Speaking of Standards

Consider my mind blown. I have to confess that I would never have thought of the W3C – a standards organization – launching a branding campaign around HTML5!

Kudos to the W3C for doing something surprising!

And something that is incredibly important… we need to promote HTML5 and all of its related standards because in that direction lies the future of the “Open Internet”. For the sake of innovation… for the sake of competition… for the sake of us all getting better services and better capabilities… we need an open Internet!

And the standards that make up what we commonly call “HTML5″ are one of the key elements of an open Interenet. So kudos to the W3C for launching this campaign… I hope that many sites will use the logo and promote the availability of HTML5-compliant sites. You can download various versions of the logo at (UPDATED WITH W3C LINK):

http://www.w3.org/html/logo/

The page has some great links to HTML5-related resources, too. Well worth a look. You can also purchase T-shirts or request some stickers.

Also, Mashable.com had a post up this morning with comments from the designer and other information.

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UPDATE: (The W3C does have the logo hosted on their website, but some of the media stories were linking to the Google App Engine site instead of the W3C site.) It seems that all the attention has overwhelmed the Google App Engine account where the logo site was served out of:

One wonders why the W3C didn’t put the logo up on their own web servers, but maybe this was faster/easier for the design firm. Whatever the case, hopefully the site will be back to being available soon…

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How well do your browsers support the new features of HTML5? By way of the Twitter account html5guy I learned today of this nice little test site:

http://www.html5test.com/

Now, the site has been out for quite some time and received an update back in June. The blog post announcing that update received a good number of interesting comments that are worth reading.

No test like this is going to be perfect, but it’s good to see some easy way that those of us using browsers can get a sense of how well the browsers do.

For the record, here were my scores on my MacBook Pro (out of a possible 300 points):

• Google Chrome 5.0.375.126: 197 points and 7 bonus points (but see caveat below)
• Firefox 3.6.12: 139 points and 4 bonus points
• Apple Safari 5.0.2: 208 points and 7 bonus points

So one very important lesson I learned today is that I haven’t updated Chrome in a while on my laptop.

Over on an iMac I have, I’m running Google Chrome 7.0.517.41 and scored much higher:

• Google Chrome 7.0.517.41: 239 points and 12 bonus points

Needless to say, I’m going to be upgrading my Chrome build today just for general reasons of not wanting to be too far behind.

UPDATE: After upgrading my Chrome browser on my MacBook Pro, the score was identical to that of the iMac.

I care (and Voxeo cares) about HTML5 because we want to make it even easier for people to interact with applications running on our platforms. Tools like the Phono JavaScript library (explained in more detail here) are a step in that direction… and some of the great work the W3C and other groups are doing to enhance HTML5 with audio and video elements will help greatly in this.

So… one way you can help is to make sure you are using browsers that support HTML5 to the best degree possible. The sooner we can roll out some of the newer elements, the better our overall web browsing experience will be!

Have you ever been coding in HTML or CSS and found yourself wondering exactly what the attributes were to a given element? Or wondering what values an attribute can have?

If so, the W3C offers this great “cheatsheet” at:

http://www.w3.org/2009/cheatsheet/

where you can simply enter a search string and look up info about HTML, CSS, SVG or XPath.

For instance, say I wanted to know more about the <div> tag in HTML, I can just enter it and then get a result with links to learn more about the possible attributes or to click over and read the actual specification:

The site nicely provides suggestions as you type. For instance, I started typing “align” and received these suggestions:

As you can probably guess from the tabs in the screenshots, the site also provides information about development for mobile browsers and guidance around accessiblity, internationalization and typography. A great resource for anyone who is coding up their site. Visit the cheatsheet at the W3C’s site to try it out yourself.