It’s been a wonderful Christmas and New Years break hasn’t it? Just swell I would say. What have you been up to?
Thanks to the wonderful world of Advertising that I’ve been imersed in since getting into the US hit TV show, ‘Mad Men‘ – I’ve started to think about how I’ll be reinventing myself. It’s a wonderful show and it’s drama and dark characters really have me addicted. Yet it’s not been enough to keep me away from the somber light of my beautiful little Mac.
Yes, it’s time to blog again. 2010 will be the year I get back into this and I promise to bring far better posts than I have before. Kicking off with a bang… perhaps a bit late, but better late than never is my investigation into the world that is HTML5. I’ve been hesitatant in the past to use it for my own site, but if you were to inspect a few elements you’ll notice the markup uses bizzare new HTML such as Header, Footer, Aside and more.
It’s a truely new experience to be without intellisense for HTML5, but I’m sure Panic’s Coda will have a plug in or some update to fix this soon. You could argue I’ve been foolish to jump and try it… however I’d disagree. I’m using if Internet Explorer php comments to pull in a javascript fix which pretty much any decent Front-end developer is also looking to use. If I were really concerned I’d also ping the site and then offer a local version should the caching of this file not be available, but my Google Analytics says that the majority of my audience uses Firefox, Chrome or Safari. So hah, I will have my cake (if I’m on my own personal domain) and eat it!
HTML5 will certainly improve semantics and make people think more about what they’re doing with their mark up. However, I wonder whether the NAV element should be like a UL or OL (un-ordered or ordered list) and contain LI. Most of all I’d really love to see canvas needs to be linked to a vector styled WYSIWYG editor.
My major gripe with using HTML 5 online, is that my Firefox plug in doesn’t support the new elements and the w3c validator (god I hate that word) is kinda lame saying that it’s all fine bar the fact that HTML5 is experimental.
So… will you be trying it out too?