Mon Apr 21
I just read a ridiculous thing at NetworkWorld about the “demise” of HTML skills. It’s in the conext of an article discussing “5 IT skills that won’t boost your salary”. I’ll quote the passage and highlight the relevent parts to save your eyeballs from being assailed by their ad-heavy pages:
Technical skills may never die, but areas of expertise wane in importance as technology advances force companies to evolve and IT staff to forsake yesterday’s craft in favor of tomorrow’s must-have talent …
As companies embrace Web 2.0 technologies such AJAX, demand for skills in HTML programming are taking a back seat. According to Foote Partners, pay for skills in technologies such as Ajax and XML increased by 12.5% in the last six months of 2007, while IT managers say they don’t see a demand for technology predecessors such as HTML. “I’m not seeing requirements for general Web 1.0 skills — HTML programming skills,” says Debbie Joy, lead solution architect for CSC in Phoenix.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find that ridicuous? AJAX requires HTML, just like cars need roads, or boats need water. Without HTML skills all the flashy new AJAX development wouldn’t work.
Tell your managers, we need to keep the plain old semantic HTML skills. Without them the web is dead.
Sun Apr 20
I was browsing through some stats for my website tonight and noticed a few people were visiting for my Automatic Image Replacement Engine (AIRE) which I did a long while ago. So I thought I’d do a quick post about some of the other experiments I’ve worked on which are all free for any use (just credit me as the original author).
A If nifty Greasemonkey script for Firefox which adds a little player for every track found on the excellent 3hive music sharing website. Keep up the good work, boys.
Show a Gannt chart with just HTML and CSS, no need for images. There’s even fixed-width and fluid-width versions.
A simple datatable class for PHP which will allow you to pass an array of values which will then be displayed as a table. Format cells almost anyhow you like, add optional alternating CSS classes, and lots more options. There’s also a simple explanation of object-oriented programming on that page in case you’ve found it as difficult as me to understand the concept.
Update a part of your webpage with JavaScript the easy way, so now anyone can do that clever AJAX stuff.
If you want to know if your server supports mod_rewrite, the fantastic way to rewrite URLs, then use this little tool.
An experiment with multiple boxes that zoom in and out when clicked. Not much more I can say about that, really.
Fonts are limited on the web, so I wrote this little PHP function that will render single-line text using any font you want as an image. Before you say “but images aren’t accessible!” it writes the images in as backgrouns, leaving accessible text in the HTML. Hoorah.
Wed Apr 16
Hi, my name’s Chris and I’m a compulsive view-sourcer. I’ve been a compulsive view-sourcer for several years, but most of the time I keep it to myself and try not to let it affect my family and friends. Sometimes I have a bad episode and then I feel guilty afterwards. Those bad episodes are happening more frequently.
You see, other people might favour crack or LSD, I prefer HTML. It gives me a real high to get some quality semantic HTML - I’m happy for hours. But there’s a lot of bad stuff out there that will just give you a headache; dirty HTML with all sorts of other crud added to it. I try to stay away from dirty code but it’s so much easier to find than the clean stuff.
Take last week. A website I used to be a regular visitor to relaunched with a new design. I went to have a look, but before I knew what I was doing I had right-clicked and viewed the source. Bad mistake. It was HTML, but only barely. Full of tables for layout, spacer GIFs, all the worst additives. I know I shouldn’t have done it, I just couldn’t stop myself.
I felt so dirty and guilty, not to mention ashamed. I had to do something about it, so I cleaned up the HTML. You can see the original version here, and my cleaned up version here.
This is where my compulsion to view sourcing gets hard to handle. I mean, it’s not enough that I see bad code, I just have to do something about it. The website I rewrote is now over 60% lighter when you count code and images, and has a clean and semantic HTML structure. If they get 250,000 visitors a month (but I think they get a lot more than that) with their old dirty homepage HTML that would be 59.6 gigabytes of data transferred. With the new clean HTML it’s cut down to 22.9 gigabytes.
But that doesn’t matter, because I’m never satisfied. I’ll always need another hit of HTML, and while the clean stuff is great, it’s the dirty stuff that’s much easier to find. Still, I suppose the first step is realising I have a problem.
—
If you’ve been affected by any of the issues raised by Chris’ confession there is help available. Visit one of the excellent online support groups and get involved. Together we can stop the supply of dirty HTML to our screens.
Tue Mar 18
A long but worthwhile read on the history (and histrionics) surrounding the current great New Web War by the estimable Joel Splosky.
Thu Mar 6
The web world is currently alight with discussion around the new Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 software slated to be released later this year. The bulk of this conversation has been about whether IE8 will display pages with its much improved (it passes the Acid2 test) standards-complianct rendering engine. It seemed that we would have had to do some fiddling to get this to work but now it appear we don’t have to. That’s a good move, well done Microsoft.
I’ve just been and had a look at the website for the IE8 developer beta, and noticed something pretty interesting. they’re introduing a new feature called WebSlices which are like feeds for certain parts of web pages. Developers who add the required code to their pages will allow visitors to subscribe to updates of those sections of the page, which many of the same facilities afforded to RSS publishers.
My initial thought was that they’d have used some horrible proprietary syntax to make this happen, completely ignoring the established ways of doing this. But I was wrong. Almost.
Looking at the whitepaper for WebSlices it appears the IE8 team have taken large slices (excuse the pun) of the hAtom format to build their new feature. The main change being using a “hslice” rather than “hatom” class on the parent element of the feed. I’m not sure why they’ve done this, hAtom seems to do everything they need. Maybe it’s just Microsoft wanting to keep some level of control, maybe there’s something more to the story.
At any rate, this is is going to make it easier for developers to provide subscribable content on their web pages. Hopefully it will bring microformats - and web standards in general - to the attention of people traditionally deep inside the Microsoft world.
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Whitby from the Hill
