File Under: HTML5, Web Standards
Jan
27
2012

HTML5 Video on the Web Today

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The hype surrounding HTML5 video has thankfully receded from the high water mark of 2011. But the absence of hype doesn’t mean HTML5 video is a thing of the past. In fact, while it’s true that HTML5 video still can’t completely match all of the features available in Flash, the state of HTML5 video on the web continues to improve with every new browser release.

For a very thorough rundown of exactly where and how well HTML5 video works on the web right now, check out the excellent report on the state of HTML5 video from Long Tail Video. Put together by the makers of JW Player, an HTML5 video player toolkit, the state of HTML5 video report is mercifully free of any evangelism for any particular technology. Instead it offers a level-headed look at reality, answering the basic questions — where can you use HTML5 video? How well will it work for users? And when will you need Flash fallbacks?.

HTML5 video enthusiasts will be happy to know that the state of native video on the web is looking better these days. Two-thirds of all the browsers on the web now support the HTML5 video tag. Support for the various video tag attributes has improved as well, with both Safari and Chrome offering full support.

Still, for all the bright points in the report, there is clearly still a need for Flash fallbacks if you want your video to reach the widest possible audience. With older versions of Internet Explorer still lingering (IE 9 and up support the HTML5 video tag) and the lack of support for closed captions and audio descriptions in any browser, Flash will likely remain the only option for at least some portion of the web for some time.

The good news is that, in some cases, the state of HTML5 video will be improving very soon, for example Firefox 10, which will be released in final form very soon, will support native fullscreen playback.

For more details on which parts of HTML5 video work and which don’t in today’s browsers, be sure to read through the full report.

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File Under: Web Basics
Jan
26
2012

Video: When We Build

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The web is buzzing, and rightly so, about Wilson Miner’s incredibly inspiring talk from the 2011 Build Conference in Belfast. You may recognize Miner’s name from his role in developing Django, as part of the team that built Apple.com or as one of the founders of Everyblock.

Miner’s talk is not your typical web developer talk; in fact, he hardly mentions the web for most of it. Rather, Miner focuses on the broader impact that technologies, and the developers and designers who create them, have on our world, and how that world in turn shapes us. Miner reminds us that we aren’t building “just websites” but shaping the world we will live in for much of the foreseeable future. And, as the Alistair Smith quote shown in the talk says, “at times of change, the learners are the ones who will inherit the world, while the knowers will be beautifully prepared for a world which no longer exists.”

So turn off your music, throw the video in fullscreen mode and give it 38 minutes. Trust us, you won’t be sorry.

After you’re done be sure to visit Miner’s website, which has links to all the material used in the talk, including books, videos, music and images for anyone who would like to learn more.

File Under: CSS, Frameworks, Mobile, Visual Design
Jan
26
2012

Twitter Adds Responsive Design Tools to Bootstrap 2.0

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Twitter is gearing up for the release of Bootstrap 2.0, the second major version of its popular open source front-end toolkit for web developers.

Bootstrap 2.0 will arrive Jan. 31, but if you’d like to take it for a spin today you can help test the pre-release build. Just head on over to GitHub and checkout the branch, 2.0-wip.

Bootstrap is designed to help you get your website up and running as fast as possible. Somewhere between a CSS framework and a “theme,” Bootstrap offers an HTML, CSS and JavaScript base for your designs, including built-in forms, buttons, tables, grids and navigation elements. Among Bootstrap’s more impressive tricks is the grid layout tool, which is based on the 960 grid system, with support for advanced features like nested and offset columns.

Bootstrap 2.0 will solve one of the bigger complaints about Bootstrap 1.0 — it was not responsive. To embrace a more responsive approach for mobile devices, Bootstrap is moving to a flexible 12-column grid system. The 2.0 release also includes some updated progress bars and customizable gallery thumbnails, but perhaps the best news is that, at just 10kb (gzipped), Bootstrap 2.0 remains an impressively lightweight framework.

While Bootstrap offers good browser support, with all the modern options covered you should be aware that it won’t work with Internet Explorer 6. To see some real world examples of what you can do with Bootstrap, head on over to the unofficial showcase, Built with Bootstrap on Tumblr.

Photo by Mike Love/flickr/CC.

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File Under: Humor, Programming
Jan
26
2012

Jokes for Nerds: Wat Moments in Programming

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If you ever doubt your nerdery, head on over to Destroy All Software and watch the video of programmer Gary Bernhardt’s Wat talk. If you find yourself laughing, rest assured, you’re a nerd.

The talk comes from CodeMash 2012, where Bernhardt took a few moments to highlight a few WAT? (link NSFW) moments in some of the web’s favorite languages like Ruby and JavaScript.

Seriously JavaScript, what’s up with this:

> [] + {}
[object Object]
> {} + []
0
File Under: CSS, HTML, HTML5
Jan
25
2012

‘HTML5 Please’ Helps You Decide Which Parts of HTML5 and CSS 3 to Use

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Keeping track of the ever-evolving HTML5 and CSS 3 support in today’s web browsers can be an overwhelming task. Sure you can use CSS animations to create some whiz-bang effects, but should you? Which browsers support it? What should you do about older browsers?

The first question can be answered by When Can I Use, which tracks browser support for HTML5 and CSS 3. You can then add tools like Modernizer to detect whether or not a feature is supported, so that you can gracefully degrade or provide an alternate solution for browsers that don’t support the features you’re using. But just what are those alternate solutions and polyfills? That’s what the new (somewhat poorly named) HTML5 Please site is designed to help with.

HTML5 Please offers a list of HTML5 elements and CSS 3 rules with an overview of browser support and any polyfills for each element listed (CSS 3 is the much more heavily documented of the two, which is why the HTML5 emphasis in the name is perhaps not the best choice). The creators of the site then go a step further and offer recommendations, “so you can decide if and how to put each of these features to use.”

The goal is to help you “use the new and shiny responsibly.”

HTML5 Please was created by Paul Irish, head of Google Chrome developer relations, Divya Manian, Web Opener for Opera Software, (along with many others) who point out that the recommendations offered on the site “represent the collective knowledge of developers who have been deep in the HTML5 trenches.”

The recommendations for HTML5 and CSS 3 features are divided into three groups — “use”, “use with caution” and “avoid”. The result is a site that makes it easy to figure out which new elements are safe to use (with polyfills) and which are still probably too new for mainstream work. If the misleading name bothers you, there’s also Browser Support, which offers similar data.

If you’d like to contribute to the project, head over to the GitHub repo.

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File Under: Web Standards
Jan
25
2012

Google Works on Internet Standards with TCP Proposals, SPDY Standardization

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As part of Google’s continuing quest to dole out web pages ever more quickly, the search giant has proposed a number of changes to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the ubiquitous Internet protocol used to reliably deliver HTTP and HTTPS data (and much more besides) over the ‘net.

Google’s focus is on reducing latency between client machines and servers, and in particular, reducing the number of round trips (either client to server and back to client, or vice versa) required. When data is sent over a TCP connection, its receipt must be acknowledged by the receiving end. The sending end can only send a certain number of packets before it must wait for an acknowledgement. The time taken to receive an acknowledgement is governed by the round-trip time (RTT). With high bandwidth, high latency connections, clients and servers can end up spending most of their time waiting for acknowledgements, rather than sending packets.

When a new connection is made, a computer may initially send three packets before acknowledgement is required. Google wants to increase this to 10. With 10 packets, a browser can typically deliver an entire HTTP request to a server before it has to stop and wait for a reply.

TCP connections require a certain amount of negotiation between client and server, requiring a round trip, before data can be sent. Google is proposing to modify TCP so that some data can be sent during that negotiation, so that the server will have it on hand already, and can start processing it straight away.

TCP waits a predetermined time (the RTO or retransmission timeout) for acknowledgments to arrive. If the RTO expires, unacknowledged packets are assumed lost and retransmitted. This ensures that if the data has been lost in transmission that the sender is never waiting for an acknowledgement that will never arrive. This timeout value varies according to the network conditions and RTT, with a default of three seconds. Google wants to reduce this default to 1 second, so that if data has been lost, neither end needs to wait so long before it has another go.

Finally, Google wants to use a new algorithm to adjust how TCP connections react to packet loss. Packet loss can indicate networks that are congested, and TCP reacts by reducing the rate at which data is sent when this congestion is detected. The company claims that the algorithms currently used to respond to this packet loss can exact too great a penalty, making connections slow down too much and for too long, and that its new algorithm is better.

In addition to these proposed changes, Google is also suggesting other modifications, especially to make TCP recover better on mobile networks.

Changing TCP is not to be taken lightly. The protocol is already suffering due to buffer bloat undermining its built-in handling of network congestion. While Google’s proposed changes are well intentioned and might improve network performance, they come with the risk that an overlooked problem or a bad interaction with other traffic could cause widespread damage to the internet.

The proposed changes to TCP to reduce latencies and start sending data sooner are a continuation of previous work Google has done to try to make web serving, in particular, faster. The company has previously proposed other modifications to protocols such as SSL to similarly accelerate data transmission.

More far-reaching than these SSL tweaks is Google’s proposed alternative to the HTTP protocol that underpins the web: SPDY.

Initially, SPDY was a proprietary Google protocol implemented only in Google’s Chrome browser. That’s changing, however. Amazon’s Silk browser includes SPDY support, and Firefox 11 will include preliminary SPDY support. Partially motivated by SPDY’s uptake, the IETF’s HTTPbis Working Group — the team of industry experts tasked with maintaining and developing the HTTP specification — is considering the development of a new specification, HTTP/2.0, with the goal of improving the performance of HTTP connections. The working group will solicit suggestions from the industry, and with two, soon to be three implementations already, SPDY is likely to be well placed among those suggestions.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com

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File Under: Web Basics
Jan
24
2012

The Disneyfication of Tech

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Truth is this — users are caught between tech and media. Neither of them is looking out for our interest. Each of them own politicians each owns tech. The tech industry is better at tech (no surprise) and the media industry is better at a lot of other things, including getting Congress to do their bidding.

I’ve been warning the news publishers to be careful about viewing Twitter and Facebook as if they were equivalent to the web. This would be like Kodak trusting Apple to handle its digital photography strategy. We know now how that turned out.

Twitter and Facebook are rich and getting richer. Either of them could easily buy a struggling but independent news organization. Then where would you be if you were dependent on them to distribute news? It would be like the Times depending on Murdoch to print their daily paper. Instead the Times invested in their own printing plant, presumably so they could have better control of the product, both from a creative and tactical standpoint. If Murdoch owned the presses and the trucks, who do you think would deliver the most timely news? They have to think about Twitter that way. At some point they will come to see themselves as a media company, if they don’t already.

Caught in the middle is the original idea of the Internet and the web, that people could be media instead of just consuming it. For that to continue, enough people have to see their future as publishing independently, and enough people have to read independently of corporate media, neither originating from Silicon Valley or Hollywood, to keep the flame alive.

I still hope that there’s a remnant of the idealism of tech. That there was value in the personal-ness of PCs. The net is the same way. We need to make it ever-easier for people to own and run their own infrastructure. People think it’s hard, but it doesn’t have to be! Each of us can have the equivalent of a printing plant, that’s the magic of tech. No harder to keep running than a laptop. To those people in tech who still hold to the ideal of free communication unrestricted by government or corporations, please use some of your profits to help guarantee the future of an independent Internet.

Otherwise, I think we can all see this clearly now, the net will be a single amorphous Disneyfied mess, not too far down the road.

This post first appeared on Scripting News.

Dave Winer, a former researcher at NYU and Harvard, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. A former contributing editor at Wired magazine, Dave won the Wired Tech Renegade award in 2001.
Follow @davewiner on Twitter.
File Under: search, Web Services
Jan
23
2012

Hack Swaps Google’s Search Plus Your World Results for the Wider Social Web

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Shortly after Google launched Search plus Your World earlier this month, critics accused the company of favoring its own nascent social network over the much richer results on others, like Twitter or Facebook. As Wired’s Steven Levy quipped, “there’s too much Plus and not enough of Our World, which has oodles of content on other social networks.”

Now developers at Twitter, Facebook and MySpace have put together a demonstration of just how much relevancy Google sacrifices in order to push Google+. The demo, which uses only Google’s own results, shows, among other questionable results, how Google routinely ignores more relevant Twitter pages to show off seldom-used Google+ profiles. To see it in action, head on over to the new Focus on the User website.

If you decide you prefer the often more relevant results from the Focus on the User experiment there’s a bookmarklet available, cheekily entitled “don’t be evil.” Just drag the bookmarklet into your web browser’s bookmarks bar and then click it whenever you want to see more than just Google+ results in Google’s search results.

The developers behind Focus on the User do work for Google+ rivals, but that doesn’t change the results of the experiment which speak for themselves. The developers also point out that their tool relies entirely on Google’s own data to rank social search results. Here’s their description of how the don’t be evil tool works:

the tool identifies the social profiles within the first ten pages of Google results (top 100 results). The ones Google ranks highest — whether they are from Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, Crunchbase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, Github or Google+ — replace the previous results that could only be from Google+.

In other words the bookmarklet largely returns Google to its previous state, before the Search Plus Your World Update. If you’d like to know more about how the bookmarklet works or see some examples and situations in which the emphasis on Google+ social results actually degrades the quality of search results be sure to check out the video below.

Photo: Rene Tillmann/AP

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File Under: search
Jan
23
2012

Google Tweaks Search Results to Punish Ad-Heavy Websites

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Google has tweaked its search algorithm to punish websites with excessive advertising “above-the-fold,” that is, websites that stack the top of the page with nothing but advertisements.

According to Google, “rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away.” To help users get to that content, Google may drop ad-heavy websites from its search results.

Google says that the change will only affect about one in 100 searches, and emphasizes that websites using what Google’s Distinguished Engineer and SEO guru Matt Cutts calls “ads above-the-fold to a normal degree” will not be affected.

Instead the change is designed to punish sites that “go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page.” In other words, if a site is so packed with ads that people can’t find what they’re looking for then Google isn’t going to send them to that site anymore.

While the distinction seems clear at first glance, digging deeper reveals some potential confusion for webmasters — for example, what role does screen size play? On a netbook, for instance, Google’s own search results page is almost entirely taken over by advertisements, not the actual search results (i.e., the content).

Google on a netbook screen: Ads are in red, search results in green

At small screen resolutions, Google’s own search results page is one of the worst offenders when it comes to advertising clutter obscuring content. That seeming hypocrisy may leave some webmasters wondering what constitutes “a normal degree of ads” and how screen size affects what is defined as “normal.” Sticking simply with what Google has written about the change, copying Google’s search results page is probably not a good idea in this case.

Cutts does encourage webmasters view their websites at different screen resolutions, suggesting that screen size does play a role, but unfortunately he doesn’t offer any details about what that role is or how it affects the algorithm’s new layout ranking scheme.

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File Under: Web Services
Jan
20
2012

Google Abandons Anonymous Accounts With New Signup Form

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Google is experimenting with a new signup form that eliminates the ability to create anonymous accounts. The new form is part of an effort to expand the Google+ social network by automatically adding every new Google account to Google+. Because Google+ requires a name and gender the new signup form effectively eliminates the anonymous Google account.

The new account creation page can be found by following the links on Google’s homepage. As the Google Operating System blog points out, the older Google account page, which does not require signing up for Google+ or Gmail, is currently still accessible through Google Reader, Calendar and other Google services.

The revamped Google account creation page adds some additional fields to the sign up form, including name and gender which are both necessary for creating a Google+ account. There’s also a new agreement — turned on by default — granting Google permission to “use my account information to personalize +1s on content and ads on non-Google websites.”

In addition to the Google+ integration, signing up for a Google account now means getting a profile page and a Gmail account; gone are the days when you could use an outside email address with your Google account. It is still possible to go in and delete the Google+, Google profile and Gmail portions of your new Google account after it’s been created, but given that few people ever change their default settings it’s safe to assume that most people won’t.

It should come as no surprise that Google is working hard to get more users signed up for Google+, after all, despite marginal momentum, Google+ is far behind Facebook when it comes to signing up new users.

Photo: Anonymous9000/Flickr/CC.

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