HTML5: normativity & authoring guides — Edward O’Connor

HTML5 accessibility

A glanceable one-stop-shop for how today’s browsers are dealing with today’s accessibility features. Then you can dive deeper into each one.

HTML5: The New Flash

A new presentation from the wonderfully curmudgeonly Steven Pemberton, the Nosferatu of the web. Ignore the clickbaity title.

I don’t agree with everything he says here, but I strongly agree with his preference for declarative solutions over (or as well as) procedural ones. In short: don’t make JavaScript for something that could be handled in markup.

This part really, really resonated with me:

The web is the way now that we distribute information. We will need the web pages we create now to be readable in 100 years time, just as we can still read 100-year-old books.

Requiring a webpage to depend on a particular 100-year-old implementation of Javascript is not exactly evidence of future-thinking.

HTML5 Differences from HTML4

I just noticed that I’m mentioned in the acknowledgements of this most handy of W3C documents. This pleases me disproportionately.

On File Formats, Very Briefly, by Paul Ford · The Manual

A history lesson and a love letter to the early web, taking in HTML, Photoshop, and the web standards movement.

Those were long years, the years of drop-shadows. Everything was jumping just slightly off the screen. For a stretch it seemed that drop-shadows and thin vertical columns of text would define the web. That was before we learned that the web is really a medium to display slideshows, as many slideshows as possible, with banner ads.

On HTML5 and the Group That Rules the Web

Paul Ford’s potted history of web standards, delivered in his own inimitable style.

Reading through the standards, which are dry as can be, you might imagine that standardization is a polite, almost academic process, where wonks calmly debate topics like semicolon placement. This is not the case.