
The onslaught of Responsive Design
Apart from the HTML5 bandwagon, Responsive Design was arguably the most discussed topic of 2011. The term was coined by Ethan Marcotte in the article Responsive Web Design, May 2010.
Apart from the HTML5 bandwagon, Responsive Design was arguably the most discussed topic of 2011. The term was coined by Ethan Marcotte in the article Responsive Web Design, May 2010.
Bruce Lawson is one of my favorite technical speakers, and it was great to see him at @media conference in London. A few days ago he wrote HTML5 Semantics which gives a nice round-up of the state of semantics in November 2011. A great read even if you’re already fluent with semantics.
The @media conference, or Web Directions as it is officially called these days, was once one of the pinnacles of web development. The celebrities of the web community gathered once a year and confirmed their positions as generals in the web standards war. In 2006 my colleague Roger Johansson from 456 Berea Street was one of the speakers. Today five years later, a lot has changed.
Recently W3C revealed a new HTML5 logo which managed to stir the old cauldron a bit. It is already appearing on tshirts where the orange badge on a blue background seems quite Superman-ish.
The web is constantly changing and 2010 will be no different. Recently the Web Standards Project announced a change of direction, which really isn’t all that surprising. The “war for web standards” as Aaron Gustafson call it is far from over, but a lot of people in the industry has transferred to the Good Side and develop solutions which have an ever increasing level of standards compliancy.
XHTML was the new black a decade ago and a lot of loud people said it was the best thing since sliced bread. Even though it wasn’t half bad, it had one important culprit: it was allowed to be served as text/html instead of only application/xml. There are many reasons for that design, the main one being that Internet Explorer doesn’t support application/xml which would break the web for most people.