This year, I have the pleasure of presenting at @media in London. I will be presenting with my colleague James Graham, whom I’ve not yet met, but who I’ve known online through the WHATWG for a while now. Our talk, entitled Getting Your Hands Dirty with HTML5, will focus on how the HTMLWG and WHATWG are working to address the needs of authors and users, and demonstrate real use cases for the new features being introduced. We will also take a look at the remarkable community surrounding the effort and show just how easy it is for you to get involved.
Category Archives: Projects
Web Jam 3
Web Jam 3 was awesome! I presented a short explanation and demonstration of the video element. For best results, you should use the experimental version of Opera with some support for <video>.
The demonstration video I used was hilarious! I lip synced and danced to the Spice Girls’ hit song Wannabe. You can download it and watch it (Ogg Theora, 14.8MiB). Feel free to remix, share, whatever (my normal copyright licence applies). (If you don’t have a media player that supports Ogg Theora, get VLC or follow the instructions on Wikipedia.)
There were prizes awarded on the night. First prize was Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium and second prize was a ticket to Web Directions South 2007, which were awarded based on SMS voting. There were also several copies of Cubicle Commando awarded randomly to people who had voted for the presentations by SMS.
Earl won the ticket to Web Directions, while I managed to score a copy of Cubicle Commando and also won the Adobe CS3 package! Instead of giving a boring acceptance speech, I ended up giving a live performance of the lip sync dance. Videos of that will be posted somewhere; I’ll let you know when I find out where.
Update: I put the video up on YouTube.
Site Launch: Edentiti
About 3 days ago, a new site for which I had developed the front-end markup, style and script officially launched. Edentiti provides individuals with ways to identify themselves electronically and is primarily targeted at Australians. The idea is that users may register with Edentiti, have their details verified by taking the necessary documentation to any Australia Post office and then use their Edentiti account to securely identify themselves with participating websites.
Leaving those details aside and looking at the much more interesting technical details of the front end: the site is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict (let me know if you find any errors), valid CSS and it uses unobtrusive JavaScript techniques to provide enhanced user interaction. The reason the site uses XHTML is because of technical limitations on the back end and the way issues were prioritised. There are plans to rectify this situation and use HTML 4.01 Strict because it’s being served as text/html and, because my original templates used HTML 4.01, the CSS and scripts were only designed and tested under HTML conditions.
There are some very nice scripts used throughout the site, including my DOM 2 Events patches and colour fading script, Gez Lemon’s Form Help without Popups and a new script that will change the face of client-side form validation forever! I’ll talk more about this in a future post, but for now feel free to take a look at it in action by going to step 2 of the Create an Edentiti process and start filling in the form. Just be sure to make some errors like typing an invalid date or e-mail address syntax.
If you do choose to register, you will be asked to download and print a PDF file which needs to be taken to an Australia Post office for verification. This PDF gets generated by Prince using HTML and a print stylesheet. I was quite impressed with how easy it was to get Prince to render the document correctly, but this is not really surprising considering it has excellent support for CSS.
I greatly enjoyed working on this site and look forward to assisting them with other projects in the future.