Archive for the 'HTML' Category

HTML Minification

Good old Kangax has been playing with HTML minification and has shared his new tool in an early stage.

What does it do?
Kangax has forked John Resig’s HTML parser which parses the HTML and sends that into the Minifier. This has rules that do things like whitespace optimization, comment removal, and collapsing boolean attributes (e.g. disabled=”true” [...]

Jaml: An HTML builder a la Haml

There have been a few HTML builder APIs out there, but Ed Spencer (new lead of Ext JS) has put together something that looks and feels similar to Haml from the Ruby side.
Jaml lets you write HTML like this:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:

 

div(

  h1(”Some title”),

  p(”Some exciting paragraph text”),

 

  br(),

 

  ul(

    li(”First item”),

    li(”Second item”),

    [...]

Zen Coding: Generating HTML from selectors

Normally we use CSS selectors to find and tear apart HTML. Sergey Chikuyonok’s jujitsu move is to do the opposite. With Zen Coding you take a CSS selector like this:
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:

 

html:xt>div#header>div#logo+ul#nav>li.item-$*5>a

 

and it generates an HTML structure like this:
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:

 

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en”>

<head>

        <title></title>

        [...]

Full Frontal ‘09: Todd Kloots on ARIA and Acessibility

Todd Kloots is talking accessibility and ARIA, with examples showing how YUI nicely supports these techniques. He explains how to improve in three areas: perception, usability, discoverability.
Can We Do ARIA Today?
Yes.
Firefox and IE (he didn’t say which version) have really good support for ARIA. And Opera, Chrome, and Safari. Likewise for the screenreaders - JAWS, [...]

Even Crazier Times: HTML Rendering… in Flash

On Monday we saw someone rewriting an HTML renderer in Canvas. Continuing the fun times we see an open source project that does the same thing, but using Flash ActionScript thanks to one of the comments on our last post:

Wrapper is a cross-browser compliant HTML/CSS rendering engine written in ActionScript that sits on top [...]

Crazy Times: Rendering HTML…. in Canvas

It’s still early work but James Urquhart has gotten HTML rendering inside the Canvas tag. In his demo, he renders the following HTML into the Canvas element:
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:

&lt;html&gt;

  &lt;head&gt;

    &lt;title&gt;&lt;/title&gt;

  &lt;/head&gt;

  &lt;body&gt;

    &lt;p class="woo" id="render" style="display:none;"&gt;

      Rendering &lt;b&gt;HTML&lt;/b&gt;…

    &lt;/p&gt;

    &lt;p&gt;&lt;span&gt;In &lt;b&gt;Canvas&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/span&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;

    &lt;p&gt;0_0&lt;/p&gt;

  &lt;/body&gt;

&lt;/html&gt;

It’s still pretty simple, but [...]

Making HTML5 Microdata Usable

This is really awesome; I’ve long thought that applying usability studies to APIs like we do for user-interfaces can yield real results and make development easier.

The HTML5 spec recently had something called microdata added to it. The idea behind microdata is to allow HTML to be annotated with machine-readable data.
A natural question is whether developers [...]

View Source Tutorial: Fancy Web Page Using HTML5, CSS, and SVG

I recently ran across a site that made my jaw drop when I realized it’s completely made with HTML5, CSS, and SVG. It’s the site for the GNU Emacs for Mac OS X release:

Who ever knew GNU Emacs could look so sexy? When I think of GNU Emacs I generally imagine Richard Stallman’s beard rather [...]

ChemDoodle Web Components

Via jzornig comes news of a cool set of components written with HTML 5 and the Canvas tag:

ChemDoodle Web Components are pure javascript objects derived from ChemDoodle™ to solve common chemistry related tasks on the web. These components are powerful, fully customizable, easy to implement, and are free under the open source GPL license.

The page [...]

Dive Into HTML 5, Intro Articles, and IE 6 Cheatsheet

I’ve come across a few nice educational articles on HTML 5 recently I want to share.
The first is from Mark Pilgrim, who has been writing a new book called Dive Into HTML 5. He has put up two chapters already, “Detecting HTML5 Features: It’s Elementary, My Dear Watson” and “Let’s Call It a Draw(ing Surface).” [...]