Each year thousands of web professionals come together at Web Directions conferences in Australia, the US, the UK and Japan to learn, connect and share their passion. Experience the web with us.
Standards, innovation, Flash, ownership and all that
It’s often argued (well, asserted might be a better way of putting it) that standards are an anathema to innovation, or at the very least a significant impediment to it.
At its most extreme, this is used as an argument for disbanding the W3C, and even for core web technologies … Read more »
The Next 6 Billion
Some time this month, for the first time, there will be 7 Billion people alive on earth. In around 14Â years, the United Nations predicts our population will reach 8 Billion. These are numbers the human mind has not evolved to intuitively understand.
According to most estimates just over 2 … Read more »
Web Directions South 2011
When you work on something for an extended period of time but which itself lasts itself only a brief moment, such as Maxine and I do with Web Directions, there’s an intensity to the event itself, and the strange mixture of relief (and exhaustion) coupled with nostalgia when it … Read more »
The challenge of WYSIWYG development for the web
This is the first in what I hope will be a number of articles I’m writing to clarify my thinking in the lead up to my Dao of Web Design Revisited presentation at this years Web Directions South.
In the middle 1990s, by an accident of fate and coincidence … Read more »
The web is a different problem
One of the most persistent criticisms of web technologies is that they evolve slowly, indeed, too slowly. Often the argument is raised that the process of standards is antithetical to “innovation†(for innovation read “making cool stuff upâ€).
To contrast with this glacial change, we’re typically pointed toward the wonders of … Read more »
2D Transforms in CSS3
One of the most powerful features of CSS3 are transforms, which allow us to take any element in an HTML document, and while not changing its effect on the page layout, rotate it, translate it (move it left, right, up and down), skew it and scale it. CSS3 provides … Read more »
What do you know? Video now available
What do you know? That’s the question we posed 20 Australian designers, developers, UX folks and others for our first ever “What do you know†events in Sydney and Melbroune.
The format was simple — each of the speakers had 5 minutes to tell the audience something they know — … Read more »
On the (abominable) proposed HTML5 “scoped†attribute for style elements
Over the last couple of years, I’ve had my fair share to say about the direction HTML5 has been taking, in particular being quite critical of the entire approach taken to adding richer semantics to HTML, as well as specific language choices.
It must be said though, that nothing has … Read more »
Bring back the CSS bike shedding property!
There’s not necessarily a lot of whimsy in the world of web standards. A great deal of value, a lot of hard work by really smart people, but not whimsy.
Well, recently there’s been a little bit of whimsy in the otherwise dry, but very useful CSS3 Text module, with the … Read more »
HTML5 selectors API — It’s like a Swiss Army Knife for the DOM
In the infancy of JavaScript, there was little if any concept of an HTML document object model (DOM). Even though JavaScript was invented to enable web developers to manipulate parts of a web page, and in the original implementation, in Netscape 2.0, developers could only access the form elements, links, … Read more »
The 2011 McFarlane Prize for Excellence in Australian Web Design
In 2006, Maxine and I started a prize for excellence in Australian Web design in honour of Nigel McFarlane, Australian web and open source pioneer.
Unlike many awards, it’s not about popularity, it’s about excellence — as assessed by … Read more »
Let the Web move you — CSS3 Animations and Transitions
A brief history on Animation of the Web
If you’ve been developing for, or even just using the web for more than about 15 years, you’ll likely remember a time when animated effects were the bomb. Animated GIFs adorned just about every page, spinning globes, little men with jack hammers, self-​​folding … Read more »
Getting Sourcey — native HTML5 Audio and video
Hard perhaps to believe, but the world wide web began without an image element. That’s right, there was no way to include images as part of the content of a web page before Mosaic implemented them (here’s Marc Andreesen proposing the img element at the beginning of 1993). The … Read more »
CSS3 Radial Gradients
Getting your head around CSS3 radial gradients
We recently took a detailed look at linear gradients in CSS3. If you’ve not read that, you might like to spend a few minutes doing so, as the concepts are very similar, and I don’t spend quite as much time in this article … Read more »
Get off(line)
Taking your web sites and apps offline with the HTML5 appcache
There’s a general (and understandable) belief by even many developers that web sites and web applications can only be used when the browser has a web connection. Indeed, this is routinely cited as one of the real advantages of “native†… Read more »
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