HTML 5 New feature review

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mikemike
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HTML 5 New feature review

Post by mikemike »

I've written a short article on HTML 5 and it's new features. Might be of interest to a few people:
http://www.mike-griffiths.co.uk/2009/06 ... -features/
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califdon
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Re: HTML 5 New feature review

Post by califdon »

Good info. Thanks, Mike.
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omniuni
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Re: HTML 5 New feature review

Post by omniuni »

Hm... since you seem to be up on the new standards...

Is there anything that will help us in making 3-column layouts with all columns the same height? I was wondering if HTML5 would provide some new element that would help replace tables in this respect. <column>, or something like that.

Any thoughts?
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mikemike
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Re: HTML 5 New feature review

Post by mikemike »

Not in HTML 5 there isn't no. This can be achieve with CSS depending on your needs. For example, if you know the content is never going to be above 400 px you can just set min-height on all of the div's.

Appreciated that this is never normally the case you can always convert div's to have the same behaviour to tables using CSS, the problem here is that the attributes aren't supported by all browsers. Just another one of those annoyances I guess.
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Re: HTML 5 New feature review

Post by Paul Arnold »

Very interesting Mike.

Are things like <draggable> going to replace things that are currently done with jQuery?
I don't really understand how things like this are intended to work.

There's going to be a hell of a lot of Browser headaches when this all gets implemented.
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mikemike
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Re: HTML 5 New feature review

Post by mikemike »

I think the long term intention is to allow developers to make web applications in HTML, as well as websites. If a website is built in purely HTML 5 it would remove the need that most websites have for plug-ins and additional scripts. As I'm sure you're aware, one major headache is having to make things accessible to everyone, so if you use a Flash or JavaScript navigation system you have to have a fallback for users without the Flash plug-in or with JS turned off. With HTML 5 you shouldn't need to - although that's not to say that the browser won't allow you to turn these options off.

The dragging events aren't there to replace JavaScript, not by any means, they're simply there to complement it and to make everything easier. The dragging events simply call to JS functions, whereas before we'd have to make our own event listeners in order to create the same effect.
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Re: HTML 5 New feature review

Post by Paul Arnold »

I can see the advantage in reducing markup then but is the way that browsers handle say the video or canvas tags likely to be consistent?
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omniuni
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Re: HTML 5 New feature review

Post by omniuni »

Canvas is already working pretty consistently. Video, on the other hand...

FF3.5 is using a built-in Vorbis/Theora decoder. Konqueror will probably use whatever backend is defined in Phonon (Xine, MPlayer, GStreamer, etc.) Safari will likely use QuickTime, and IE will likely use Windows Media Destroyer. Er... Player, sorry.

Now, Theora is royalty free, hence FF3.5's use of it. Any of the backends mentioned for Konq will play Theora no problem. Plugins to allow Theora support for QT and WMP both exist. Also, Theora is a rapidly developing Open codec that provides excellent compression if used correctly, and of course with Vorbis as the audio codec, we can say good-bye to streaming videos with sub-par audio!

I just hope it catches on...
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