25 HTML5 Features, Tips, and Techniques you Must Know | NETTUTS

August 3rd, 2010

This industry moves fast — really fast! If you’re not careful, you’ll be left in its dust. So, if you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed with the coming changes/updates in HTML5, use this as a primer of the things you must know.


1. New Doctype

Still using that pesky, impossible-to-memorize XHTML doctype?

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

If so, why? Switch to the new HTML5 doctype. You’ll live longer — as Douglas Quaid might say.

<!DOCTYPE html>

In fact, did you know that it truthfully isn’t even really necessary for HTML5? However, it’s used for current, and older browsers that require a specified doctype. Browsers that do not understand this doctype will simply render the contained markup in standards mode. So, without worry, feel free to throw caution to the wind, and embrace the new HTML5 doctype.

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CSS Three — Connecting The Dots

June 9th, 2010

As a web community, we’ve made a lot of exciting progress in regards to CSS3. We’ve put properties like text-shadow & border-radius to good use while stepping into background-clip and visual effects like transitions and animations. We’ve also spent a great deal of time debating how and when to implement these properties. Just because a property isn’t widely supported by browsers or fully documented at the moment, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be working with it. In fact, I’d argue the opposite.

Best practices for CSS3 usage need to be hashed out in blog posts, during spare time, and outside of client projects. Coming up with creative and sensible ways to get the most out of CSS3 will require the kind of experimentation wherein developers gladly trade ten failures for a single success. Right now, there are tons of property combinations and uses out there waiting to be discovered. All we have to do is connect the dots. It’s time to get your hands dirty and innovate!

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A JavaScript Content Switcher That Works Without JavaScript | impressivewebs

March 9th, 2010

Recently, while doing research/work on a completely unrelated topic, I came across the beautiful illustrations on Rype Arts, which are displayed inside of a JavaScript-driven content switcher. For some reason, I happened to visit the page with JavaScript disabled and noticed that the content switcher was still working (albeit, with a few flaws).

At first I couldn’t figure out how it was functioning. Normally, with JavaScript disabled, this type of content switcher (or content slider) will just display one item, or else display all items, without allowing any “switching” functionality. After some poking around, I realized it’s not a very difficult thing to do. The switcher utilizes in-page anchors and overflow: hidden to keep the switchability intact.

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The Basics of CSS3 | webdesignerwall

March 6th, 2010

Last week I posted a CSS3 dropdown menu and someone complained that I didn’t explain the CSS code in detail. Well, here is a post on the basics of the new properties: text-shadow, box-shadow, and border-radius. These CSS3 properties are commonly used to enhance layout and good to know.

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Pagination: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience

March 6th, 2010

We’ve been getting a lot of questions in Q+A and on the road at events like last week’s Miva Merchant conference, Online Marketing Summit and the YCombinator conference about how to properly paginate results for search engines. In this post, we’ll cover the dangers, opportunities and optimization tactics that can best ensure success. The best part? These practices aren’t just good for SEO, they’re great for usability and user experience too!

Why is Pagination an SEO Issue?

Pagination, the practice of segmenting links to content on multiple pages, affects two critical elements of search engine accessibility.

  • Crawl Depth: Best practices demand that the search engine spiders reach content-rich pages in as few “clicks” as possible (turns out, users like this, too). This also impacts calculations like Google’s PageRank (or Bing’s StaticRank), which determine the raw popularity of a URL and are an element of the overall algorithmic ranking system.
  • Duplicate Content: Search engines take duplication very seriously and attempt to show only a single URL that contains any given piece of content. When pagination is implemented improperly, it can cause duplicate content problems, both for individual articles and the landing pages that allow browsing access to them.

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CSS bar charts—styling data with CSS3 and progressive enhancement

March 6th, 2010

Bar charts in CSS are neither very new, or very difficult. Using some pretty basic styling you can force lists etc into resembling graphs and charts fairly easily. Such charts, in their most basic form, work perfectly well in displaying and presenting the data they represent. However, using some rich CSS3 and progressive enhancement, you can really start pushing the display and presentation of these normally boring documents to the next level. They are also an ideal way in which to demonstrate the power and ability of progressive enhancement.

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Button Height and a Broken Box Model

March 6th, 2010

When I figured out the workaround for line-heights in form buttons last week, I also discovered an interesting discrepancy (feature?) across all major browsers in terms of buttons and the box model. Check out this article for a more in-depth refresher on the CSS Box Model, but here’s a brief summary:

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Adaptable view – how do they do it?

February 27th, 2010

Adaptable view is a user interface design pattern which you can use to allow users to manually change visual appearance of content in order to fit their needs. This is usually done by switching styles (in web sites and applications). This way you provide your users with more control over the appearance of content which improves user experience.

Adaptable view can be used to enable users to increase/decrease font size, change background color, darken background for higher contrast, switch between different site versions or to change the layout of the site or any part of it. To learn more about this pattern check out Adaptable View design pattern on UI Patterns. You will find a strange implementation of this pattern where complete header is being hidden – including the logo.

In this tutorial, I will focus on explaining how to manually change the layout and show you two great examples and “how did they do it”.

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