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Should you care about HTML5?

Posted 30 Apr 2010 / Written by Steve Coventry / Make a Comment

Answer: Yes! HTML5 is going to form the foundations of most websites within a few years, and most modern browsers including FireFox, Chrome, Safari and Opera already support it. Here is a cool demo of just some of what can be achieved without any plugins.

Previously visualization like this which play music, displays smooth animations, and hooks straight into Twitter, would've been something you'd have to build in Flash or Silverlight, requiring developers to know multiple languages, and viewers to download weighty plugins. Now it's possible to pull this off using just HTML5, which includes support for video and audio embedding, a canvas for scriptable animations and all kinds of other rich content that'll make current HTML based webpages look weak and bland in comparison.

Big names like YouTube are already looking at ditching their Flash player in preference of a full HTML5 offering, it's also fueling the fire heating up between Apple and Adobe over Flash on the iPhone. The latest models of the iPhone coming out will heavily feature HTML5, offering some great features for advertisers that you can check out here.

So grab the latest build of your favourite browser and have a look at what it can do. You'll be seeing a lot more of this before too long, so if your newest gadget's software supports it, consider it a worthwhile feature.

A solution to using custom fonts online

Posted 31 Mar 2010 / Written by Steve Coventry / Make a Comment

I am sure many of you are aware of the limitations of using fonts on the internet. Traditionally websites have been forced to use a small selection of ‘web safe’ fonts which don’t exactly inspire. There have been many solutions to this problem, most of which have their own pitfalls whether it be due to accessibility issues, poor SEO, being a pain to update or all the above. The most popular solution is sIFR which is a type of flash replacement text. This works by dynamically replacing the required text elements with a flash object containing the text, because this text is now within flash it can be styled using any font. Also because this is done on the fly when the page is loaded it does not impact on search engine optimisation, neither does it affect accessibility because a ‘hidden’ copy of the original text is left in place for screen readers.

So you may be thinking that the problem has been solved? Well not exactly... Having used sIFR on a number of projects I have noticed many areas where it doesn’t play nicely and inadvertently breaks something or ends up looking wrong. And because this is supposed to be a ‘simple’ solution you can’t quite style the text how you would like in all situations.

So after becoming increasingly frustrated with sIFR and not being able to find a better alternative I decided to write my own which would do exactly what I wanted. So without any further delay I would like to introduce WWIFR (or Wickedweb Inline Flash Replacement, for the want of a better name) to the world... wide web. Actually this is not me introducing WWIFR at all, because without knowing it you have been seeing it all over this website.

The benefits of WWIFR over sIFR are many, but the biggest bonus is that it can be styled in more ways than you ever could with sIFR, and because I wrote it I can update it to accommodate any styling I desire.
Take a look here to see some of what WWIFR can do.

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