Banjax Weblog

HTML5 Reading Material

2008-08-07T13:48:52Z

The HTML5 specification is being implemented piecemeal as areas of the specification become stable; with all of the major browser manufacturers involved in one or both of the two working groups ("W3C":http://www.w3.org/html/wg/ and "WHATWG":http://www.whatwg.org/) HTML5 will be becoming a bigger part of our day to day work. Currently all browsers support the HTML5 doctype, which triggers standards mode in browsers, so as an exercise we're trying out HTML5 on banjax.com:



 
  
    Banjax Web Design
    ...

If you try banjax.com on the "HTML5 Outliner":http://james.html5.org/outliner.html you should see it breaks down into a nice neat 'Table of Contents' like outline, albeit without using the new section or footer elements (HTML5 is backward compatible). You can also try "validator.nu":http://validator.nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.banjax.com%2F with the Banjax.com url, can't guarantee it's valid because as the spec changes so does validator.nu and we may be a little behind—though at the minute we're not doing anything too advanced so there shouldn't be a problem. There is a lot of material on HTML5 out there, articles, presentations, tools and wikis. I thought I might try and bring together some of the good stuff: *A couple of really quick HTML5 previews:* "XTECH '08 HTML5 Lightning Talk":http://annevankesteren.nl/2008/xtech-html5 by Anne van Kesteren of Opera Software ASA "How HTML5 can be used today":http://simon.html5.org/presentations/html5-geekmeet.en by Simon Pieters of of Opera Software ASA *A couple of much longer articles on HTML5:* "A Preview of HTML 5":http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5 by Lachlan Hunt of Opera Software ASA "New elements in HTML 5: Structure and semantics":http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-html5/ by Elliotte Rusty Harold *Useful Resources:* "HTML5 Validator":http://validator.nu/ by "Henri Sivonen":http://hsivonen.iki.fi/ & Mozilla (go to "Henri's site":http://hsivonen.iki.fi/, read the articles, acquire knowledge!) "HTML5 FAQ":http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ from the "WHATWG Wiki":http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/ "HTML5 Elements List":http://simon.html5.org/html5-elements by Simon Pieters "HTML5 Differences from HTML4":http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Differences_from_HTML4 from the "WHATWG Wiki":http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/ "HTML vrs. XHTML":http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/HTML_vs._XHTML from the "WHATWG Wiki":http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/ "HTML5 Outliner":http://james.html5.org/outliner.html by James Graham

How not to get round the Data Protection Act

2008-06-18T18:14:21Z

While registering for a click-use licence on the UK OPSI website I was presented with this gem, see if you can spot the mistake:



  We publish a list of Licence Holders on our
    website. However, to comply with data protection
    legislation we do not show details of private
    individuals without their consent.
  Please tick
    the box if you have no objections to your name and
    address details appearing on our website:

The input to opt out of being listed, and thus be compliant with the UK Data Protection Act, has the disabled attribute, which disables the use of the checkbox completely. You're signed up whether you like it or not. Let's see what the W3C HTML spec says about use of the disabled attribute: bq. "In contexts where user input is either undesirable or irrelevant, it is important to be able to disable a control or render it read-only..." Genius. :)

Thanks for all the linky love

2008-05-13T09:54:57Z

Looking at the server logs for Banjax.com we've got some nice linky love from the likes of bestwebgallery.com, cssmania.com, webcreme.com, screenfluent.com, www.cssleak.com & www.mostinspired.com. So it seems only fair to return the favour, thanks everyone!

If you're interested, when I say I looked at the server logs this is what I mean:

awk -F\" '($2 ~ /GET \/ /){ print $4 }' \ 
banjax.com-access.log \
| awk -F\/ '{ print $1,$2,$3 }' \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

Which returns something like this:

   1742 http:  cssmania.com
    861 http:  www.webcreme.com
    676 -  
    195 http:  webcreme.com
     88 http:  screenfluent.com
     70 http:  www.google.com
     24 http:  www.banjax.com
     23 http:  www.netvibes.com
     21 http:  www.mostinspired.com
     13 http:  www.cssleak.com
     ...

AWK is very useful for working with logs, you can read more about it here on the Wikipedia page for AWK.

A New Banjax Web Site.

2008-04-22T22:51:31Z

It's hard writing these "first post" posts. There's a lot of performance anxiety, what's my voice, my motivation... We don't generally use XHTML here, we hate neither web standards nor Zeldman. We just don't believe in XHTML. 99.999% of the time what people sell as XHTML is actually HTML. If you're not transporting your content text/html then it doesn't matter what you say in the DOCTYPE or META, it's plain ol' HTML. And there's nothing wrong with that at all, in fact, since it works in *all* browsers (ie. Internet Explorer) it's a much better idea all round. Anyway, I think I've set the bar low enough here for future blog posts from the people at Banjax (and guests!). I hope you like our website and I hope we find the bugs before you do. :)