Tag: HTML5

WhichElement.com

I’m pleased to unveil a little project I’ve been working on for a few weeks now: whichElement.com. WhichElement.com is a reference site for answering the question “Which elements should I use to mark up this HTML semantically?” I’ve been joined in this effort by my coworker, Ray Camden. We’re pleased to put this out there, and eager to see what you can do with it.

The Story Behind It

I was (and still am) incredibly impressed by HTML5 Please.  I think it’s a fantastically on-target site. It showcases its technology and hits on a specific need and fills it brilliantly. I wanted to do something in the same vein without just copying it.  Around the time that I was feeling this, I got into an argument on semantics with someone. Specifically they were asking questions about when they should use article versus
div. Basically I explained what I knew of the spec for article. I gave some analysis, and made a recommendation.

When I was done with the argument I had an idea for a site:  A reference that would help people choose for themselves which tags to use semantically without being authoritarian.  I also wanted to set the tone that there isn’t one right answer to these things – that “semantically correct” isn’t a binary thing, but a position on a continuum.

The Technology Behind It

Another important thing for us in doing this was choice of technology. We placed a couple of constraints on the project:

  • We wanted to be open to other people contributing and offer a few channels for that.
  • No content management or wiki software
  • All code and content would be in HTML/JavaScript/CSS; no server-side technology

To achieve this we made a few choices.  To go open and collaborative without having a wiki, we went with github. Not the usual answer for a content site, but I think we can make it work.  The choice of no server-side tech (other than a vanilla web server) came about so as to not discourage contributions from anyone.  PHP, Ruby, ColdFusion, some JVM language, Python – whatever your back end, you have to know HTML/JavaScript/CSS. So let’s not skew one way, when most of the contributions can be made very simply with the front-end stack.

Working in those constraints wasn’t always easy. Ray got tired of copying and pasting template code around despite my incredibly stupid protestations that “No, it will be okay; we can work that way.” So he came up with a cool way to handle that with some JavaScript and .htaccess magic. I had to come up with a way to provide search without having any sort of server-side tech. We’re not sure if other people will be cool contributing under these constraints, but obviously I hope so.

Get Involved

We’re open to contributions.  We do all of the publishing through an automated build process that looks at the github repository for the project. So git is the path to getting on production.  We’re open to forks and pull requests.  We’re also open to contributions through email.  Basically if you want to contribute, drop us a line, we’ll figure out how to work with you to get you in.

 

Inception Score Easter Egg with Web Audio API

There’s a great video on YouTube detailing an Easter Egg in the score for the movie Inception.  Basically Inception is about dreams and the slowing down of time. Likewise the score is based on the slowing down of music that is played inside the plot of the movie.  Pretty cool. Feel free to check out the video before continuing.

I wanted to use this concept to show off the Audio capabilities in HTML5. Basically I want to:

  • Play the Inception Score
  • Play the Edith Piaf song
  • Play the Edit Piaf song slowed down
  • Play the Inception score over the slowed down Edith Piaf song.

But the vanilla tag didn’t work for me. The tag does have the ability to be slowed down, but it seems that in Chrome and Safari, I could not get the rate below 50% of the original. On Chrome the sound stopped playing if the rate was below 50%, and on Safari the sound just never got slower even though the rate was below 50%.

I figured I would give the Web Audio API a try and see what it could do. So I wrote a function that could play back a sound at a given rate:

http://snipplr.com/js/embed.js
http://snipplr.com/json/63363

That worked. All I had to do was set up some HTML to display it, some CSS to make it look less plain, and some buttons to make it work.

There’s a working demo here:

Audio API Demo

Oh before you click on that link – It only works on Chrome. And sometimes it has the tendency to stop working all together. The fix is to empty your browser cache, and restart Chrome. But hey, still a cool proof of concept.

Web Audio API: setting playbackRate

I was working on a little demo showing the manipulation of playback rates of audio clips.  The Audio tag failed miserably.  On Safari and Chrome (both for Mac) the audio tag couldn’t playback the audio any slower than half speed.

For what I was working on, this meant trying out the Web Audio API.  I stole some code that allowed for playback, got it working, then tried to manipulate the playbackRate for the clip. But no joy, no Chipmunks singing for me.

I looked up a couple of things, and many of them pointed at this statement from the HTML5Rocks Web Audio API FAQ:

Q: HOW CAN I CHANGE THE PITCH OF A SOUND USING THE WEB AUDIO API?
A: Change the playbackRate on the source node.

I tried and I tried for an hour to get this to work using this syntax:

source.playbackRate = 2.0;

Turns out you have to set it as:

source.playbackRate.value = 2.0;

Hopefully, this spares you some time.

Github Ribbons in CSS

Github has these cool ribbon images that you can use if you want to encourage forking your project on your site. They’re great and I wanted to use them on a little project I am working on. However, one of my goals was not to use any images, but rather produce all display elements with CSS.

It was a little bit of trial and error but I got it working. Basically you do the following:

  • Create a link in a div with an id of “banner”
  • Force div#banner to be 149px x 149px.
  • Set overflow to “hidden”

This creates a square display area that won’t show things that stretch out past the bounds of the box.

  • Create an A link
  • Tilt it using a CSS transform
  • Use relative positioning to pull the ribbon into place
  • Use CSS shadows to tweak the text and ribbon shadows
  • Finally I use a CSS gradient in the background of the ribbon to give it the bands that run along the edge.

https://gist.github.com/1679040.js

Issues:

  • It’s not a pixel perfect representation.
  • It doesn’ work on IE before 9. It doesn’t appear at all.

I’m not sure if I’m going to use this. I’ll sound judgmental here, but the fact that it doesn’t show up on IE less than 9 seems like a good thing. Do I want a developer on my project that isn’t using the latest browser? Probably not.

Demo
See the live demo here.

Update

A couple people pointed out that there was a weird doubling of the letters on their browser (Chrome on Windows, and Safari on iPad.) Looks like it was caused by a slight text-shadow I had on the text. The text on the original banner has some anti-aliasing going on, and on some browsers, the text shadow helps it look a little smoother, but on others you get that doubling. So I’ve removed the text shadow.  Display should be a little more consistent. 

Speaking in Philly this Week

I’ll be speaking in my hometown this week. I’ll be presenting at the Philadelphia Area New Media Association (PANMA) meeting for January.

Topics:

  • jQuery Mobile
  • PhoneGap
  • Typekit
  • Edge
  • CSS Shaders

Description:

Adobe and HTML5

In the past few months, there has been a number of new tools and new services from Adobe for HTML5. Some of these tools, like PhoneGap Build and jQuery contributions are aimed at developers and some, such as Edge, are more focused on designers. Adobe Evangelist Terry Ryan will give an overview and demos of these and other tools.

The meeting is on Thursday, January 26th at 6:00PM. It will be at the Huntsman Building at 38th and Walnut on Penn’s Campus.

Venn Diagram entirely in CSS

A friend of mine alerted me this weekend to just how much I have a weird fascination with Venn diagrams. I decided to roll with it. So yeah, I have an irrational love of Venn diagrams. But that begs the question, can I make a Venn diagram with just CSS?

I found a couple of examples out there:

But I felt like they had a bit too much fluff in the HTML markup. Not that there is anything technically wrong with their implementations. I prefer complexity in my CSS and not in my HTML. It’s probably just a subjective thing, but I do.

So how do you do it?

First you create 3 divs. 1 for each Venn circle, and 1 for the overlap section. Each div contains a p with content in it.

https://gist.github.com/1664396.js?file=htmlportion.html

Then you go to style each of the circles. Give them matching heights and widths, and a border radius of half of the height. This creates the circle. Then give each one an opacity below 1. This will ensure that when they overlap they will form a new color.

https://gist.github.com/1664396.js?file=circles.css

I then created two rules based on the nth child css selector to color each of the circles. I also padded to ensure that there would be a space to write in the overlap section.

https://gist.github.com/1664396.js?file=eachcircle.css

Finally I styled the overlap section using relative positioning and pulled it back towards the center.

https://gist.github.com/1664396.js?file=overlap.css

The real trick is to watch the pixel counts because a couple are directly related.

To create a circle:

  • width must equal height
  • border radius must equal 50% of width.

To overlap circles:

  • Circle 2 must have negative x left margin
  • (Or Circle 1 must have negative x right margin)
  • Each circle must have x padding-left or x padding-right to ensure its text doesn’t spill over borders

It looks like the example works across modern browsers, including IE 9, but not previous versions.

Speaking at Webvisions Next Week in NYC

I was originally scheduled to help out my colleague Kevin Hoyt as a TA. Turns out that there was a slight scheduling SNAFU and I’m taking a full slot. My topic:

The Future of HTML5 Motion Design

HTML5 and CSS3 are hot, driven by an explosion of new, Internet connected devices. While they offer many new features that should allow you to do the types of things that you previously did in Flash, actually making it happen is really hard. Until now.

If you weren’t sure, I’ll be talking about Adobe Edge, our HTML5 animation tool. It’s currently in beta, and looking pretty cool.

So if you’re in NYC, and want to get some dirt on where Adobe is going with HTML animation or just to get close to some of the foremost experts on the web, you really got to check out Webvisions.

A Custom Textarea for Finicky in HTML5

I’m doing more work on bringing Finicky to HTML. Another interface that I wanted to reproduce was a custom input for note fields. It’s basically a hand-drawn top and bottom to user editable notes with a hand writing font. As you fill the notes, the area expands and the bottom moves with the expansion. It’s another cool UI tweak that my designer came up with that I want to honor in this version.

My first pass at it tried to use border images to fill the images as border-top and border-bottom on a textarea. I had one giant problem with that: CSS Border images are very unsupported. I couldn’t get them to work on Chrome, and they don’t appear to be accessible on a lot of browsers yet including the mobile browsers I am targeting.

My next pass was using a textarea. I got a little further along, but textareas are static. They don’t expand to fit the content. In fact, that’s sort of the opposite of their intent. They are supposed to stay static to accommodate large amounts of content. I’m sure I could do something with JavaScript to make that happen, but I hate doing that. No rational reason for that. I just feel that every time I use JavaScript to handle a display/style issue, I die a little on the inside. If I can do it in CSS, so be it.

My next attempt used the new HTML5 attribute “contenteditable.” Contenteditable basically says that the content in a given element is editable by the user. This means that I can just create a div that is user editable. The div has the added benefit of being able to dynamically resize itself when new content comes in. This is exactly what I am looking for.

It works perfectly until I actually go to use it in my mobile app. Surprise, surprise, contenteditable isn’t supported on Android yet.

So it’s back to textarea and JavaScript manipulation. (And a little piece of me dies.) There is a jQuery plugin that will make a text area expand with more content, but it seemed a little heavy since I’m not using jQuery in this application. The basic method is pretty straightforward:

  • Create a placeholder for a mirror of the textarea content
  • Create a function for onkeyup for the textarea that:
    • Sets the mirror content to be the content of the textarea
    • Grabs the height of the mirror
    • Sets the textarea height to that height

http://snipplr.com/js/embed.js
http://snipplr.com/json/62437

http://snipplr.com/js/embed.js
http://snipplr.com/json/62438

The basic solution is spelled out in this post on the textArea jQuery Plugin.

I went one step further and created a CSS transition that smooths out the height change of the textarea.

http://snipplr.com/js/embed.js
http://snipplr.com/json/62439

That’s a long road to getting it done, but it works. Here’s a working demo of it.

Circular Button with Photo Mask Using CSS

I’m currently working on porting Finicky over to HTML5 as a training exercise for building real applications (as opposed to more demoware) with HTML5 for mobile. It’s going fairly well, but there was one piece of UI that I was really worried about. It was a little complicated to render in ActionScript, and I feared it might be impossible in HTML. In fact it’s one of the few things I found much easier.

On the edit page there is a button for prompting you to take a picture of an item that you want to save. When you haven’t taken a picture, you see a little camera icon on the button. When you have already selected an image, you see a circular mask of the picture inside a circular frame created by the button. Look at the picture; it’s a lot easier to show than to explain. My designer really did a cool job there on that piece of UI, and I wanted to replicate it.

My first instinct should have been to look up “css mask” as it would probably be the easiest way if it was implemented. I didn’t. I instead went with using border radius to shape my button into a perfect circle and positioning it on top of the original button. In reviewing information on CSS Masking, I don’t think it would be the perfect solution. The images that I’ll be using in my final product are going to come from source images of different sizes. My method allows me to drop in any size/proportioned image into the background-image CSS property of my link and have it still work as a perfect circle. However, my research there makes me want to explore CSS masks more.

Anyway, back to the main point, how did I accomplish this?

First, I make an a link that I’ll use an a as the interactive part of the UI, as well as the holder for my picture. And I’ll wrap it in a div that will hold the button graphics.

http://snipplr.com/js/embed.js
http://snipplr.com/json/62377

I give the containing div a background-image containing the button graphic and I hard set the size to match the image size.

http://snipplr.com/js/embed.js
http://snipplr.com/json/62378

Once the container is done, I turn the a link into a circle by giving it a border radius of 50% of the height and width of the element. (I also used a background-color to see where I was putting it. )

http://snipplr.com/js/embed.js
http://snipplr.com/json/62379

Then I set the positioning to relative, to offset it within the containing div. I then fiddled with the top and left until the circle link was pretty equidistant from all sides of the containing div. It wasn’t just straight math because the drop shadow in the graphic made the blue circle of the button not completely in the center of the png file.

Finally I made a class with the picture I wanted to place in the background-image of the button.

Couple things to note here:

  • I hard coded the CSS for demonstration purposes, in my app, I’ll just add the background-image dynamically via the DOM.
  • This, like all awesome things, won’t work in versions of IE earlier than 9.
  • However, it has much more support than using masks, so I think it also wins on that account.

Here’s a demo with the full source.

CSS Tables and Responsive Design

It’s been more than a decade since the call to abolish table-based layouts was started. Many, if not most, designers and developers have come over to the CSS way of doing things (or at least doing it most of the time while occasionally resorting to a table layout when they couldn’t get the CSS to work.) Mixed in with the pragmatic use of tables is the occasional person pointing out the advantages of table-based layouts.

Tables do things when laying out that CSS designs with floats and padding and negative margins haven’t been able to duplicate with the same simplicity: dynamic grids, rows that are all the same height, and vertical centering. There are grid systems, and frameworks that have handled this problem for awhile but they have their warts. CSS-based tables are a good solution to this problem, and have a lot of other benefits. But even then I’ve heard angst about CSS-based solutions (frameworks or CSS tables) basically being the same amount of work and angst as a table for the same result.

Here’s a colleague (Greg Rewis) of mine complaining about the main angst of all of these solutions:

@garazi: Okay, CSS Grids, can we just go back to tables…?! I mean, really?! #nodiff

On the other hand objections to using tables are usually based on semantics, SEO, and accessibility:

  • tables are for tabular data
  • tables in layout are incredibly hard for screen readers to deal with
  • table markup adds a lot of cruft to markup

The problem with these issues is that for many people they just aren’t compelling enough. Correct semantics is a lofty goal, but it’s not a goal that clients care about. Accessibility takes a back seat because most of us never bother to fire up a screen reader. Cruft is usually seen as bad, there are other ways to improve page performance and SEO, so this argument sometimes helps but not enough.

Therefore, I’ve added a new reason not to use tables focusing on the current zeitgeist around responsive design:

Once you go table, you cannot go back.

Once you wrap your stuff in tables you cede a lot of control of the presentation to the browser. And most browsers don’t linearize info in a table well because by wrapping it in table markup, you’ve effectively said “don’t linearize this content”. So if you are going to display this info on a mobile device with a smaller width you get scrunched content that is hard to read. Either that, or the mobile browser keeps it wide, but allows you to horizontally scroll, which as you know is a fate worse than death.

Live Demo: Table Design

Your first attempt to deal with this is to handle this with floats and padding and whatnot. You set everything to float left, so when the screen contracts, things slip under each other. This works very well if you know or hard-set the dimensions of your content beforehand. Otherwise you end up with weird outcomes and odd configurations of your grid. Even if it does work well, typically you’ve needed to add extra structural markup to make it work. Adding the cruft that not doing tables was supposed to take away. And it’s all div’s so it gets hard to keep track of where you are.

Live Demo: Float Design

Ideally, you want something that acts like a table when you have a wide screen and acts like simple block divs when you are on a small screen. So you take some good semantic HTML, combine it with CSS tables and boom, you have a layout that acts like tables when you are wide, and acts linear when you are small. It also lacks the weird layout issues you get from floating.

Live Demo: CSS Table Design

There are issues with this approach as well. IE 7 and below doesn’t support it. So that is something to contend with. I choose not to. In browsers that don’t support this, it just looks like the linearized version, which I’m pretty cool with as it is suboptimal, not broken. I’ve also seen a weird issue with it not laying out things correctly when I resize the screen. (If you refresh after resizing, it draws it correctly.) Still tracking this down.

Further Reading

Table Layouts vs. Div Layouts: From Hell to Hell?
Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong