Two things that have inspired me recently, neither are directly linked to development and neither are at all related (apart from being inspirational).
Today I was put on record (with my consent!) complaining about Adobe’s new tool – Edge.
Tonight I figured I would a) give it a go and b) explain why I don’t think it is a good idea.
I will cover b) first then show you a)!
So Edge is essentially a tool for writing Flash like animations which utilise current web standards to get the job done. On the face of it this sounds like a pretty cool idea, since we all hate Flash, right? I mean it can run in most modern browsers (including iDevices) and sure it doesn’t require you to download a third party plugin to play anything – what isn’t to love.
I will tell you what isn’t to love – the fact that animation isn’t semantic, you can’t display any markup to convey an animation (save for animation within video). HTML is a Markup Language that should used for turning data into machine readable code to be parsed at will by whatever program wants to.
There is no data you can convey with an animation (or at least that couldn’t be conveyed a more semantic way) so being able to play an animation in HTML is pointless. It is only good for some visual sprinkles (but then so was Flash!).
Anyway, rant over – I don’t like the idea of squeezing HTML to do something it wasn’t designed for and shouldn’t be used for. You might, in which case you should download the trail whilst you can.
I did, here are the results. Edge Test.
Interestingly, the one tag I expected to see was Canvas, I thought this is the ideal HTML5 tag for animation, apart from that I have to say the code it produces is pretty nice, and the learning curve (for someone who last used anything like that over 5 years ago) was pretty shallow.
By the way, I should give some love to the following YouTube video, helping me to get my animation on!
And, you know, if you need any animation work done, well my portfolio speaks for itself!
I finally got around to fixing the stupid looking bullets that appeared on a lot of the parts of the disqus commenting system.
The issue, of course, was that my stylesheet wasn’t designed to hide the style of the unordered list items. Here is the code I needed to add to remove the bullets.
Written by #disqus_thread ul {
list-style: none outside none;
}Hope it helps someone.
Sometimes IE7 gets it right.
An example of this would be when you have a td with a CSS property of width: 100px; and apply a colspan of say 3.
What most browsers seem to do is take that width and multiply it by the colspan, whilst this is sometimes useful it isn’t what you asked the browser to do.
IE7 doesn’t assume anything, it applies the colspan first then looks at the CSS and says ‘hold on a minute, they want this width set to 100px’ and applies it.
In my opinion that is the way it should work and well done IE7 for not trying to second guess me.
Nettuts provides some excellent tutorials from time to time and I think the latest one which takes the user through the basics of using Canvas.
Apart from gaming I have yet to see a really interesting use for the canvas element but hopefully more people getting exposed to the basics of it will help bread some creativity and some fun things will follow as a result.
