A Few Odd Thoughts

Posted On: 2011-06-09

Wow so much for the sun shining through the gently swaying palm trees and the soft breezes that I so often talk about. Today where I live we're being reminded what winter is like in other parts of Australia. It's cold ... it's windy ... and there's a good chance that it's going to start raining soon.

Of course here in the office it's a pleasant 72 and I don't have to venture outside for quite a while but when I do I just hope my partner has the heater in the car turned up. I am not a person who likes to be cold.

Designing for mobile phones
Over on Porn Resource I've been running a series on designing websites for mobile devices. It's not an exact nuts and bolts type series but more one where I pose a few problems and hopefully get you thinking about how you can solve them. Designing for mobile devices is quite different to designing for your average personal computer and there are lots of things that you need to do differently if you want your website to not only display but also be useable on a small screen.

If you haven't tried designing a mobile website yet you should start thinking about doing that because more and more people are accessing the Internet via their mobile phones and you need to have your marketing message out there in a format that renders well on a very small screen. You should also be having a look at jQuery Mobile ... it may have many of the answers to the problems that you will need to overcome if you want the best outcome for your mobile sites.

Popular browsers
Now I know that most adult webmasters don't seem to worry too much about how different browsers display their content and if a website displays ok in Internet Explorer 8 ... or maybe even IE9 ... they're happy. But guys there are other browsers out there and they don't all display your websites in the same way.

When we do begin to think about other browsers we usually think of Firefox as being the second most popular browser but to my surprise Firefox is not the second-most popular browser out there at the moment. Right now it seems that Chrome is running ahead of Firefox but the experts don't expect Firefox to be lagging behind for long.

And did you know that there is a new version of Firefox due out within the next few weeks? I certainly didn't and it only seems like a few months ago that Firefox 4 downloaded itself to my laptop.

I have to admit that I still don't like Firefox 4 and I've kept it off my desktop computers here at the office and at home. My partner doesn't like Firefox 4 either so we're both hoping we can avoid Firefox 5 for as long as possible.

Final Call for HTML5
I know that some web masters are using HTML 5 already but the W3C has not yet approved the HTML specification ... in fact they've only just issued the final call for a broad review of the HTML5 specs. However that doesn't mean that you still have some time before you simply must learn the latest version of HTML because if you don't start now the chances are that you'll be way behind other webmasters when the final specs are agreed upon.

As always there are going to be some HTML elements that worked in previous versions but have now been phased out in HTML5. Everyone's favorite tag will no longer work and if you like putting sound on your website and use the tag you had better look for an alternative ... there is an alternative but I don't like unbidden sound on a website so I'll let you find the correct tag for yourself.

The tag has been struck out too and if you use it in a HTML5 document it will break the page.

There are also a number of tags that are now obsolete but will continue to work in HTML5. Perhaps the one that most webmasters may use is the 'border' attribute that some people often use with images. In technical terms the 'border' attribute and a few others that aren't used all that frequently are now consider to be obsolete but permitted.

And that's it for me today. Now I'm off to dive into some design work that's going to require WordPress to bend to my will before the day is done ... it should be fun.