Today I was part of a video conference with the university of Dundee for this year’s Yahoo university hack challenge. Every year the students release a “hack” as part of their coursework for Yahoo and the programme yielded quite some amazing hacks in the last years.

This year is different for me as I am not working for Yahoo any longer. So instead of telling the students about YQL, YUI and Yahoo’s Geo platform I talked about Mozilla, our mission and gave them some ideas what to hack for the benefit of HTML5 and the open web. The slides are available on Slideshare or embedded here:

My main task for the students was to think about the web as it is right now. The web is the platform and the browser is the tool. Documentation about the different technologies is freely available and – in Mozilla’s case – also editable by everyone to ensure that it is up-to-date.

HTML5 is a big new thing and a lot of people go crazy about it. The issue is that a lot of it is progress for the sake of progress and there is not much insight into what the new technologies mean in terms of accessibility or backwards compatibility. As Dundee university is one of the few in the UK that have an accessibility focus I thought this a great opportunity to ask the students to consider some a11y hack with new technologies.

I talked about native audio and video in browsers and the benefits it has over closed source solutions (pointing to the lecture I’ve given at MIT on the subject of multimedia on the web).

I also told the students about the interview I did with John Foliot on the topic of HTML5 accessibility as this contained a few ideas they could hack on that need solutions.

I talked about the Popcorn.js library which makes it easy to sync video with other web page content and the Butter interface for it which simulates Flash builder or Shockwave but for open technologies.

I briefly mentioned the Universal Subtitles tool that allows you to add subtitles with translations to any video on the web.

Another demo to inspire the students was Mark Boas’ audio and text sync example which shows how you could sync the text of a speech with the audio file for later replay.

This led to a quick introduction of Mozilla’s Audio API which gives you in-depth access to audio files down to the beats per minute.

Next I introduced Mozilla’s gaming section and the winner of the last game competition Marble Run, explaining that HTML5 gaming is hot right now (especially with Facebook’s support) and that there is quite some prize money and good prizes to be won.

Next up I talked about Mozilla’s Labs and the tools to play with there – Rainbow, a JavaScript extension to access the camera and microphone of computers as input devices, Chromeless, a UI-less browser allowing you to build bespoke browsing solutions and Prospector, a way to data-mine browsing behaviour of users.

I ended my introduction to Mozilla tech for hacking with the extension builder for Firefox which makes it easy to make the browser do what it doesn’t do yet.

Let’s see what the students come up with!

I just released the notes of my “Using HTML5 sensibly” talk over on the Mozilla hacks blog and there are a few questions that need answering by anyone who wants to be part of publishing on the web in the future:

• Can innovation be based on “people never did this correctly anyways”?
• Is it HTML or BML? (HyperText Markup Language or Browser Markup Language)
• Should HTML be there only for browsers? What about conversion Services? Search bots? Content scrapers?
• Should we shoe-horn new technology into legacy browsers?
• Do patches add complexity as we need to test their performance? (there is no point in giving an old browser functionality that simply looks bad or grinds it down to a halt)
• How about moving IE fixes to the server side? Padding with DIVs with classes in PHP/Ruby/Python after checking the browser and no JS for IE?
• Can we expect content creators to create video in many formats to support an open technology?
• Can a service like vid.ly be trusted for content creation and storage?
• Is HTML5 not applicable for premium content?

Check the detailed notes on the Mozilla blog, and – as a reminder – here are the slides and the video of the talk:

You can get the slides on Slideshare or see them here:

You can see “Using HTML5 sensibly” on any HTML5 enabled device here (courtesy of vid.ly).

Yesterday night I spoke at the London Ajax Meetup about Multimedia on the web (a repeat of my MIT talk as I wanted a video of it) and “Using HTML5” sensibly.

Especially the second talk was close to my heart as I think it is high time us developers take back HTML5 from the marketing people. HTML5 is the evolution of our web technologies, not another flashy add-on to already badly used outdated practices.

You can find the Slides of the talk on Slideshare:

The audio recording of the talk is also available on archive.org.

The organisers promised that the video of the talks is available soon.

I am also going to write a detailed post on Mozilla once the video is available.

As just announced – the Google IO conference registration is open and they have created a very cool countdown animation:

In the blog post they describe the cool countdown as HTML5:

If you liked our HTML5 countdown, stay tuned for more surprises. We’ll keep you posted on the latest developments for Google I/O 2011 at the website, on Twitter (@Googleio) and Google Buzz. Get your tickets early—last year we sold out in record time!

Whilst awesome, there is not much new HTML in there right now. This time there is no need for beauitfying – the code is not at all minified or packed and includes comments – which I love, thanks guys! Seems most of the work was done by Matt King and the balls use the box2D physics engine.

Strangely enough, however it does not use the CANVAS tag for the animation (as box2d does), but instead creates images which get moved around. I guess this is a performance issue, but seeing that this MBA has its fan running after half a minute of the countdown it didn’t help too much.

There is also no sign of any of the new semantic HTML elements in the source – instead of header, section and footer there are DIVs with IDs. There’s a NOSCRIPT element telling people to go to whatbrowser.org to download a better browser and a screenshot of the animation if it doesn’t work for you. This is a good way of getting people excited but I don’t know why you would need a NOSCRIPT when you generate all the images of the balls anyways. Just replace this message when the page loads.

Just setting the record straight here, thanks for keeping the source open, Google!

For years our clients have been confused about the elusive fold on the web. We all * know * that content should be above it but designers always squirm when we ask them about it.

Time to make it easy for designers to show their clients where the fold is. For this, I wrote a bookmarklet:

Just by showing people you can stop a lot of fruitless discussions.

(might contain irony)