It was announced on the HTML Work­ing Group mail­ing list this morn­ing that the font ele­ment will be absent from the next draft of the HTML5 spec­i­fi­ca­tion. The inclu­sion of font in the spec was con­tro­ver­sial, as many (includ­ing myself) thought it was a pure­ly dec­o­ra­tive ele­ment that had no place in seman­tic code.

Of course, browsers will still have to sup­port the ele­ment because of the many lega­cy sites on the web; but as of now any soft­ware that gen­er­ates mark-up should use the style attribute instead. It’s a small incre­ment better.

Any­one not read­ing this in an RSS feed will notice that I’ve installed a new theme. I was nev­er real­ly hap­py with the pre­vi­ous one, as it was based on a design that had been reject­ed from anoth­er project and was called into action before it was ready.

I’ve giv­en this one a ver­sion num­ber of 0.5, as I still have a lot I want to do with it, notably: embed­ding more micro­for­mats in the code; adding more pro­gres­sive enhance­ment to the CSS; mak­ing more use of Word­Press’ tag­ging sys­tem; and test­ing more thor­ough­ly in IE.

How­ev­er, I’m pret­ty pleased with the more typo­graph­ic direc­tion in this design, and am excit­ed to be using a theme I gen­uine­ly care about.

If any read­ers have any con­struc­tive crit­i­cism to give, please go ahead and do so in the com­ments. How­ev­er, do please be gen­tle with me!

As promised, slight­ly more detailed notes on the ses­sions at FoWD (fur­ther links to pre­sen­ta­tions to fol­low). In chrono­log­i­cal order:

Finding Inspiration for Design (Patrick McNeil)

I missed the begin­ning of this, but it seemed to be pret­ty sage, if not rather com­mon­sense, advice (don’t just use web­sites for web design inspi­ra­tion), as well as some notes on cur­rent trends and tips on future ones; soft colours, more use of hor­i­zon­tal space, more video.

User Experience vs Brand Experience (Steve Pearce and Andy Clarke)

Set up as a con­fronta­tion, but in fact both speak­ers were at pains to point out that both should be thought of togeth­er. Andy Clarke adds: don’t be afraid to fail, we learn from our mistakes.

Read the full article

Yes­ter­day I attend­ed the Future Of Web Design Lon­don event in Kens­ing­ton (along with my love­ly wife). Unfor­tu­nate­ly I’ve been suf­fer­ing from some stink­ing virus for the past cou­ple of days, which left me uncom­fort­able, occa­sion­al­ly in pain, and irri­tat­ed. Please bear in mind that this may have coloured my per­cep­tion of the event some­what; also, please accept my apolo­gies if you were at the event and start to suf­fer the same symp­toms in a few days.

I’ll write short reviews of the indi­vid­ual ses­sions at a lat­er date, but my gen­er­al opin­ion is that it was just OK; it dealt more in cur­rent design trends than future, almost all of which you prob­a­bly already know if you keep up to date with sites like A List Apart or some of the bet­ter blogs. Although that’s not to say it was a com­plete waste of time; few of the speak­ers were less than inter­est­ing, and there are always new tech­niques to learn or exist­ing tech­niques to reinforce.

Some of the speak­ers suf­fered from not hav­ing worked (or, at least, not for a long time) in a reg­u­lar agency posi­tion (if I may coin a phrase, coal-face web devel­op­ment), and their advice was there­fore use­ful on a the­o­ret­i­cal basis only. Sure, it would be great if we could make mis­takes in pub­lic and make con­stant revi­sions to our web­sites, but who pays for that? The client almost cer­tain­ly won’t. We think our­selves lucky to have some clients who are savvy enough to make annu­al revi­sions to their sites! And while I’d love to just “get bet­ter clients”, that’s just not how the real world works for those of us who don’t work at start-ups or own our own agencies.

In sum­ma­ry, then, com­pared to last year’s @media, which I found gen­uine­ly inspir­ing, this was ‘only’ inter­est­ing. I’ll give care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion as to whether or not I attend again next year.

Cushy­CMS is a very sim­ple, nice idea for allow­ing users to edit con­tent on their web­site with­out giv­ing them access to the tem­plates. It does­n’t allow changes to mark-up or style sheets, only titles, images and blocks of copy.

It requires that the site admin marks up the blocks that will be editable by adding class="cushycms" to their con­tain­ing ele­ments; the web-based appli­ca­tion will then auto­mat­i­cal­ly find each marked ele­ment in the pages you assign to it and open a text area (with or with­out WYSIWYG edi­tor) allow­ing the user to edit.

In its cur­rent state it would­n’t be suit­able for sites with a lot of pages, but if you run a small, brochure-type site for a cus­tomer who want­ed to make occa­sion­al updates, this could be a bet­ter solu­tion in some cas­es than installing a full data­base-pow­ered CMS.

I’d pre­fer it to have a bet­ter WYSIWYG edi­tor, and it would be more use­ful if the inter­face could be brand­ed and host­ed on your own serv­er. How­ev­er, the cre­ators are open to feed­back and these ideas and many oth­ers have been sug­gest­ed already.

While it may not (yet?) be the answer to all your con­tent man­age­ment require­ments, Cushy­CMS is a neat, clever lit­tle app that would be use­ful for small busi­ness­es or for small clients. It’s cur­rent­ly in Pri­vate Beta only, but if you watch the intro­duc­to­ry video close­ly, that won’t be a bar­ri­er to entry.

I men­tioned CSS Vari­ables pre­vi­ous­ly, and now the pro­pos­al has been pub­lished and I agree with authors Daniel Glaz­man and David Hyatt when they say:

We expect CSS Vari­ables to receive a very pos­i­tive feed­back from both the Web authors’ com­mu­ni­ty and brows­er vendors. 

The syn­tax will be to declare the vari­ables using the @variables at-rule, then call­ing them with the var() function:

@variables { keyColor: #f00; }
h1 { color: var(keyColor); }

That’s it. Beau­ti­ful­ly sim­ple, and I real­ly, real­ly look for­ward to see­ing it implemented.