Things have been pretty quiet here recently, though by contrast 2011 was an eventful year both personally and professionally. During the course of the year I completed many interesting projects at work, had my first speaking engagement at Dundee Web Standards, moved house and got engaged to a beautiful girl. An eventful year I’m sure you’ll agree!
The highlight professionally was when I agreed to do a short talk about Responsive Web Design at Dundee Web Standards in August, and I enjoyed doing it and will maybe do more speaking in the future. I’ll admit to being a bit nervous before grabbing the mic, but once I got started it seemed to go pretty well. Responsive design is a topic I’m highly interested and a strong supporter of so I had plenty to say on the topic.
Just before the talk I re-designed this site slightly both in terms of look and also converted it to a responsive layout, although I’ll admit to neglecting it a bit of late. I added a Labs section with great intentions of using it to host experiments and little snippets I’ve worked on but this year I intend to get this up and running properly. I also intend to start writing more, as the last post was in February and is the longest I’ve gone without adding new content. There are several drafts waiting to be finished that I can complete and push to the site.
All in all 2012 will be a busy year and I personally can’t wait to see what is in store after a fantastic 2011.
The highlight undoubtedly was getting engaged and plans are well underway for our wedding next January – complete with it’s own website which I am currently working on and will announce the details of in due course.
As well as the well-documented additions to the HTML5 spec, a number of elements have had their meanings changed to reflect the changes in the way websites are built and also some previously deprecated elements have been brought back so to speak and now have valid, semantic meaning, allowing us to use the b, i and s elements again without the need to feel dirty whilst we do so!
A list of the changed elements is listed below:
a
The anchor elements changes in the manner that block-level links are now valid code. This has been supported in browsers for a while, but is now valid. Also, using the name=”#id” convention is now obsolete which was typically used for in page navigation. Instead, apply this technique to it’s containing element. The target attribute is now no longer deprecated “as it useful in Web applications, particularly in combination with the iframe element.”
The media attribute is new and can be used in conjunction with CSS media queries.
b
The b element has changed from the presentational meaning of bold text to “offset text conventionally styled in bold”. This doesn’t appear to be a massive shift in definition but is a way of separating out content from it’s surroundings without providing any extra meaning. The em and strong attributes embolden the text but provide emphasis on the text, whereas the b element has no extra meaning and is useful in a range of situations.
There are over 100 elements in the HTML specification, and it’s fair to say that some are more used by others. Elements like div, ul and table are used on almost every project whereas some are rarely used such as kbd, var and wbr. Some of this is down to browser support and I’ll be honest in my case some down to ignorance of it’s existence.
I’ve done a bit of research into some of these lesser known elements and listed them below, and I certainly intend to use them more in projects now where appropriate.
Base:
The base element is a way to declare a base href for the document, which is then used by the relative urls on the page. There is a maximum of one base element per page and is a similar syntax to normal a elements:
var
The var element is used to markup variables, or text that represents a variable value. In a maths or programming concept, it represents a value which is a variable, or can be used to indicate a value which the user will mentally replace with a custom value.
samp
The samp element is used to mark up sample output of a program. Again, more suited to web applications than standard websites, it’s used for sample output for example a demo of a process or system which generates a value or result depending on a user’s interaction.
