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Well here I am in what Steve jokingly refers to as 'the afternoon office'. It's a beautiful covered deck out the back of our new house and when I sit here in the shade I look out over our back yard filled with palm trees and some Australian eucalypts plus plenty of birds.

Right now there's a pleasant breeze blowing through the palms and about the only thing I'm missing is a drink with an umbrella in it. I've even got two monitors set up out here and Steve's organized everything so that we can have it set up and operating in just a two or three minutes. On a warm spring afternoon it's definitely the place to be if I can get away from our office in town.

Fonts
If you're a person who can see then you come in contact with fonts just about every day of your life. You read information that comes to you using a font; you post information to your website in a font that I hope people can read ... they're a vital part of our very existence but we don't think about them too often.

Right now though Microsoft is thinking of fonts ... it's been involved in a redesign of the Georgia and Verdana fonts for some time now and even though they've finally made an announcement about there there's still quite a bit of work to be done. Now you would think that redesigning a font wouldn't take all that much time but work began on the redesign back in 2007 and it's not expected to be finished till early next year.

The Georgia and Verdana fonts were originally released into the wild back in 1996 and the redesign will add new weights and widths beyond the four that were released back then. Whether or not the new releases will have much impact on us is yet to be seen but if you're what the designers call a 'creative' webmaster then perhaps you will be able to make use of them.

HTML5
It seems like there's been a sudden surge of interest in HTML5 and if your income depends on your use of HTML then perhaps now is the time you should really start taking some interest in HTML5 because it's quite different to what has gone before.

While there are some who are wondering if HTML5 will ever be released ... and there's no rock-solid guarantee that it will ... it's definitely time to start learning a bit about it. There are new elements and the differences between some of them are s0 subtle that even some very smart HTML coders are struggling to see the differences.

A good place to start learning about HTML5 might be the specifications, demos and one of the email lists that you'll find at whatwg.org. They also have a chat room so you can probably get a quick answer to any of your questions.

One thing I wouldn't do right now though is to start building sites in HTML5. Of course there are some out there already ... there's even at least one WordPress theme available in HTML5 ... but in the adult online business you need to be able to build sites quickly and debugging sites that you build in HTML5 to make them visible in all browsers may take a little too much time to justify the effort just yet.

CSS3
Of course HTML5 goes hand in hand with CSS3 and when there's some more cross-browser compatibility with these two we should start using. Of course CSS3 is not compatible with even the latest version of IE but that doesn't mean that we can start learning how to use it when Internet Explorer decides to catch up to the rest of the browser world.

A good place to learn about CSS3 is on an amazing site called Nettuts that's full of great tutorials on everything from Apache to PHP, JQuery, Javascript, HTML. Ruby, CSS and a whole lot more. You can find all that information at http://net.tutsplus.com.

Actually I think that's where I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon. I may not have anyone around to get me that drink with an umbrella in it ... that's one of the down-sides of running a distributed business ... but I can go mix my own and then sit back and really enjoy the afternoon office.

Don't get too envious though for tomorrow it's back to the grind at the office in town and a heap of work. We've got three new sites that have to be shown to various clients by Friday morning and there's still a lot of work to be done on them