Month: February 2012

Here’s the thing. You take your tablet PC to lunch with the intention of reading the latest on the RSS feeds. You open your news reader, you like an article, you want to share. One option is twitter. You try it, but the embedded web browser doesn’t know your twitter password. You open the article in the browser, and it doesn’t either. The app that does, the official twitter app, is not available as an option for tweeting.

Compare this with the experience on a web browser. It remembers your twitter login details because there’s a cookie set. Sharing a link from Google Reader is simply a matter of pressing “tweet this”. Bang, it’s gone.

Am I the only one who thinks that having multiple, separate web browsers, each with their own cookie stores (the App Model) as opposed to the single ubiquitous web browser with a single shared cookie store and unlimited available apps, is a retrograde step?

Reminds me of the nightmare of cut-and-paste between applications on MS-DOS!

Why can’t tablet PCs do this? Is Google Chrome OS (apparently just a browser as operating system) better?

In my courses on Web Design, EG-146, EG-153, EG-259 and EG-253 I have long advocated the use of Firebug as must-install developer tool. Over recent years, Google’s Chrome Browser, Apple’s Safari, Opera and even the new Internet Explorer have built developer tools into their standard browser offering. In Firefox 10, released on 31st January 2012, Firefox has finally built-in developer tools too, and they look pretty slick. And more is to come in Firefox 11 to be released in March. Here’s a short video introduction and you can read more in Developer Tools in Firefox Aurora 10 and in An Overview of Firefox Developer Tools and Firefox 10 Arrives with New Dev Tools and Full-Screen API.

Welcome to the blogging exercise ICCT class of 2011. Please leave the link to your new blog in the comments.

• Dive Into HTML5

Mark Pilgrim wrote Dive Into Python (bookmarked elsewhere in this collection) and here he is writing an emerging O’Reilly Book called “HTML5: up and running” which will be released in a similar way … in paper with on-line version available under Creative Commons. It is now being maintained by the community.

tags:html5 book free online mark.pilgrim dive.in eg-259 tutorial ebook html resources eg-146 eg-153
– A long digression into how browsers handle unknown elements

Part of Chapter 3 or Mark Pilgrim’s “Dive into HTML5″ that discusses how browsers handle unknown elements that introduces a JavaScript fix that will enable Internet Explorer to build the correct DOM from an HTML5 document which will enable the new element to be styled and accessed by JavaScript.

tags:html5 element fix javascript mark.pilgrim diveintohtml5 eg-259
– How Did We Get Here? – Dive Into HTML5

Chapter 1 of “Dive into HTML5″ the on-line version of Mark Pilgrim’s book that will eventually be published as HTML5: Up and Running by Google Press to be published by O’Reilly. I’ve linked this because it’s a very nice potted history of how HTML came to be.

tags:eg-259 eg-146 web standards html xhtml mime mark.pilgrim diveintohtml5 html5
– Detecting HTML5 Features – Dive Into HTML5

Chapter 2 of Mark Pilgrim’s book. This one is interesting in that it is both a discussion on how you might, as a web developer, use JavaScript to detect your customer’s browser support for the new HTML5 features, as well as, at the same time, using these/

tags:example testbed browser html5 javascript detection html webdev tutorial reference book mark.pilgrim diveintohtml5 modenizr eg-259

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.