Category: Asides

Interesting links or quick ideas which don’t require any comment from me.

The state of video on the web

As Firefox 3.5 brings open video to the web, the W3C decide to drop codec requirements from the HTML 5 spec, citing disagreement between browser makers and concern over patents. Luckily, there’s a way to make video for everybody, which means encoding each clip only twice.


Web workers of the world: Unite

To much fanfare (the blowing of their own trumpets), Opera today announced Unite, a new service which lets you use the browser as a personal file server and social space. I haven’t had more than a passing glance at it yet – my URL is home.stopsatgreen.operaunite.com, if you’d like to see if I’m available – but it certainly looks interesting. Useful? I’m not sure yet.


CSS3.info: Progression in layout modules

Just written a new post on CSS3.info (the first for a long time), on the subject of the progression of a couple of layout modules through the W3C recommendation process. It’s actually a bit more exciting than I’ve just made it sound.


Internet Explorer 8 has been released

Microsoft announced the launch of Internet Explorer 8 yesterday; I urge everyone to download it as soon as possible, and to encourage their friends to do likewise – especially if their friends are using IE6. It’s great that we have another standards-compliant browser on the market, and I hope that adoption is swift.

What I would really like to see from Microsoft now is a series of iterative releases introducing new standards; rather than waiting three years for IE9, I would much rather wait one year for IE8.1. General manager, Dean Hachamovitch, has stated that there is a commitment on their side as long as test suites exist, so I call on all browser makers and standards bodies to work together to achieve that.


Bespin, the cloud, and Canvas

Mozilla recently launched a very early version of Bespin, their online IDE (Sitepoint have a nice overview). It’s hard to make too much of it at this early stage, although it is impressively fast and responsive; time will tell if that continues to be the case as new features are added.

This responsiveness seems to come from the front end being created using JavaScript (only 62kb compressed, apparently) and the HTML5 canvas element (update: more on that implementation). Seeing other examples of what its capable of, I really need to start learning more about canvas.


Quick testing for console.log

I’m happy to see that IE8 includes native support for console.log, the JavaScript command which writes information to your preferred debugging tool (mine is Firebug). If you leave it in your code – as I did on my latest project – it throws an error in IE7 & below.

The way around it is to quickly check that the command is supported by your browser, and to provide an alternative (I use that old standby, alert) if not; and the quickest way to do that is with the if...else shorthand:

window.console ? console.log(foo) : alert(foo);

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Aside

I’ve updated my Speaking page to include more conferences, more videos, and a little on my speaking requirements and preferences. I’m planning to cut down on the number of talks I give in 2014 (twelve is too many), but am always open to interesting offers and opportunities, so please get in touch if you’re organising an event.

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