Monday 27 June 2011

Training for the future – HTML5 & CSS3

The prospect of two days hardcore programming would fill most people outside the Web world with dread! Luckily, the digital team at Idealogy ‘lives to programme’ and ‘programmes to live’.

“Hmmm” they say in their robotic little voices!

For those who don’t know it yet, HTML5 is the long awaited revision to HTML and we could spend all day trying to write a description of what it is, what it does and how differently it does it, but trusty old Wikipedia says it best:


HTML5 is a language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web, a core technology of the Internet. It is the latest revision of the HTML standard (originally created in 1990 and most recently standardized as HTML4 in 1997) and currently remains under development. HTML5 is a response to the observation that the HTML and XHTML in common use on the World Wide Web is a mixture of features introduced by various specifications, along with those introduced by software products such as web browsers, those established by common practice, and the many syntax errors in existing web documents

So there!

CSS3 is the next step forward from CSS2, oddly enough, but again see Wikipedia:

Instead of defining all features in a single, large specification like CSS2, CSS3 is divided into several separate documents called "modules". Each module adds new capability or extends features defined in CSS2, over preserving backward compatibility.

But enough tech dribble! In layman’s terms, HTML5 allows us to have new markup elements for video and text alongside new APIs for geo-location, drag and drop and canvas plus others. CSS3 allows us to do even more cool, funky design things such as (better) rounded corners, drop shadows, backgrounds, transparency plus a whole load more.

Now, I can hear the designers in the building thinking Christmas has arrived with all these new tools and I suppose in a way it has. The newer browsers support most of this new code and you can really do some interesting stuff without the need for graphics - which is great. That, plus the fact that some of it is so easy to implement will certainly make the designers’ lives much easier.

So what’s the downside?

Browsers I guess would be my answer! Plus the slow upgrade schedule of many companies. Support for most of this is limited to the newer browsers and until their penetration reaches the masses we’ll be coding hacks and degrading designs to work for multiple browsers for a fair while yet. Still it can only get better.

In summary, we’ll be able to push the boundaries with some clients but for others we’ll need to keep the designers tightly reined in for the foreseeable future. HTML5/CSS3 has come a long way but it’s going to be a long haul before there is enough take-up in the corporate world to support all these new tools.

We’ll be doing what we want with our own new site though!

Posted by Simon Johnson



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