Shawn Medero » html5

Daily Brief, February 18th 2010, Afternoon Edition

Shawn Medero — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:34:56 +0000

Daily Brief, February 12th 2010, Weekend Edition

Shawn Medero — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:41:52 +0000

Somedays, what is actually going on with progress in the W3C’s HTML WG, with respect to HTML5, is anyone’s guess
Adobe’s Flash player 10.1 supports a private browsing mode. For those unaware, like your web browser, Flash has cookies too
Seattle’s Saltchuk Resources has developed a hybrid tug boat
Ithaca’s Gimme! Coffee composted roughly 24 tons in 2009. [Read about how it happens and what the end product is][4a]
Director and writer John Hughes’s son have uncovered roughly 300 notebooks of their father’s notes
Aaron Schwartz muses on concepts of “Open Government” and “Transparency” in politics
Captain America feels out of touch with the Tea Party

Daily Brief, February 6th 2010, Weekend Edition

Shawn Medero — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:13:55 +0000

Joanna Smith Rakoff describes her experience as an assistant at Harold Ober Associates, JD. Salinger’s publisher. Ultimately one of her roles ended up being a gatekeeper of Salinger’s personal life by replying to the many letters addressed to the author.
Opera 10.5 snapshot build 9240 re-adds support for the W3C Geolocation API, reenables Opera Unite and Spell checking, and (via site-patching) adds support for Google Wave.
The Guardian’s new Zeitgeist is a “what’s popular right now on our site” page presented visually as a heat-map. The Guardian blog has an entry up describing with the behind-the-scenes introduction.
William J. Rapaport, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Buffalo, provides a history of the sentence “Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.” This is the sort thing that trips up folks working on any sort of natural language processing disambiguation task.
Google Apps is phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 in 2010.
Finally, if you still haven’t made time for it, Obama’s appearance at a Republican Retreat in Baltimore is one of the more fascinating moments in U.S. Presidential history. This sort of “question time” between elected head of state and elected representatives is apparently quite common in other countries.

HTML5’s Section Element? Try HTML 1.0

Shawn Medero — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:43:31 +0000

I was reading through an archive email thread with the subject of “still no DTD, huh?”. It is mostly Dan Connolly and Tim Berners-Lee discussing dtds and some bugs in the NeXT editor that generated HTML, including everyone’s favorite “quoted attribute values.” People have long blamed Internet Explorer for allowing such loose HTML syntax, but it really goes back much further than that.

The more interesting content of these emails centers around the discussion of elements such as

, , and their descriptions/use match pretty closely to what we have in HTML5 today.

Dan Connolly provides an example of the intended use of these elements:




foo

   

       header 


      paragraph associated with above header

      

       header 


      stuff under H2

Tim replies to this example with:

YEs, sections appeal to me too. Especially when making big HTML files out of lots of little ones. The effect of
..
would be to demote all headings by one inside the section. I would be inclined then to have simpky a tag which would be equivalent to H0 and map onto H1 within a section, or Hn within n sections. The SGML parser can’t generate this stuff, but the editors could derive it from the style information. We would have to introduce
early on to get a transistion period. Then in HTML3 we would declare H2 etc obsolete.

If you look in the comments of the original HTML DTD, there’s even a place for these tags

It is an fun look at what might have been…