HTML5 Getting Closer

Posted on by thomas

The HTML Working Group at the W3C has published a full set of Working Drafts for the specification of HTML5.

This is another important step to move HTML5 and its associated technologies closer to become an “official” standard and will certainly speed up the implementation of many of these features in modern browsers.

Here are the links to the various documents that have been published:

And just as a reminder, here are my examples for some of the new features of HTML5.

Cool Open Source: FlightGear

Posted on by thomas

This is very cool: I’ve just done a lazy flight around San Francisco Bay with FlightGear – an open source project that has been going on for about fifteen years now. Not sure how I managed to not hear of this before, since I’ve been having bad withdrawal symptoms since I’d ditched Windows and Flight Simulator a few years ago.

FlightGear is very far advanced at this point and much about the architecture of the platform is very attractive. All the scenery files, plane models and the AI traffic definitions are done in XML – there is a lot of stuff to poke around in… not that I really need another time sink at this point…

Flying in FlightGear was very nice. Similar to Microsoft’s FlightSim, but maybe a little bit more of a realistic aircraft handing (which is not always good for the casual pilot!). The scenery around the Bay was gorgeous and the clouds and sky (which is what a pilot will see the most) are near perfect, at least as good as FS9.

With versions for Mac and PC and as a free download, what is there not to like?

Audio Under Ice

Posted on by thomas

Here’s another one of those things that is quite amazing in that special Internet kind of way: The German Alfred Wegener Institute maintains a station on the ice shelf in Antarctica and some enterprising scientists have lowered a microphone through the ice into the water under the ice shelf and the resulting audio stream – after bouncing via satellite to Germany – can be listened to live by anybody who has an Internet connection.

Now what would you be hearing there? From my casual listening, there is a constant low roar in the line, almost like white noise, which is actually kind of relaxing, and then suddenly there are loud cracks, booms and whiplashing metallic noises whenever the ice shifts.

From what the institute website states, there is a good chance of catching the songs of various kinds of seals and whales, but today I’ve only heard faint, low noises that may have come from whales. I’m looking forward to hear them close up.

But even just the echoing booms of the ice are fascinating and the stereo effect of the microphone is quite startling. Not sure if that makes me sound weird, but I could listen to this audio stream all day! :-)

When Hover Becomes a Drag

Posted on by thomas

Over at Roughly Drafted is a very interesting article about the UI issues of having Flash on a touch screen device.

I pretty much slapped my forehead when I read this, since it is actually very obvious once you think about it, but most of us haven’t had a chance yet to experience Flash on a touch screen, so the issue hasn’t been in our face enough… and the issue is that many Flash experiences on the Web use mouse hover all over the place. Now imagine trying to use that on a touchscreen. Exactly.

Now to be fair, this is not just a Flash problem, the same is true for many websites where we use hover states for additional information and easy option selectors. We will have to come to terms with the fact that there are more and more touchscreen devices with excellent web capabilities, and we will have to start designing sites accordingly.

The article implies that this is one of the main reasons that there is no Flash on the iPhone or the new iPad and I’m not so sure that’s the case, but the absence of Flash on the iPhone has definitely prolonged the detrimental behavior of all web designers and developers to assume that there is always a mouse cursor.

We will have to let go of the mouse cursor. It’s an interesting experiment – look at your most recent web project (if that’s what you do) and see if it can be used without a mouse. And if not, can you fix it?

On The HTML5 Train

Posted on by thomas

A full month without a post! Time is truly flying right now. On the personal side, I’ve been busy with helping to prepare for our little family as the arrival of the Little One(tm) is getting closer and closer…

And work-wise I’ve spent as much time as possible reading up on the new HTML5 and CSS3 features – and there are many.

On my more experimental site – Stories In Flight – I’ve started to create a whole section with small cheatsheets and tutorials around things in HTML5 that have caught my eyes:

  • There is the master cheatsheet for HTML5 and CSS3, which gives you a good overview of some of the highlights like box shadows, rounded corners, SVG and Canvas tags.
  • I’ve created a little tutorial around the basics of Ruby Annotations and there’s also a suggestion of a practical use in language training.
  • An exploration of CSS3 multiple background images and – rather a surprise – how this can be used quite efficiently for JavaScript animations. I will revisit this feature in the near future with several interesting new ideas…
  • A quick look at the basic HTML5 audio tag, including a script solution that allows to easily create whole soundscapes with multiple channels of sound that will come in handy for JavaScript games.

The more I research all the new HTML5 features, the more excited I get for the future of interface engineering – after years of very little progress, where almost all interesting new interface developments came from the Flash side, we are now seeing a renaissance of HTML.

Yes, there will be browser incompatibilities, and yes, Flash will not go away, but I think we will be able to define a much better model where Flash will really only be used where it is necessary. No more reason to kill accessibility and SEO with Flash navigation elements.

We will see exciting new HTML websites exploding onto the scene, lightweight, accessible and kicking all kinds of visual butt.

I can’t wait.

The Other Ruby

Posted on by thomas

The number of changes to HTML and CSS that are now showing up in browser rendering engines as part of the general push towards HTML5 are quite astonishing. If you are a web developer and you are not spending all your time right now learning new technologies, then you are probably doing something wrong.

Among the many changes there is one element that has been implemented in Internet Explorer for years, but only now has made the official cut with HTML5 and now slowly finds its way into other modern browsers: Ruby Annotations.

In short, ruby allows the addition of a short annotation, like a pronunciation guide, to a word in a text. Ruby annotations have been used in East Asian languages in print for a very long time, so this new feature will certainly improve the acceptance of standards-based browsers in Asia.

But it will be interesting to see what other uses web developers will find for these new elements – they allow for interesting layout solutions around online translation, language learning and developmental training that are certainly worth exploring.

The Web We Should Have

Posted on by thomas

The Web as we know it is based for the most part on ten year old technology.

There are many features that web designers have been craving for since the early 2000s that have been stuck in standardization limbo for many years and still now, in 2010, the web community has to support ancient browsers that just won’t go away. Internet Explorer 6 is now nine years old. NINE YEARS!

Every time somebody builds a big commercial website, some 5-10% of the HTML development time is spent on making the site work on IE6, and there are many cool features that are still regularly cut from designs since IE6 or IE7 or even IE8 do not support them.

But there is some light at the end of the tunnel. Even with Microsoft dragging their feet on every new feature, the Web is slowly changing. HTML5 is not an official standard yet, but there are many features that have already been implemented by Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome – and for some of them there are adequate workarounds for IE7 & 8 that allow us finally to stretch a little bit, try something new… to experiment.

Here is a HTML5/CSS3 Cheatsheet that I’ve created mostly so that I don’t have to look up the syntax on random web sites every time I want to use one of these. There’s text shadows, box shadows, rounded corners, inline SVG and Canvas support. Many of these things will make the web a better looking place (and I’m sure we’ll also see many anti-usecases in the near future!), and if you are a web developer you may find a use for these, too!

The Third and The Seventh

Posted on by thomas

third_seventhAlex Roman has spent a year creating one of the most astonishing CG short films that I’ve seen in a long time: The Third & The Seventh (HD version at vimeo).

The film can be best described as a meditation on architecture, photography and the sense of space and depth in the world around us.

Alex Roman recreated several modern buildings as 3D renderings and then uses some quite amazing craftsmanship to give the viewer a sense of depth with very subtle animations where the virtual camera slowly floats through the buildings, with ever so slight changes in focus.

Many of the effects are so subtle, especially in the first half of the film that I didn’t even believe that I am looking at CG rendered versions of the buildings. Alex has a great sense for lighting and clearly must have spent many hours tuning the lighting set ups to create extremely photorealistic settings. Only in the second half of the film, when he introduces surrealistic effects, does it become apparent that we have been looking at computer graphics all along.

Here is a video with some of the scenes as compositing breakdowns in case you want to see a peek under the hood of several of the scenes in the film.

It should be mentioned that Alex also created the soundtrack for the film, making this all around a major tour de force.

FlickrPoet on Flickr Blog

Posted on by thomas

Today I noticed a surprising spike in traffic to FlickrPoet, and after a little bit of digging I found the source for all this sudden interest: FlickrPoet has been mentioned on the Flickr Blog!

It’s been interesting to follow the buzz that the Flickr Blog can create – within hours I saw hundreds of users come to the site, mostly from an ever-expanding tweet cloud on Twitter.

The comments in many of the tweets as well as emails to me and comments left on the Flickr API page for FlickrPoet have been great – it’s fun to think of so many people spending a few minutes on that site and playing with the creative options of the app. Several people mentioned that they wrote small poems right there on the site – how neat is that!

Multitudes

Posted on by thomas

China officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups in the country, a fact that is easy to overlook when one travels through the major population centers which look dominantly Han. A trip into the countryside very often reveals a different picture, with smaller villages sporting very different faces and sometimes also different attire from the typical Chinese street clothes.

Here is a gorgeous look at the 56 ethnic groups (long page with big photos), from the western deserts to the eastern ocean shore and from Russian enclaves in the far north to tribal villages in the jungle near the Burmese border.

I wasn’t able to find much information about this amazing photo shoot, but it is obvious that serious funding and much work was involved in creating these unique tableaus – each of the photos must have taken several days to prepare and clearly much care was taken in selecting the members of each community and in encouraging them to put on their traditional clothes.