Christian Heilmann

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Archive for March, 2008

Sitepoint releases new HTML reference (with JS reference to come)

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

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Good HTML references are really hard to come by, either they are just listings, like W3schools.com or terribly outdated.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I am working with other portals/article sites on similar projects and hope this will help flush old and outdated tutorials out of the search engine result pages.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.

Paris Web Videos are online – check out my “Successful teams use web standards” presentation

Friday, March 7th, 2008

The lovely people at Paris Web just released all the videos of the 2007 conference on dailymotion. My talk is the only English one and deals with the topic of how following web standards helps your team to be more successful:


Successful teams use web standards!
Uploaded by parisweb

Slides:

The other videos are pretty interesting insofar as they cover accessibility and internationalization matters from a technical, social and legislative angle. My favourite was the IBM server that automatically transcribes videos by running voice recognition over the audio stream.

The new web development challenge – independent modules in larger frameworks

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

I just wrote a post on the YDN Developer blog how our work as web developers is very likely to change in the nearer future. I am not talking about the imminent coming of IE8 and its – thankfully – standard new rendering engine but about web architectural decisions I have witnessed in lots of talks with large corporations, big web sites and people that try to move their products into backend frameworks.

The new challenge is that the page as we know it will be very likely to die out soon and be replaced with a set of modules that can be customized for the user needs and by what we know of them or even opened up to third party developers. The success of the likes of facebook and the new MySpace developer framework are very likely to be just the start. A shame that the technologies and standards we use to develop clean and maintainable web products are not geared towards that kind of approach. Where is the cascade if everything should be self-contained?