Have I Mentioned That The HTML5 DOCTYPE Makes Me Smile?

Posted on by Rob Larsen

It does.

Why?

Well, I’ve been doing this job, at a very high level, for a long time and I couldn’t code this by hand if you paid me $50,000:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
	"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

I understand it, and I can’t remember it. That’s basically gibberish to most people. There’s no way anyone is going to remember that string.

This? This I can code by hand and pretty much anyone can “get” what it’s doing:

<!DOCTYPE html >

I do wonder if there’s been any backlash against that? I’ve seen a lot of backlash against HTML5 over the past year, but I can’t really remember anyone complaining about the doctype declaration.

I bet someone hates it.

Not me 🙂

Bing Launches Twitter Search (and I’m Writing About the Real Time Web Over At AWiderNet)

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Mashable broke the story earlier today and withing a couple of hours Microsoft launched bing.com/twitter Web 2.0 Summit. First impression? I don’t like the look of the tag cloud.

tag-cloud

C’Mon, Microsoft, you can be cooler than that.

One thing I do like is the timing of it as I just wrote a big-ass article on the Real-Time Web over at AWiderNet.

Look at me being all topical.

Check it out and let me know what you think. Comments are always welcome.

I’m Excited About the New Google Analytics Engagement Goals Feature

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Since I run so many content-centric sites, I’ve never really had much use for Google Analytics’ goals. It’s one thing when you’re doing lead generation or ecommerce. Those goals are clear and easy to define.

Someone filled out a form? Goal reached.

Someone hit a thank you page for purchasing a book? Goal reached.

For content sites, where the aim is engagement goals are tougher to define.
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Default HTML Rendering in 81 Browsers Visualized

Posted on by Rob Larsen

The following is a test of this page of unstyled, generic markup performed in 81 browsers. I used browsercam to take screen captures, then imported the resulting captures into Photoshop. In Photoshop, I zeroed out the top/left coordinates of the HTML canvas (not to be confused with the Canvas element,) and then set the Opacity on each layer to 10%. For the second visualization I simply turned on the difference blending mode at full opacity.

Why? I thought it was an interesting illustration of why we use reset style sheets. There’s almost no consistency in the way these browsers handle even the most generic markup.

Here are the two visualizations:
Continue reading “Default HTML Rendering in 81 Browsers Visualized” →

Sample HTML Markup Used To Style Common Text Elements

Posted on by Rob Larsen

The following is what we use to lay down the most common text styles. This is honestly more than we usually need, but it helps ensure we don’t miss anything when real content is flowed into a design. I thought it might be useful for folks to use in their own projects.

I’ve got a live version here on the site.
Continue reading “Sample HTML Markup Used To Style Common Text Elements” →