WP Tempus Dominus Auto

Usually when I blog about programming, it’s Perl stuff, but here’s something that’s mostly Javascript (with a little PHP to act as a shim for WordPress). It’s a script to use Tempus Dominus as a date/time picker for HTML 5 date and time form inputs on Bootstrap/jQuery-based sites. It lets you do stuff like this: … Continued

Extending hCard with RDFa

hCard is an HTML-based format for describing contacts (people, organisations, etc) on web pages. It allows you to mark up which elements represent their name, their address, their birthday and so forth. Here’s an example: Toby Inkster Birthday: 1980-06-01. While hCard offers many useful properties that can be used to describe contacts, some are considered … Continued

The Semantic Web

One of my current interests is the semantic web — that is, the push to move from publishing text on the Web to publishing structured data, which can actually be understood by computers (in so far as a computer can truly “understand” anything). By publishing information so that computers can understand it, you make the … Continued

The Great IE8 Meta Tag Climb Down

Yeah, so I know I’m about a week late in mentioning this (I’ve been busy — let’s hope nobody is using this blog as their primary source of news), but the Microsoft Internet Explorer team have backed down on their ridiculous META tag idea. Read about it on IEblog.

The Great IE8 Meta Tag Debacle

So Microsoft, in conjunction with some of the folk at WaSP, has announced its intention to include the quirks mode that beats all quirks modes in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 in an article on A List Apart: Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8. This has proved to be quite a controversial idea. … Continued

CSS to HTML Compiler

I’ve searched around the ‘Net for something like this before, but without success, so decided to write my own. The basic idea is this: there are certain circumstances in which you need to write some styled HTML without access to the document’s header. For example, when composing HTML-formatted e-mails, which may be displayed in a … Continued

Open Mobile Alliance DTD Oops!

The Open Mobile Alliance, who are responsible for co-ordinating the web-browsing efforts of mobile phones, seem to have misplaced xhtml-mobile12-model-1.mod. This file is a key part of the DTD for the latest version of their XHTML Mobile Profile standard, which defines how authors should construct web pages intended for the consumption of mobile phones. Now … Continued

PHP Linkifier

Here’s a nifty bit of code I wrote a while back (utilising a function from PHP SmartyPants) that takes a bunch of HTML, searches it for some word or phrase that you specify, and turns all occurances of it into a link, unless it’s already a link!

The Tao of HTML 5 – Part II

Part of the problem with the WHATWG HTML 5 specification is that it’s primarily written by browser makers. (Hixie, its editor, is the exception, as he currently works for Google, though in the past was employed by the Mozilla Foundation and Opera.) This has steered the focus of the specification towards browser manufacturers — the … Continued

Ogg Theora Support in Opera 9.5

In Hâkon Wium Lie’s latest missive on Opera Labs he details Opera’s upcoming support for the element in HTML 5. He points out that it’s not much use without at least one defacto standard web video format (much like JPEG, GIF and PNG have become for the element. A preview release of Opera 9.5 includes … Continued

The Tao of HTML 5

On the 10th of June 1215, the a group of English barons invaded London and five days later forced King John to attach his seal to the Magna Carta in Runnymede, on the border of modern-day Sussex and Berkshire. (In those days it was customary to attach ones seal to an agreement rather than sign … Continued

Re: Views on XHTML 1.1 site

David Dorward wrote: Jukka K. Korpela wrote: But the W3C makes a big noise about it! See http://www.w3.org main page right now. They have created a working draft for XHTML 1.1 Second Edition. Which says that XHTML 1.1 SHOULD be served as text/html… and references a document which says it SHOULD NOT be served as … Continued

On Custom DTDs

Dylan Parry wrote: Of course, but validating against a custom, non-standards controlled DTD is a complete waste of time for HTML. That would be validation for validation’s sake. If you can’t validate against a recognised doctype then there is truly no point in attempting to create your own to cover your problems Using a custom … Continued

On Web Design

local wrote: Now I wonder how important cross-browser coding actually is. How many browsers do I have to test, which versions? I have two philosophies on this question. The first is the philosophy I apply when making my own website — I stick to the standards and let any browser that can't handle it be … Continued