FontShop announces that they are ready to deliver their font library as web type:
[S]tarting today, Typekit users can pick from dozens of FontFonts, including FF Meta, FF Dax, and FF Netto. Plus, the Typekit service lets you test any of those FontFonts on your page before you publish.
And tomorrow?
Typekit is just one piece of a holistic strategy for FontFonts on the web. The library should be licensable in a more traditional way too. That’s where WOFF fits in. … Soon anyone will be able to license and download for their website the same professional quality FontFont they use in desktop applications, but crafted specifically for the new medium.
Ellen Lupton is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. She is the author of numerous books and articles on design, a frequent lecturer, and an AIGA Gold Medalist.
It seems like only yesterday that the HTML5 Super Friends asked the HTML5 working groups to rethink footer’s content model to avoid web developer misuse and frustration. Okay, it wasn’t yesterday, it was Monday. Close enough. Today comes word that footer is indeed being redefined as we requested. This is a wonderful usability improvement to HTML5, and we salute the working group(s) for listening and acting.
The HTML5 specification runs on for over 900 pages, and much of what it covers, while vital to browser makers, is meaningless to people who create websites. If thousands of irrelevant details in the HTML5 spec have you crossing your eyes and crying for Mama, Michael™ Smith’s HTML 5: The Markup Language is just what the HTML5 doctor ordered: lean, clean, and content-author-focused. Until there’s a plain-language HTML5 Pocket Guide, Smith’s edited presentation of the spec will do. (It’s also available in a single page format.)
Half of standards making is minutia; the other half is politics. Rightly or wrongly, I’ve long suspected that Atom was born, not of necessity, but because of conflicts between the XML crowd and the founders of RSS. Likewise, rightly or wrongly, I reckoned HTML5 was at least partly Hixie’s revenge against XHTML served as text/html.
And then a funny thing happened. Some friends and I gathered at Happy Cog’s New York studio to hash out the pros and cons of HTML5 from the perspective of semantic-markup-oriented web designers (as opposed to the equally valid perspectives of browser engineers and web application developers—the two perspectives that have primarily driven the creation of HTML 5).
Our first task was to come to a shared understanding of the spec. During the two days and nights we spent poring over new and changed semantic elements, we discovered that many things we had previously considered serious problems were fixable issues related to language.
Easy language problems
Some of these language problems are trivial indeed. For instance, on both the WHATWG and W3C sites, the specification is sometimes called “HTML 5” (with a space) and sometimes called “HTML5” (with no space). A standard should have a standard name. (Informed of this problem, Hixie has removed the space everywhere in the WHATWG version of the spec.)
Likewise, as an end-user, I found it confusing to be told that there is an “HTML5 serialization of HTML 5,” let alone an “XHTML 5 version of HTML5.” I requested that the two serializations be referred to as “HTML” and “XHTML”—emphasizing the distinction between the two kinds of syntax rather than drawing needless attention to version numbers. (Again, Hixie promptly updated the spec.)
Names and expectations
Some language problems are tougher—but still eminently fixable, because they are language problems that mar the presentation of good ideas, not bad ideas that require rethinking.
For example, in order to choose suitable names for the new semantic elements in HTML 5, Hixie analyzed classnames on thousands of websites to see what web designers and developers were already doing. If many designers and developers use classnames like “header” and “footer” to contain certain kinds of content, then HTML 5 should use these labels, too, Hixie and his colleagues reasoned. Doing so would make the purpose of the new elements intuitively obvious to working web professionals, removing the learning curve and encouraging proper element use from the get-go.
It’s a beautiful theory that comes straight out of Bert Bos’s W3C Design Principles. There’s just one problem. Header, and especially footer, behave differently from what their names will lead web designers and developers to expect. Developers will use it for the footer of the page—not for the footer of each section. And they will be frustrated that the footer in HTML5 forbids navigation links. After all, the footer at the bottom of web pages almost always includes navigation links.
To avoid misuse and frustration, the content model of footer should change to match that of header, so that it may be used concurrently as a template level element (the expected use) and a sub-division of section (the new use). Alternately, the element’s name should be changed (to almost anything but “footer”). Expanding the content model is clearly the better choice.
For the love of markup
HTML5 is unusual in many ways. Chiefly, it is the first HTML created in the time of web applications. It is also the first to be initiated outside the W3C (although it now develops there in parallel).
Not surprisingly in a specification that goes on for 900 pages, there are at least a dozen places in HTML5 where a thoughtful standardista might request clarification, suggest a change, or both. My friends and I have taken a stab at this ourselves, and will soon publish our short list of recommendations and requests for clarification.
Nevertheless, the more I study the direction HTML5 is taking, the better I like it. In the words of the HTML5 Super Friends, “Its introduction of a limited set of additional semantic elements, its instructions on how to handle failure, and its integration of application development tools hold the promise of richer and more consistent user experiences, faster prototyping, and increased human and machine semantics.”
Update
[4:47 PM EST] Calling all cars! The HTML5 Super Friends declaration of support is now live, as is the Super Friends Guide to HTML5 Hiccups (i.e. our technical recommendations).
Instead of static pictures of fonts, linked font files can be retrieved from the web and used to display HTML text. And not just for headlines, but for body copy, too. It’s brilliant! It’s magnificent! There are just two problems:
Unless they are specifically licensed for web use (and few fonts are), if you embed fonts you own on a web page, you may be violating your End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) with the font foundry.
While Safari (and other Webkit browsers, including Google Chrome), Opera, and Firefox support @font-face for TrueType (TTF) and OpenType (OTF) fonts, guess which browser does not? That’s right, Internet Explorer. That’s not because IE is technically inferior to the other browsers. Rather, it’s because Microsoft does not wish to provide technology that might infringe on the rights of type designers. Instead, Microsoft supports @font-face only for the Embedded OpenType (EOT) format—which Microsoft itself invented. EOT discourages the copying of copyrighted font files via encryption, “subsetting” (using only needed characters rather than the entire font), and other techniques. Microsoft has supported EOT—and proposed it as a W3C standard—since IE4 was young. No other browser maker supports EOT.
The Tan method and IE
It’s the perennial web standards problem, but until Microsoft joins the party, Jon Tan offers a commendable workaround, combining standard @font-face with EOT served via IE conditional comments. It’s a hack, perhaps, but a clean one—and one that even Microsoft would approve. Nice work, Jon Tan. That’s one hurdle cleared.
The licensing hurdle
Type foundries are on the verge of agreeing to standards that will protect their rights and enable designers to embed real fonts on their web pages via standard CSS. They are on the verge, but not there yet. Competing proposals include Erik van Blokland and Tal Leming’s .webfont, a compressed format containing XML and font data; Ascender’s EOT Lite, which removes the chief objections to Microsoft’s EOT while still working in IE; and David Berlow’s OpenType Permissions and Recommendations Table, a mechanism for showing that the designer has paid for the right to use a particular font on a particular domain.
Using @font-face in all browsers today
Some of these methods work already. For instance, on Font Bureau’s website, you will soon be able to buy a web- and print-licensed version of one of their fonts for 20% more than a print-only-licensed version, and embed it on a given domain via @font-face. It will be legally licensed, and it will work in Safari, Firefox, and Opera. It will even work in IE, if you use Jon Tan’s workaround.
Rise of the middlemen
Until type designers agree to a standard and all browsers support @font-face embedding of TrueType and OpenType fonts, “middleman” platforms such as Typekit and Typotheque will make real web fonts possible by handling licensing and technological hassles.
As nearly all of you reading this know, here’s how it works: First, companies like Typekit get font vendors to sign on. The companies agree to license their fonts through Typekit. Designers pay a monthly fee to Typekit for arranging the license and hosting the fonts. Typekit also provides a technology solution, ensuring that the fonts show up in browsers that support standard font formats via @font-face (Safari, Firefox, Opera) as well as the one that does not (Internet Explorer).
Worth noting is that Typekit is font foundry agnostic, welcoming all, whereas Typotheque is a foundry-specific solution. The wizards at Clearleft have their own middleman platform in the works. All these solutions are currently in beta.
As of this writing, their pricing models are unknown—and price is sure to have an impact on acceptance.
Moreover, by definition, no web font middleman (or font developer, like Typotheque) offers every font you could wish for, and ultimately, designers will only choose a service that provides fonts they wish to use. Nor is it yet known whose technical solution will be best, whose font file will load fastest, how reliable each hosting platform will be as usage scales up, and so on.
The effect of font services on web standards
It remains to be seen whether a font-licensing standard and universal browser support for @font-face will kill the middlemen, or whether the middlemen will prove so successful that they delay or stifle the adoption of a font-licensing standard and allow Microsoft to shrug its shoulders indefinitely at supporting @font-face for anything beyond its proprietary EOT file format.
There is also the possibility that the middlemen, by increasing acceptance of web fonts, will hasten the arrival of a licensing standard—and that this will, in turn, prompt Microsoft to support @font-face for any licensed font.
Back in 2000, CSS co-creator Bert Bos set out to explain the W3C’s design principles—“to make explicit what the developers in the various W3C working groups mean when they invoke words like efficiency, maintainability, accessibility, extensibility, learnability, simplicity, [and] longevity….”
Eventually published in 2003, the essay, although ostensibly concerned with explaining W3C working group principles to the uninitiated, actually articulates the key principle that separates great design from the muck we normally wade through. It also serves as a warning to Bert’s fellow W3C wizards not to seek the dark magic of abstract purity at the expense of the common good. Tragically for these wizards, and for we who use their technologies, it is a warning some developers of W3C specifications continue to overlook.
Design is for people
In his introduction, Bert summarizes the humanistic value that is supposed to be at the core of every web standard:
Contrary to appearances, the W3C specifications are for the most part not designed for computers, but for people. … Most of the formats are in fact compromises between human-readability and computer efficiency….
But why do we want people to read them at all? Because all our specs are incomplete. Because people, usually other people than the original developers, have to add to them….
For the same reason we try to keep the specifications of reasonable size. They must describe a useful chunk of technology, but not one that is too large for an individual to understand.
Over the succeeding 25 web pages (the article is chunked out in pamphlet-sized pages, each devoted to a single principle such as “maintainability” and “robustness”) Bert clearly, plainly, and humbly articulates a series of rather profound ideas that are key to the web’s growth and that might apply equally admirably to realms of human endeavor beyond the web.
The Web now runs on HTML, HTTP and URLs, none of which existed before the ’90s. But it isn’t just because of the quality of these new formats and protocols that the Web took off. In fact, the original HTTP was a worse protocol than, e.g., Gopher or FTP in its capabilities….
And that fact shows nicely what made the Web possible at all: it didn’t try to replace things that already worked, it only added new modules, that fit in the existing infrastructure. …
And nowadays (the year 2000), it may look like everything is XML and HTTP, but that impression is only because the “old” stuff is so well integrated that you forget about it: there is no replacement for e-mail or Usenet, for JPEG or MPEG, and many other essential parts of the Web.
He then warns:
There is, unfortunately, a tendency in every standards organization, W3C not excluded, to replace everything that was created by others with things developed in-house. It is the not-invented-here syndrome, a feeling that things that were not developed “for the Web” are somehow inferior. And that “we” can do better than “them.” But even if that is true, maybe the improvement still isn’t worth spending a working group’s resources on.
Shrinkage and seduction
In his gentle way, Bert seems to be speaking directly to his W3C peers, who may not always share his and Håkon‘s humanism. For, despite what designers new to CSS, struggling for the first time with concepts like “float” and the box model may think, Bert and Håkon designed the web’s layout language to be easy to learn, teach, implement, maintain, and (eventually) extend. They also designed CSS not to overwhelm the newcomer with advanced power at the cost of profound complexity. (“CSS stops short of even more powerful features that programmers use in their programming languages: macros, variables, symbolic constants, conditionals, expressions over variables, etc. That is because these things give power-users a lot of rope, but less experienced users will unwittingly hang themselves; or, more likely, be so scared that they won’t even touch CSS. It’s a balance.”)
This striving to be understood and used by the inexperienced is the underlying principle of all good design, from the iPhone to the Eames chair. It’s what Jared Spool would call usability and you and I may consider the heart of design. When anything new is created, be it a website, a service, or a web markup language, there is a gap between what the creator knows (which is everything about how it’s supposed to work), and what you and I know (which is nothing). The goal of design is to shrink this ignorance gap while seducing us into leaping across it.
What were once vices are now habits
You can see this principle at work in CSS, whose simplicity allowed us to learn it. Although we now rail against the limitations of CSS 1 and even CSS 2.1, what we are really complaining about is the slow pace of CSS 3 and the greater slowness with which browser makers (some more than others) adopt bits of it.
Note that at one time we would have railed against browser makers who implemented parts of a specification that was still under development; now we admire them. Note, too, that it has taken well over a decade for developers to understand and browsers to support basic CSS, and it is only from the perspective of the experienced customer who craves more that advanced web designers now cry out for immediate CSS 3 adoption and chafe against the “restrictions” of current CSS as universally supported in all browsers, including IE8.
If CSS had initially offered the power, depth, and complexity that CSS 3 promises, we would still be designing with tables or Flash. Even assuming a browser had existed that could demonstrate the power of CSS 3, the complexity of the specification would have daunted everyone but Eric Meyer, had CSS 1 not come out of the gate first.
The future of the future of standards
It was the practical simplicity of CSS that enabled browser engineers to implement it and tempted designers to use (and then evangelize) it. In contrast, it was the seeming complexity and detachment from practical workaday concerns that doomed XHTML 2, while XHTML 1.0 remains a valid spec that will likely still be working when you and I have retired (assuming retirement will be possible in our lifetime—but that’s another story).
And yet, compared to some W3C specs in progress, XHTML 2 was a model of accessible, practical, down-to-earth usability.
To the extent that W3C specifications remain modular, practical, and accessible to the non-PhD in computer science, they will be adopted by browser makers and the marketplace. The farther they depart from the principles Bert articulated, the sooner they will peter out into nothingness, and the likelier we are to face a crisis in which web standards once again detach from the direction in which the web is actually moving, and the medium is given over to incompatible, proprietary technologies.
David Berlow of The Font Bureau has proposed a Permissions Table for OpenType that can be implemented immediately to turn raw fonts into web fonts without any wrappers or other nonsense. If adopted, it will enable type designers to license their work for web use, and web designers to create pages that use real fonts via the CSS @font-face standard.
My April 21, 2009 A List Apart interview with Berlow explains how a permissions table would enable type designers to support @font-face without DRM or intermediary hosted licensing. A press release provides more detail:
Future web users will not want their browsers clogging the workings of their Operating Systems with fonts, or the browsers’ presenting the users with web content that the user cannot read. In addition, web users do not want imprecisely or un-aesthetically presented content where a simple type-bearing graphic would suffice. Lastly, users do not want fonts to be able to give fraudulent users the unique corporate appearance of a genuine company.
So far, the browsers allowing use of the @Font-face font linking are installing and removing fonts in an invisible way, but future browsers may need to more intelligently manage web fonts for users as more sites employ them. Here, the proposed table can help by containing the links from which the fonts came, and determining their cacheability based on the user’s browsing history. More importantly, the recommendations section of the proposed table could allow a browser to offer reconcileablilty of any font treatment in conflict with a user’s ‘preferenced’ desires in areas such as sizing of type, presentation of line length and potentially dangerous type treatments such as rapid text blinking.
The Permissions Table proposal will be announced tomorrow on newsgroups and forums frequented by type designers.
Read more
Web Fonts, HTML 5 Roundup: Worthwhile reading on the hot new web font proposals, and on HTML 5/CSS 3 basics, plus a demo of advanced HTML 5 trickery. — 20 July 2009
Web Fonts Now (How We’re Doing With That): Everything you ever wanted to know about real fonts on the web, including commercial foundries that allow @font-face embedding; which browsers already support @font-face; what IE supports instead; Håkon Wium Lie, father of CSS, on @font-face at A List Apart; the Berlow interview at A List Apart; @font-face vs. EOT; Cufón; SIFR; Cufón combined with @font-face; Adobe, web fonts, and EOT; and Typekit, a new web service offering a web-only font linking license on a hosted platform; — 23 May 2009
When Apple chose KHTML rather than Mozilla Gecko as the basis for its Safari browser, some of us in the web standards community scratched our heads. Sure, KHTML, the rendering engine in Konqueror, was open-source and standards-compliant. But, at the time, Gecko’s standards support was more advanced, and Gecko-based Mozilla, Camino, and even Netscape 6 felt more like browsers than Konqueror. Gecko browsers had the features, the comparative maturity, and the support of the standards community. Apple’s adoption of KHTML, and creation of a forked version called Webkit, seemed puzzling and wrong.
Yet, thanks largely to the success of the iPhone, Webkit (Apple’s open source version of KHTML) in the form of Safari, has been a surprising force for good on the web, raising people’s expectations about what a web browser can and should do, and what a web page should look like. Had Apple chosen Gecko, they might not have been able to so powerfully influence mainstream consumer opinion, because the fully formed, distinctly mature Gecko brand and experience could easily have overshadowed and constrained Apple’s contribution. (Not to mention, tolerating external constraint is not a game Apple plays.)
Just how has mobile Safari, a relative latecomer to the world of standards-based browsing, been able to make a difference, and what difference has it made?
The platform paradox
Firefox and Opera were wonderful before any Webkit-based browser reached maturity, but Firefox and Opera were and are non-mainstream tastes. Most people use Windows without thinking much about it, and most Windows users open the browser that comes with their operating system, again without too much thought. This doesn’t make them dumb and us smart. We are interaction designers; they are not.
Thus, the paradox: even though Firefox and Opera offered powerfully compelling visions of what could be accomplished with web standards back when IE6 offered a comparatively poor experience, Firefox and Opera, not unlike Linux and Mac OS, were platforms for the converted. If you knew enough to want Firefox and Opera, those browsers delivered features and experience that confirmed the wisdom of your choice. If you didn’t know to want them, you didn’t realize you were missing anything, because folks reading this page sweated like Egyptian pyramid builders to make sure you had a good experience despite your browser’s flaws.
The power to convert
Firefox and Opera are great browsers that have greatly advanced the cause of web standards, but because they are choices in a space where most people don’t make choices, their power to convert is necessarily somewhat truncated. The millions mostly don’t care what happens on their desktop. It’s mostly not in their control. They either don’t have a choice or don’t realize they have one, and their expectations have been systematically lowered by two decades of unexciting user experience.
By contrast, the iPhone functions in a hot realm where consumers do make choices, and where choices are badges. Of course many people are forced economically to choose the cheap or free phone that comes with their mobile service. But many others are in a position to select a device. And the iPhone is to today’s urban professional gym rat what cigarettes and martinis were to their 1950s predecessors. You and I may claim to choose a mobile device based on its features, but the upwardly mobile (pardon the pun), totally hot person standing next to us in the elevator may choose their phone the same way they choose their handbag. And now that the iPhone sells for $99, more people can afford to make a fashion decision about their phone—and they’ll do it.
Mobile 2.0
Although there were great phones before the iPhone, and although the iPhone has its detractors, it is fair to say that we are now in a Mobile 2.0 phase where people expect more than a Lynx-like experience when they use their phone to access the internet. Mobile Safari in iPhone, along with the device’s superior text handling thanks to Apple and Adobe technologies, is changing perceptions about and expectations of the web in the same way social networking did, and just at the historical moment when social networking has gone totally mainstream.
Oprah’s on Twitter, your mom’s on Twitter, and they’re either using an iPhone or a recently vastly upgraded Palm or Blackberry that takes nearly all of its cues from the iPhone. Devices that copy the iPhone of course mostly end up selling the iPhone, the same way Bravo’s The Fashion Show would mostly make you miss Project Runway if you even watched The Fashion Show, which you probably haven’t.
Safari isn’t perfect, and Mobile Safari has bugs not evident in desktop Safari, but Webkit + Apple = secret sauce selling web standards to a new generation of consumers and developers.
Read more
Web Fonts, HTML 5 Roundup: Worthwhile reading on the hot new web font proposals, and on HTML 5/CSS 3 basics, plus a demo of advanced HTML 5 trickery. — 20 July 2009
HTML 5: Nav Ambiguity Resolved. An e-mail from Chairman Hickson resolves an ambiguity in the nav element of HTML 5. What does that mean in English? Glad you asked! — 13 July 2009
In Defense of Web Developers: Pushing back against the “XHTML is bullshit, man!” crowd’s using the cessation of XHTML 2.0 activity to condescend to—or even childishly glory in the “folly” of—web developers who build with XHTML 1.0, a stable W3C recommendation for nearly ten years, and one that will continue to work indefinitely. — 7 July 2009
XHTML DOA WTF: The web’s future isn’t what the web’s past cracked it up to be. — 2 July 2009
It has only been a few days but I am already sick of the “XHTML is bullshit, man!” crowd using the cessation of XHTML 2.0 activity to condescend to—or even childishly glory in the “folly” of—web developers who build with XHTML 1.0, a stable W3C recommendation for nearly ten years, and one that will continue to work indefinitely.
A coterie of well-informed codemeisters, from ppk to Ian Hickson, has always had legit beefs with XHTML, the most persuasive of which was Hickson’s:
It is suggested that HTML delivered as text/html is broken and XHTML delivered as text/xml is risky, so authors intending their work for public consumption should stick to HTML 4.01, and authors who wish to use XHTML should deliver their markup as application/xhtml+xml.
This problem always struck me as more theoretical than real, but I pointed it out in every edition of Designing With Web Standards and left it to the reader to decide. When I wrote the first edition of the book, some versions of Mozilla and IE would go into Quirksmode in the presence of HTML 4, breaking CSS layouts. To me, that was a worse problem than whatever was supposed to be scary or bad about using well-formed XHTML syntax while delivering it as HTML all browsers could support.
The opportunity to rethink markup
The social benefit of rethinking markup sealed the deal. XHTML’s introduction in 2000, and its emphasis on rules of construction, gave web standards evangelists like me a platform on which to hook a program of semantic markup replacing the bloated and unsustainable tag soup of the day. The web is better for this and always will be, and there is much still to do, as many people who create websites still have not heard the call.
A few who became disenchanted with XHTML early retreated to HTML 4, and as browsers stopped going into Quirksmode in its presence, valid, structural HTML 4 became a reasonable option again. But both HTML 4 and XHTML 1 were document languages, not transactional languages. They were all noun, and almost no verb. So Ian Hickson, XHTML’s biggest critic, fathered HTML 5, an action-oriented toddler specification that won’t reach adulthood until 2022, although some of it can be used today.
And guess what? HTML 5 is as controversial today as XHTML was in 2000, and there are just as many people who worry that a specification of which they don’t entirely approve is being shoved down their throats by an “uncaring elite.” Only this time, instead of the W3C, the “uncaring elite” is Mr Hickson, with W3C rubber stamp, and input from browser makers, including his employer.
XHTML not dead
All of this is to say that XHTML is not dead (XHTML 2 is dead, thank goodness), and HTML 5 is not here yet. Between now and 2022, we have plenty of time to learn about HTML 5 and contribute to the discussion—and browser makers have 13 years to get it right. Which is also to say all of us—not just those who long ago retreated to HTML 4, or who became fans of HTML 5 before it could even say “Mama”—are entitled to be pleased that standard markup activity will now have a single focus, rather than a dual one (with XHTML 2 the dog spec that no one was willing to mercy-kill until now).
Entitled to be pleased is not the same as entitled to gloat and name call. As DN put it in comment-44126:
What is really rather aggravating is how many people are using this news as a stick with which to beat any developer or freelancer who’s had the audacity to study up on and use XHTML in good faith–or even, much to the horror of the Smug Knowbetters, admire XHTML’s intelligible markup structure–for the brand-new-minted sin of doing the most with XHTML that’s possible. The ‘unofficial Q&A’ is ripe with that kind of condescension. …[D]on’t pin users (front-end developers are merely users of specifications) with Microsoft’s failure to support the correct MIME type.
Read more
Web Fonts, HTML 5 Roundup: Worthwhile reading on the hot new web font proposals, and on HTML 5/CSS 3 basics, plus a demo of advanced HTML 5 trickery. — 20 July 2009
HTML 5: Nav Ambiguity Resolved. An e-mail from Chairman Hickson resolves an ambiguity in the nav element of HTML 5. What does that mean in English? Glad you asked! — 13 July 2009
Web Standards Secret Sauce: Even though Firefox and Opera offered powerfully compelling visions of what could be accomplished with web standards back when IE6 offered a poor experience, Firefox and Opera, not unlike Linux and Mac OS, were platforms for the converted. Thanks largely to the success of the iPhone, Webkit, in the form of Safari, has been a surprising force for good on the web, raising people’s expectations about what a web browser can and should do, and what a web page should look like. — 12 July 2009
XHTML DOA WTF: The web’s future isn’t what the web’s past cracked it up to be. — 2 July 2009
XHTML 2 Working Group Expected to Stop Work End of 2009, W3C to Increase Resources on HTML 5
2009-07-02: Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed. By doing so, and by increasing resources in the Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate the progress of HTML 5 and clarify W3C’s position regarding the future of HTML. A FAQ answers questions about the future of deliverables of the XHTML 2 Working Group, and the status of various discussions related to HTML. Learn more about the HTML Activity. (Permalink)
Please note that this thread has been updated with useful comments and links that help make sense of the emergence of HTML 5, the death of XHTML 2.0, and what designers and developers need to know about the present and future of web markup.
Read more
Web Fonts, HTML 5 Roundup: Worthwhile reading on the hot new web font proposals, and on HTML 5/CSS 3 basics, plus a demo of advanced HTML 5 trickery. — 20 July 2009
HTML 5: Nav Ambiguity Resolved. An e-mail from Chairman Hickson resolves an ambiguity in the nav element of HTML 5. What does that mean in English? Glad you asked! — 13 July 2009
Web Standards Secret Sauce: Even though Firefox and Opera offered powerfully compelling visions of what could be accomplished with web standards back when IE6 offered a poor experience, Firefox and Opera, not unlike Linux and Mac OS, were platforms for the converted. Thanks largely to the success of the iPhone, Webkit, in the form of Safari, has been a surprising force for good on the web, raising people’s expectations about what a web browser can and should do, and what a web page should look like. — 12 July 2009
In Defense of Web Developers: Pushing back against the “XHTML is bullshit, man!” crowd’s using the cessation of XHTML 2.0 activity to condescend to—or even childishly glory in the “folly” of—web developers who build with XHTML 1.0, a stable W3C recommendation for nearly ten years, and one that will continue to work indefinitely. — 7 July 2009
The earliest websites were minimal in the extreme, but without the style and flair to make a virtue of their simplicity. 37signals and Kottke pioneered the combination of simplicity with deft design sense. Cardigan made it art.
Although it is never popular, never the dominant trend, rarely wins design awards, and almost never earns acclaim from designers, design stripped down to its essentials is always a good idea, and especially on the web, where every byte counts. We salute the old and new practitioners of minimalist web design, and solicit your thoughts on pioneers or present practitioners who combine a minimalist aesthetic with significant design chops.
