruce — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:19:08 +0000

There seems to be confusion about the minimal set of elements that make a valid HTML5 page.

(Amended on prompting from Tab Atkins and Mathias Bynens in comments below.)

The simplest valid document is

The title element is required in most situations, but when a higher-level protocol provides title information, e.g. in the Subject line of an e-mail when HTML is used as an e-mail authoring format, the title element can be omitted.

Assuming you’re writing a web page rather than an HTML email, you need the title element, although technically it can be blank.

However, you shouldn’t do that. Failure to specify a character encoding which can introduce an obscure but real security vulnerability. So, the simplest valid and secure document looks like this:

blah

I'm the content

(You don’t actually need the content, of course, but it’s a pretty rubbish web page without it, and an empty title isn’t much good.)

However, for accessibility reasons, you should declare the natural language of the document (English/ French/ Swahili) on the html element, which therefore means you need that element (note that you don’t need to close it, though):

blah

I'm the content

If you’re planning to use AppCache to enable offline applications, you’ll need the html element as the manifest attribute goes there.

Internet Explorer 9 Developer Preview 3 and its antecedents can’t apply CSS to new HTML5 elements without a body element. (Try it without body and with body.)

So if you’re attempting to do that, the smallest valid, secure, screenreader-accessible and stylable-in-IE HTML5 page you can have is

blah

I'm the content

Just because you can do this doesn’t mean you should, of course. Depending on your colleagues, it could be confusing and thus a maintainability nightmare.

I use the head element, and close those tags that need closing (although I don’t bother with trailing slashes on self-closing elements).

So the minimal valid, secure, screenreader-accessible and stylable-in-IE HTML5 page (not email) that it easily readable and maintainable (subjective, of course) is probably






blah


I'm the content

Enjoy.

(PS, I co-wrote a book!)

Introducing HTML5 lands!

Bruce — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 13:07:56 +0000

I got home to find my author copies of Introducing HTML5 had arrived, straight from the printer in the US. They’ll be on the shelves in a week or so.

Rather than engaging in weird “unboxing” photosets on Flickr, I decided to celebrate this joyous occasion in a different way.

(Images may be NSFW if you work a very prudish environment or are a nun.)

Remy upped my ante:

So get the book. It’s the only thing that will take your mind off these images.