Sitepoint just released a HTML reference which is part of their plan to have a full reference on the trinity of web development (HTML/CSS/JavaScript).

Good HTML references are really hard to come by, either they are just listings, like W3schools.com or terribly outdated.

Sitepoint have done quite a good job in listing all the HTML elements and categorizing them into different use cases. There is also a list of deprecated elements and attributes to avoid (which could be considered dangerous to still bring up as some of them are too handy to simply add to solve an issue) and a Microformats primer.

I am working with other portals/article sites on similar projects and hope this will help flush old and outdated tutorials out of the search engine result pages.

The reference also gives a legend of browser support, something that so so far was only available on the German SelfHTML reference.

My latest contribution to the ink-on-dead-tree media is a chapter for Sitepoint’s new book
The Art and Science of JavaScript. I’ve been giving details about the history and the contents of the book in detail in a blog post on the Yahoo Developer Blog and while it has been out for a while I just got my free copies today, hence the delay.

My chapter in detail covers how you can build a badge to display information you stored on another site in yours without having to resort to a server side solution or slow down your site. All the magic happens after the page has been loaded and if there is no JavaScript available, visitors will still see a link to the same online resource.

It is a detailed explanation of the rationale and script that feeds my del.icio.us plugin for wordpress shown below:

[delicious:My links about JavaScript,codepo8,10,javascript]

Whilst not the flashiest of the chapters I hope that people can learn something about APIs, REST and dynamic script node generation from it.

I was personally very positively surprised by the quality of the book itself: the full colour print, typography and iconography are very nice. The only thing that is missing is an author name or short bio on the chapter start page, it is a bit tricky to know who did what. Well done Sitepoint!