Archive for August, 2009

HTML 5 – An interesting step-by-step post

By Simon, 6 August, 2009, No Comment

Smashing Magazine wrote an excellent post a couple of days ago about building a page in HTML 5. It has a step-by-step guide and the explanations for each section were clear and concise.

HTML 5 is still well in its infancy and very few browsers even support what has been approved. The thing is we know it is going to happen so there is no harm in learning the foundations of how it works now. I’m not advocating that we should all start developing everything in HTML 5 but this is another tool to think about when building or updating a site. In the age where job competition is fierce this can only be another string in your bow.

Visit the Smashing Magazine HTML 5 post here.

Also See…

- HTML 5 on Wiki

- http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/16/html5-and-the-future-of-the-web/

- W3C’s oveview of HTML 5

- Differences between HTML4 and HTML 5

- A HTML 5 validator

Microformats – Google back the RDFa format

By Simon, 5 August, 2009, No Comment

One of the big issues of Web 2.0 is the computers inability to distinguish what the content is. You might well have “Author: Simon Day” which, to a human, is very obvious but to a search engine spider or computer it isn’t because the page can contain many names. It simply cannot extrapolate the information as well as a human because the pages can contain many other names, dates, times, URL’s, email addresses and so on . What we’ve needed for a long time is a way for the spiders and computers to know what is actually happening on a section of a page and give it precise details like, as an example, the when, the what and the who.

Microformats are a way of adding a small piece of markup so it can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined.

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