Dispatches From The Internets

When I opened my inbox this morning, I nearly fell over. According to Daniel Glazman, co-chair of the CSS Working Group at the W3C, browser makers are considering supporting the WebKit vendor prefix (-webkit-) because the web development community can’t be bothered to use the equivalent experimental properties for other browsers:

WebKit, the rendering engine at the heart of Safari and Chrome, living in iPhones, iPads and Android devices, is now the over-dominant browser on the mobile Web and technically, the mobile Web is full of works-only-in-WebKit web sites while other browsers and their users are crying. Many sites are sniffing the browser’s User-Agent string and filtering out non-WebKit browsers. As in the past with IE6, it’s not a question of innovation but a question of hardware market dominance and software bundled with hardware. But there is an aspect of the problem we did not have during the IE6 era: these web sites are also WebKit-specific because they use only “experimental” CSS properties prefixed with -webkit- and not their Mozilla, Microsoft or Opera counterparts. So even if the browser sniffing goes away, web sites will remain broken for non-WebKit browsers…

In a recent post, Adrian Roselli ranted a bit about the awkward position we are in with regard to HTML5. Here’s a taste:

The trend continues where I speak to clients, vendors, young developers fresh out of college, and even the teachers/professors who instruct them and they don’t understand that HTML5 and CSS3 aren’t the same specification. I have repeatedly shown an HTML 4.01 site with CSS3 to explain that they are each distinct specifications which can be applied in different combinations of different versions. This is further complicated when JavaScript is folded into the mix—some folks even think jQuery is part of the HTML5 specification.

Late last week, I linked my Forrst followers to Stephanie Rieger’s awesome post “A Plea for Progressive Enhancement” which offered a even-handed critique of a sliding menu interaction on the website for the Obama campaign. The main thrust of her complaint was that it didn’t work on most of the mobile devices she tested, including an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3.5—one version prior to the release of iOS 5.

When we launched the mobile-first version of this blog, we opted not to include Google+ as one of the sharing options because there was no way to make it work without JavaScript (a fact which undermined both our progressive enhancement philosophy and the privacy of our readers). I tried digging into the (IMHO) over-engineered code that manages the +1 button to find an end point, but after about an hour of digging decided it wasn’t worth it. Thankfully there are others out there who are more persistent than I am and a way to share on Google+ without using the Google-supplied JavaScript is now available thanks to the folks at TechLifeWeb.

Today is a momentous day.

After a whirlwind trip to 4 countries (5 if you count Florida), I am back to a rock-solid internet connection and got a moment to take a breath and post my slides from the first stop on the trip: Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany.

In the past few months, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time discussing the differences between the “adaptive” and “responsive” web design philosophies. Don’t get me wrong, I love having these discussions, but I felt the need to set the record straight: these two philosophies are not at odds, despite numerous blog posts and tweets to the contrary.

Below you’ll find the slides from the talk I gave earlier today at Future of Web Design titled “HTML5: Smart Markup for Smarter Websites.” It’s been a long day, so that’s it for now. I’ll post my notes from some of the talks I caught in a day or so (once I’ve finished prepping for Wednesday’s workshop).

Enjoy!

This past week was a bit of a whirlwind as Kelly and I flew to DC for a few meetings and then to NYC for the ExpressionEngine CodeIgniter Conference. We had a blast at the conference, meeting new people, seeing old friends, and eating a ton of great food. While we were there, we got name-dropped by the affable EllisLab CEO, Leslie Comacho in his keynote address for our work on the forthcoming native rich text editor for ExpressionEngine and we also met up with the always charming Jeremy Keith (and the lovely Jessica Spengler) to hatch some R4G plans that will be unveiled in the next week or so.

If you’re reading this on a desktop browser, you may not have noticed, but we just turned this blog on it’s head, design-wise. Those of you browsing on a tablet or mobile device, however, should be enjoying a much more comfortable reading experience. Now that’s not to say that we’ve been giving mobile the short end of the stick before pushing out the new code, but our approach to mobile has changed drastically since the redesign of this blog early last year and we’re really happy to be able to bring the lessons we’ve learned back here.