I stumbled on the Mozilla Foundation’s Drumbeat project recently:

Drumbeat gathers smart, creative people like you around big ideas, practical projects and local events that improve the open web.

It’s very well done combination of projects + community.

Drumbeat Toronto Meetup

There’s a whole slew of cool projects already one here. A small sample:

While HTML5 has a bunch of semantic elements, including new ones like <article> and <nav>, sometimes there just isn’t an element with the right meaning. What we want are ways to extend what we’ve got, to add extra semantics that are machine-readable — data that a browser, script, or robot can use.

First, he starts with the options HTML4 gave us and what options we now have with HTML5:

There were five fundamental ways we could extend HTML 4:

• <meta> element
• class attribute
• rel attribute
• rev attribute
• profile attribute

In HTML5, rev has fallen by the wayside, becoming obsolete since hardly anyone used it correctly, and because it can be replaced by rel. profile is also obsolete, and there is no support for namespaces in HTML5. However,<meta>, class, and rel are all in HTML5. In fact, <meta> now has spec-defined names and a way to submit newname values, and rel has several new link types defined in the HTML5 specification and a way to submit more too.

Even better, WAI-ARIA’s role and aria-* attributes are allowed in HTML5, and HTML5 validators can check HTML5+ ARIA. Other new methods of extending HTML5 include custom data attributes (data-*), microdata, and RDFa. Guest doctor Chris Bewick introduced us to HTML5’s new data-* attribute system, which is perfect for adding private custom data for JavaScript, and we’ll no doubt meet microdata and RDFa sooner or later.

Finally there are microformats. As Dr. Bruce touched on microformats in his article on the <time> element, let’s delve a little deeper into what microformats are and how to use them in HTML5.

Oli then does a great deep dive of microformats, going over the different ones defined by the community to date (there are 33 microformat specifications!) and covering some of the common patterns that you can use if you need to roll your own microformat. If you’ve been wondering how to use things like hCard, hCalendar, XHTML Friends Network (XFN), etc. in your own systems then definitely give this article a gander.

[via John Allsop]

Check out a demo of the new keyframe animation.

Custom attributes is also a new feature that makes it easier to do things like animating a portion of an attribute segment (demo).

Full release notes:

• fixed IE8 issue with the HTML element named Raphael
• fixed precision for arcs in IE
• added caching to getPointAtSegmentLength function
• added ability to do more than one animation of an element at the same time
• added "cubic-bezier()" as an easing method
• added new syntax for animation (keyframes)
• hsl2rgb now accept h as degree (0..360), s and b as % (0..100)
• show="new" instead of target="blank" for SVG
• added angle method
• added snapTo method
• cached popup || activeX for IE
• fixed insertAfter
• fixed timeouts for animation
• added customAttributes

BTW I just noticed that Dmitry is now at Sencha; they're assembling quite the team! Congrats Dmitry!

The new SVG Web release, like all of their releases, is named after especially silly D&D monsters. The new release is code named Owlephant:

You've heard of Elephants, you've heard of Owls… put them together and you get the fearsome Owlephant. If you encounter one, be sure it will be the last thing you ever, um, encounter. Hoot…. stomp!

With this release SVG Web now scores 55.45% on the SVG compatibility charts, almost at the same level as IE 9 (58%).

Major aspects of this new release includes overhauls and fixes for gradients, clipping, events, text placement, and more. It also includes a huge step forward in SMIL animation support, including being able to animate path segments and interpolate their values, scripting SMIL with JavaScript, and more.

This release has been built by the community, with major contributions from Bruce Duncan from VisualMining.com; Ken Stacey from SVGMaker.com; and the always awesome (and project co-leader) Rick Masters. Thanks to the many people like Michael Neutze, Bruce Rindahl, and more for their bug testing and evangelism!

Everything fixed in this release:

• Issue 471 : Radial gradient different between Flash and Native renders
• Issue 349 : gradients with bounding box cooordinates are positioned wrongly on circles
• Issue 475 : 'this' not getting set correctly in SVG element event callback
• Issue 477 : The change in the size of the ClipPath area is not reflected by Flash Renderer.
• Issue 483 : Changing gradient stop does not trigger redraw of referencing elements
• Issue 484 : Dynamic clip-path attribute changes are not reflected.
• Issue 476 : set Element Problems and numerous SMIL issues
• Issue 489 : Support beginElement() for animation elements
• Issue 494 : SVGTextNode.onDrawGlyph not removing glyph clones
• Issue 495 : Support units-per-em on SVG fonts
• Issue 492 : 'button' property missing in mouse event object
• Issue 472 : get svg.js even more compressed with Google's closure compiler (30K reduction)
• Issue 499 : Object loaded svg with scripts not firing window load or SVGLoad event
• Issue 488 : Updating styles via Javascript does not visibly update child nodes in IE/Flash
• Issue 496 : Support exponents in path values
• Issue 502 : Radial Gradient userSpaceOnUse Matrix calculated incorrectly
• Issue 503 : Radial Gradient focalLen not used for stroke
• Issue 504 : Radial Gradient userSpaceOnUse Matrix calculated incorrectly for SVGCircle and SVGEllipse nodes
• Issue 497 : bad 'target' when click on text node
• Issue 342 : Event handler fires only after second mouse click.
• Issue 507 : Namespaced elements not allowed until svg element added to page
• Issue 158: Rotated text not rendering for native fonts (Mostly Fixed)
• Issue 467 : Namespace exception loading video example in IE8
• Issue 510 : Font Family not used when surrounded by single quotes in Flash 10.1
• Issue 57 : SVG default fill-rule 'nonzero' not supported by flash 9
• Issue 123 : Nested svg elements don't show up in the DOM correctly
• Issue 145: dynamically creating SMIL elements and attributes
• Issue 356 : Show SVG Web Release Name and Revision in Right Click Menu
• Issue 513 : getElementsByTagNameNS returning text nodes
• Issue 515 : Call handleEvent on EventListener objects passed to addEventListener
• Issue 517 : Elements with fill set to 'none' should produce mouse events but do not
• Issue 518 : Avoid redraw on change to pointer-events attribute
• Issue 523 : Event listener from object element may be applied to svg element erroneously
• Issue 522 : Need way to create element with self declared namespace
• Issue 525 : Image element not respecting display='none'
• Issue 524 : Jquery $(window).scroll event will not fire
• Issue 527 : Excessive messages for detached event listeners
• Issue 528 : Exception if remove event listener from detached element, then add to document
• Issue 321 : Support for animating path 'd' attribute (and interpolate between values)
• Issue 514 : clip-path not used when part of style attribute value
• Issue 526 : Object using clip path cannot have its opacity animated
• Issue 535 : Nested svg disappears when animated
• Issue 536 : Problems tracking whether elements attached to document or not
• Issue 537 : Animation added in onload listener does not initialize
• Issue 538 : Node removed while invalid causes endless frame listening
• Issue 539 : Animation with invalid or forward href causes exception
• Issue 540 : script stack space quota is exhausted by large svg file
• Issue 511 : Keyboard events are not supported properly

Download the release now and get started!

Please note that there are some breaking changes in this release that will affect code that uses older versions of SVG Web; more details here. Also note that SVG Web does not yet support the native SVG functionality in IE 9 preview releases.

[Disclosure: I'm a member of the SVG Web team]

I stumbled across http://webkit.org/specs recently, which is basically a nifty listing of all custom extensions Apple/Webkit has made to web specs, written up as specs themselves so that other browsers can implement them:

• Squirrelfish Bytecode
• Timed Media Elements
• CSS Effects
• Extensions to CSS 3 Media Queries
• The 'pointer-events' property

There were some on here that I had never even heard of. The first is the Timed Media Elements spec, which is a fancy name for basically CSS that can control playback of video and audio:

Another interesting spec contains extensions to CSS Media Queries, basically making it possible for user agents to query whether CSS Transforms, Animations, 3D Transforms, and Transitions are available so you can apply different style sheets for platforms that support these CSS effects:

TechCrunch reports on a Googler, Paul Truong, who created an HTML5-based game for Gmail called Galactic Inbox using his 20% time:

When you start it up, a little Gmail logo envelope guy pops out of a “20% Projects Lab” and starts flying. Essentially, he’s a spaceship and can shoot objects coming his way. It’s simple, but fun.

Read more on the Gmail Blog.

Play the game yourself (note that you must be using a modern browser)!

[via Bryan Neuberg]

Note that the feature only currently works in Chrome.

Ryan begins with the following code:

Describing the code Ryan says:

From the code above you attach an ondragstart event listener to something you want to “drag out” and save to your file system. On the dragstart event you set the data using the new “DownloadURL” type and pass file information to it.

Note though that in order to pass the correct data to the dragstart event you need to provide a download URL that can be passed to the setData("DownloadURL" call. Ryan uses the HTML5 data-* attribute to pass this custom data in:

The custom attribute uses three different fields of data separated by colons:

The files mime type, the name you wish it to be saved as (this can be anything) and the url to where the file can be downloaded from.

Nice find Ryan!

Via JD Bartlett comes HTML5 innerShiv for IE. Before innerShiv, the following would not work in IE:

For example, let's imagine we have some CSS that defines the following for the HTML5 elements footer, header, and section:

Unfortunately, even if you are using one of the tricks to force IE to deal with HTML5 elements shivs don't work when dealing with innerHTML before an element is appended to the DOM:

However, the shiv doesn't work in Internet Explorer when an element's content is added with innerHTML before being appended to the document. That's a common use case, and noticeable in libraries like jQuery when you try to append or load (etc.) HTML5 content

Some example bad JQuery code that runs into this problem:

JD's library is the solution to this problem:

innerShiv is a function which takes your HTML string, adds it to a hidden document-appended element in IE, and returns an IE-safe document fragment or collection

Now you can do the following to have things work:

Note that you don't have to use JQuery to use innerShiv.

Last week Adobe announced they are jumping into the Web Fonts game in a partnership with Typekit:

For this debut of Adobe Web Fonts, I think we’ve made some great choices. Everyone knows Myriad and Minion — pervasive workhorse sans serif and serif typefaces, respectively, which will prove to be as useful on the web as they have been in print. Thomas Phinney’s Hypatia Sans and Carol Twombly’s Chaparral are distinctive and versatile. Adobe Text is Robert Slimbach’s newest design which a lot of people haven’t even seen yet (so far it has only been available as a registration benefit for CS5 customers) but I’m certain it will quickly establish itself as a flexible and reliable text typeface, and I’m pleased it will now get a wider audience.

Richard Lipton’s classic Bickham Script is one of our most popular display typefaces and a distinctive addition to the Adobe Web Fonts collection. More of Robert Slimbach’s work now available for web use include Adobe Garamond, Caflisch Script, Cronos, and the “display” designs for Garamond Premier (based on Claude Garamond’s beautiful Gros Canon type).

Speaking of which: You will find that we’ve included optical size variations for some of our typefaces. These designs are carefully crafted to look their best at small sizes (“caption”), medium- to large-size headings (“subhead”), or in headlines and other large sizes (“display”). On the web, these distinctions are less resolved than in print, but optical sizes will give you more options to find just the right font for your needs — and giving users better options for fine typography is what Adobe Originals are all about.

Remember, Adobe Web Fonts support the same languages and scripts as their desktop counterparts. Most are “Pro” fonts — meaning their character set supports Central European languages. Adobe Text, Garamond Premier, Hypatia Sans, Minion, and Myriad also support Greek and Cyrillic. (Select the “All Characters” Subset option in Typekit to use them.)

It's exciting to see Adobe supporting web fonts!

From Hakim El Hattab (who has some very nifty HTML5 experiments up) comes some nice tips on using the Canvas tag:

Cross browser implementation

There are no real discrepancies between the canvas outputs of different browsers so long as the JavaScript code is written correctly (if not, browsers tend to try and fix things for you, often resulting in varying results).

Performance

When working with animation on canvas, performance can be a challenge since bitmap operations are very processing expensive, especially at high resolutions. One important optimization rule to follow is to reuse as many pixels as possible between frames. What I mean by that is the fewer pixels that need to be processed each frame, the faster your program will run. A good example of this is when erasing pixels with the clearRect(x,y,w,h)method, it is very beneficial to clear and redraw only the pixels that have changed and not, for instance, a full screen 1920x1280 sized canvas. Unlike the Flash Player’s redraw regions, this management of “dirty rectangles” needs to be done manually for canvas.

State stack & transformation

The canvas can be manipulated via transformations such as rotation and scaling, resulting in a change to the canvas co-ordinate system. This is where it’s important to know about the state stack for which two methods are available: “save” (pushes the current state to the stack) and “restore” (reverts to the previous state). This enables you to apply transformation to a drawing and then restore back to the previous state to make sure the next shape is not affected by any earlier transformation. The states also include properties such as the fill and stroke colors.

Compositing

A very powerful tool at hand when working with canvas is compositing modes which, amongst other things, allow for masking and layering. As an example, you can check out Bakemono, where composite modes are used to mask the eye and mouth. There's a wide array of available composite modes and they are all set through the canvas context's “globalCompositeOperation” property.

Anti-aliasing

To allow for sub-pixel drawings, all browser implementations of canvas employ anti-aliasing (although this does not seem to be a requirement in the HTML5 spec). Anti-aliasing can be important to keep in mind if you want to draw crisp lines and notice the result looks blurred. To work around this you will need to either round to integer values or offset by half a pixel depending on if you’re drawing fills or strokes.

Clearing the canvas

To clear the entire canvas of any existing pixels you would normally use the clearRect(x,y,w,h) function but there is another option available. Whenever the width/height of the canvas are set, even if they are set to the value they already have, the canvas is reset. This is good to know when working with a dynamically sized canvas as you will notice drawings disappearing.

[via Mr. Doob]

I can confirm that Motorola acquired 280 North earlier this summer. The transaction provides Motorola with specialized web-app engineering talent and technology that will help facilitate the continued expansion of Motorola’s application ecosystem. We believe 280 North will be instrumental in helping us continue to foster the Android ecosystem with innovative web-based technologies and applications. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Congrats!

[via John Resig]

Things kicked off with a nice introductory article by Ethan Marcotte introducing CSS Media Queries in order to have responsive and adaptable web designs.

Things started to get interesting with a counter-article by Jason Grigsby titled "CSS Media Query for Mobile is Fool's Gold". Jason claims:

Unfortunately, CSS media query is fool’s gold for mobile devices. It hides tough problems and gives developers a false promise of a simple solution for designing to multiple screens.

His chief issues with CSS Media Queries can be boiled down to:

The idea of adding more code—adding more to download—in order to optimize for mobile should be the first clue that this isn’t a good solution.

From a high level his other objections are:

• That speed matters more on mobile devices
• That letting the browser scale images for you is a bad idea since delivering images at the maximum size then scaling them down is wasteful on mobile devices
• That resizing images on mobile browsers is cpu and memory intensive, both of which mobile devices can lack

Jason also discusses some interesting workarounds people have proposed for the above issues still using CSS Media Queries, such as delivering different images at different sizes using different CSS Media Queries and using hidden CSS background images but:

However, the iPhone still downloads the images even though they are not displayed.

He does find some workarounds but there are issues:

Two methods that appear to work are:

• Setting the parent of an element with a background image to display:none.
• Using media query min-width declaration to only specify a minimum browser width for the desktop image and a max-width for the mobile image does result in only the mobile image being downloaded in Mobile Safari.

These two options mean that using CSS media queries isn’t completely impossible, but using the parent element to hide images and changing existing desktop CSS to add min-width declarations are significant changes to existing CSS. It isn’t going to be as simple as adding a CSS media query for mobile and calling your job done.

In the end Jason argues for separate web sites for mobile, but:

There are some good uses of CSS media queries. If you’re building a discrete web application where you have more control and can make sure that the desktop web isn’t bloated, it can make sense.

Also, Ros Hodgekiss from Campaign Monitor wrote an exceptional article on how you can use media queries in html email to provide a mobile optimized layout. This is perhaps the ideal use case because when you send html email, you have no choice but to send a single html document regardless of what device the recipient will be using.

In response to Jason's CSS Media Query smackdown PPK wrote up an editorial titled "Combining Media Queries and JavaScript":

On Tuesday Jason Grigsby challenged the conventional view that media queries are all we need to make a website mobile-friendly. Although he’s right when he points out some serious problems, I do not think that media queries are the “fool’s gold,” as Jason says. The message seems to be more that media queries alone are not enough to make your sites mobile-friendly. An additional component is required.

PPK argues that CSS Media Queries have their place:

Media queries are silver bullets when it comes to pure CSS. Restricting the width of your site, moving sidebars and main navigations elsewhere, media queries can do all that and more.

The trick, however, is that a pure CSS approach is not enough. In addition we need a JavaScript that also reads out the media queries and uses the data to decide whether to download the complicated mapping script, whether to download the low-source or the full-source images, or possibly none.

As far as I know there is no direct access to media queries from JavaScript. You can’t read out whether the example media query above has fired or not.

He then talks about a nifty way to pair up JS and CSS Media Queries:

Fortunately, there is a pretty safe way of using JavaScript in conjunction with media queries. It turns out that all browsers I tested so far have paired the width and device-width media queries with the values of document.documentElement. clientWidth and screen.width, respectively.

This is a general rule. All mobile browsers that support media queries exhibit these pairings. It’s hard to believe, but I haven’t found any exceptions yet — and rest assured that I searched for them, because I could not believe that it would be this simple. And I will continue to keep an eye on this and report problems as soon as I find them.

...

When these scripts are added to media queries, we’re a whole lot closer to making one website that reacts to a mobile (or rather, a narrow-screen) environment both in its CSS and in its asset management.

Finally, Bruce Lawson tag teamed into the rumble with an article on the topic titled "There's more to mobile than than media queries":

In our enthusiasm to try out media queries and in our rush to skim the latest articles and tutorials, it's easy to overlook caveats and restrictions. Media queries are good at what they do but are just a single tool for a job where two or three are probably needed. In particular, combining them with JavaScript as PPK and others advocate seems to me the most practical solution for web developers to adopt at the moment.

[CC-A by Paolo Camera]

Tell me below whether you think CSS Media Queries are your friend or foe?

In his demo Jonas uses the Canvas tag to map the physics simulations on. Click on it to create explosions:

Jonas talks about the approach he used to convert the original library from ActionScript to JavaScript:

At first I thought this conversion would be trivial as both actionscript and javascript are dialects of ECMAScript. Well, I was wrong. Nevertheless I continued to follow my regex based approach, basically trying to ram my head through a wall. After a few attempts I succeeded to convert Box2DAS3 to javascript. It had a nasty bug though. Two solid cubes were able to penetrate each other when they fell on their edges. The reason? ActionScript supports 'properties'. I didn't know about this and the conversion script does not support it. In the end I fixed the few properties in the translated code by hand because I was too lazy to add support for getters and setters to the conversion script. Now it seems to work pretty well. Please keep in mind, this is not a generic actionscript to javascript compiler, it's just a script that happens to work for box2dflash.

The explosions in the demo are simulated by shooting out a few tracer particles with a high density and velocity. The benefit over just applying an impulse to each object is that the strength of the impulse is proportional to the surface area. Also the force of the explosion will to some extent be redirected to the side by the floor. When using this in production code you would probably want to destroy the tracer particles after their first collision or a few seconds.

You can grab the converted JavaScript yourself. There isn't any current documentation but you can follow the existing Flash box2dflash documentation.

Here's what the explode function looks like in Jonas' test demo for example:

This library is useful for games and fancy user interfaces using HTML5.

[via Mr. Doob]

How can you go wrong with lyrics like this:

CSS3
Web animation done properly
CSS3
Degrading gracefully

I had a dream, an awesome dream
People surfing in the park
On Windows, Linux and Mac
And their page load speeds were oh-so-high
No big JavaScript library
Just to show some eye-candy

CSS3
Web animation done properly
CSS3
Degrading gracefully

As we surf down the superhighway
Did you ever even think
We could replace <marquee> and <blink>?
With just one, just one line of code
But it's open to abuse
We must be careful not to overuse it

CSS3
Web animation done properly
CSS3
Degrading gracefully

CSS3
Web animation done properly
CSS3
Degrading gracefully
Degrading gracefully
With HTML5, naturally

[via Bruce Lawson]

He has a cool demo (Chrome or Safari + Snow Leopard only) of the effect:

The pulsing effect, for example, is generated by a CSS3 Animation:

The map itself is rotated to a 3D angle using a CSS 3D Transform:

While the pin, marker, and pinhead themselves are a combination of CSS 3D, CSS Transforms, CSS Gradients, and more:

One of his posts from 2008 entitled "Compression using Canvas and PNG-embedded data" had a good idea: if you want to compress JavaScript and CSS you could reverse engineer a packing algorithm in JavaScript or you could use a lossless packing system that is already in use and supported in browsers. In this case the packed format is PNG and the way to unpack it is by using the canvas API's getImageData() method:

As there are quite some interesting competitions going on that need really small JavaScript solutions Alex Le took up Jacob's work and wrapped it in a build script that concatenates, packs and converts to a PNG and unpacks it for the 10K competition with a JavaScript. In the process Alex also found some bug in Internet Explorer 9's canvas implementation as it only reads the first 8192 bytes of a PNG and returns 0 for the others :(.

It is pretty amazing how efficient this way of packing is. What we need to test now is when and if it is worth while to have the unpacking done on the client. Imagine adding your JS and CSS to the end of an image and cropping it in CSS to have all the info you need in an app in a single HTTP request. Let the games begin.

[CC-A by Noah Sussman]

That's a pretty creative use of IE Conditional Comments.

[via jdalton]

We've seen a number of nice CSS3 generators. I stumbled across another one recently that has a nice set of features for autogenerating the following from a single CSS3 generator web page:

• Border Radius
• Gradients
• CSS Transforms
• CSS Animations
• CSS Transitions
• Text Shadow
• Box Shadow
• Text Rotation
• @Font Face