Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle has an interesting post asking ‘if you have an obsolescence recovery plan for PC games?’ Thanks to emulators, games from 30 years ago can still be played on modern hardware. However he notes that: This unusually fortunate circumstance may not persist forever though. Technology will probably move on eventually to devices that are sufficiently different in form that even emulation is no longer feasible. Many are now predicting that mobile tablet computers will replace desktops and that closed architectures will prevail over the open general purpose architecture of current desktop PCs. Emulation may no Read More
Month: January 2012
HTML5 – the ‘italic’ elements – em, i and cite
I skipped a couple of days, so by way of catch up, three elements today. Italic text is really semantically complicated. Who knew? Presenting the <i>, <em> and <cite> elements… I haven’t completed my archaeological dig, but as far back as 1995, HTML 2.0 had already standardised both <i>and <em>, with <i> used for italic, and <em> for an “emphasized phrase, typically rendered as italics”. My recollection however is that most at the time used <i>. With HTML4.0, CSS and the separation of style and content, <i> was deprecated and <em> popularised for emphasis, typically rendered as italics, but open Read More
WordPress Custom Menus
I decided I wanted to change how the top menu on this blog was working, so started in my usual manner: look at source code of header.php in the theme and start altering the WordPress calls to wp_list_categories to include or exclude certain categories. My intention was to separate my posts about HTML5 elements into separate menu link so they all appear together, then have Home showing all posts except the HTML5 ones to avoid them overwhelming the rest of the (infrequently posted!) content. Poking around in the Graphene theme though things weren’t so obvious (no calls to wp_list_categories), so Read More
HTML5 – The code element
As a techie, I often want to post excerpts of code on a webpage. Generally in publishing code fragments are printed in a monotype font to distinguish from the main body of text and also to more closely resemble how the code appears in the IDE. The <code> element is used in this way to highlight content that is a code fragment. Here’s a quick example both as the text and then in use: Use the JQuery <code> click() </code> function to bind an event handler to the javascript click event to perform an action when the user mouse clicks Read More
HTML5 – The small element
<small> is in the ‘4.6 Text-level semantics’ section of the WHAT-WG HTML living standard. <small> one used to mean just that: small font. It is now one of a set of elements that has been re-imagined in a more semantic light. <small> now has a very distinct meaning – it now represents ‘side comments such as small print’. This also would cover disclaimers, copyright notices and the like. <small> is a text level element, so is expected to be used within a block of text such as a paragraph, and not as a block of text. So small print such Read More
HTML5 elements
When I first learnt HTML4 and CSS I did it by digesting the formal spec, section by section. Seemed like the best way to learn it, straight from the horses mouth. I’m pretty conversant with the current set of HTML5 elements, but mainly from second hand reading of books / blog posts; also the spec is still in flux, so I thought a similar exercise would be useful again. Rather than try and tackle it in one go and get indigestion, I thought ‘how about reading up on a tag a day’. So here we are: I’ve created a new Read More