By now, you probably know that Diaspora is a (as yet unpublished) social network where you own and control your private information.
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Diaspora, the privacy aware & personally controlled social network, to be open-sourced on 15th September
Render maps in HTML5 using Geographic Style Sheets
You know how it is, you follow a few links and then you find something that blows your mind… This is how I ended up on Cartagen, following a link from Open Street Map Wiki.
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HTML & CSS validation
You can use WC3 Markup Validation Service to validate your html5.
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New blog design, with HTML5 tags and mobiles in mind
I have finally updated the Wordpress theme for this blog. Some of the tweaks I have made include using new HTML5 tags, such as header, nav and footer. Other changes include moving the site navigation to the top, which is designed to help viewing the blog on a mobile phone.
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How to reset canvas in HTML5
The excellent “Dive Into HTML5″ online tutorial by Mark Pilgrim mentions that to reset a canvas (= clear all its contents), all you need to do is set its width. It even says that you can set the width to be the same as the current width and gives the example below
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Google Chrome Web Store preview now up for developers
The developer dashboard for Google Chrome Extensions is now up at https://chrome.google.com/extensions/developer/dashboard.
I haven’t tested it yet but it seems that you need to pay a one-time developer registration fee of $5. The fee is said to be required to verify your account and at that value, I can’t really think that Google is expecting to make money off developers registering. In comparison, to register as a Google Android developer, the fee is $25.
What is your CSS3 approach?
From my recent CSS3 research, it seems that there are two schools of thought when it comes to using CSS3 in your web design.
The first approach is to design your website without using CSS3 then to add CSS3 features to enhance the basic user experience of your website without any detrimental effect for those using a browser that doesn’t implement this specific CSS3 feature. For example, you can use rounded-corners for your menu because they look better – those viewing in a non-compliant browser will still be able to view your menu properly, albeit without rounded corners.
The other approach is to design for the most CSS3 compliant browsers and then to provide alternatives for browsers that do not implement a certain CSS3 capability. Note that this doesn’t mean designing for a specific browser, it is only about checking if the browser implements a certain CSS3 capability. For example, if the browser implements transitions and transformations, you can design a product area using these to show off different information about the product in a visually creative manner. If the browser doesn’t implement these, you can design the product area showing the different bits of information in a grid. This approach requires you to test if the browser implement a certain CSS3 capability then to provide two CSS codes.
Which approach do you prefer? Which approach are you currently implementing?
HTML5 rocks indeed
I’ve just checked out the HTML5 presentation at HTML5 Rocks, it’s pretty impressive.
Of course, it’s a catch 22 situation: the more HTML5 compliant your browser is, the more you’ll enjoy the presentation (which encompasses HTML5, CSS3 and the new JS APIs). They should do a video of it showing what it should look like so people with older browsers might find out about it and decide to upgrade their browsers 
To worry or not to worry about IE6
A few years ago, it seemed that web developers had to code their websites in two ways: to be compliant with standards and newer browsers, and for backward compatibility with IE6. Yes, IE6 was still widely used and behaved in its own manner, not following many CSS, JavaScript and HTML standards. This meant web developers had to add many hacks to their code to ensure the web page would show as desired – or as near to desired as possible – on IE6.
But, should we worry about IE6 now?
According to the latest report, the current share of IE6 is 18.11%. It’s much lower than it was, say, 2 years ago, but it is still significant (a bit over 1 in 6 but not quite 1 in 5).
Two sides to the story:
- if you don’t check for IE6 compatibility, you are excluding almost 1 user in 5. We’re not talking about a minority here, it’s a pretty serious figure.
- if you keep making sure websites look OK on IE6, you will not encourage people to upgrade their browser to a more modern one.
The question is, how easy is it for users to upgrade their browser?
- browsers are free so cost isn’t an issue.
- most modern browsers will not install on an old OS, such as Windows 98, and of course, a new Windows OS is not free. However, Linux is free and something like Ubuntu is quite user-friendly.
- it is relatively simple to install a new browser: one click to download, one click to install, a few clicks to accept user license.
- I know the above, you know the above, but what about your grandmother? She might have seen Google Chrome ads but she probably hasn’t taken notice. I certainly wouldn’t expect my father in law to upgrade his browser himself – however, I would gladly do it for him.
So my answer to “should you worry about IE6 compatibility?” is two folds:
- if you know somebody still using IE6, please, upgrade their browser for them.
- do not specifically design for IE6 compatibility because it is outrageous that IT managers up and down the country haven’t done their job properly and upgraded their systems to more modern browsers.
Too harsh? What is your take on this?
How to trick “Windows/Mac only” web apps
Several web apps, such as Virgin Broadband activation, require you to have a “Windows or Mac” computer. Most of them only check the useragent string that your browser sends them so you can do the following to fool them:
1. Open firefox and type about:config in the address bar.
2. Type in general.useragent.extra.firefox in the filter bar.
3. Change the value of string above to Mozilla/4.0 (compatible: MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0).
4. Restart Firefox.
It worked to get Virgin Broadband activation web app going on my Ubuntu netbook and it’s a good trick to try whenever a web app tells you you need a different OS.
Thanks to Gordon’s How to Activate Virgin Media Broadband using Ubuntu.