wheresrhys

Being a font-end web developer is looking very interesting/scary at the moment. The web is awash with talk of html 5, how we should all be taking advantage of it now, and the various tools by Google and others for making it possible despite what internet explorer fails to implement.

It is, quite literally, mental!*

The last year of my web life has seen me learn more stuff (php, javascript, jQuery, Google Maps, Zend framework and more), more quickly than ever before, and there’s still a load of things uncompleted on my to-do list, Flash being the most prominent hole in my arsenal…

…until now.

My firefox has about 20 tabs open, most of them containing information about my industry that wasn’t very relevant until a few weeks ago. Now, if I’m to keep touting myself as a front-end developer of any quality I will have to learn about:

• Vector graphics and animation, which will mean getting to grips with Adobe Illustrator and some vector graphics oriented javascript libraries which make working with Scalable vector graphics and the canvas element easier
• The not inconsequential lengthening of the list of tags available for use in markup
• Consider using  lot more javascript libraries as my approach to getting websites to work in ie, which runs contrary to what I’ve always done before.
• And many more things, essentially revolving around the fact that so many things that designers would always have liked to do on websites have suddenly become feasible.

On the bright side though, SVG and canvas combined with some other subtler features of html 5 could make Flash relatively obsolete, which increases the value of the time I’ve spent learning javascript. The project I’m about to start working on was initially conceived as a Flash game, but as there’s very little animation involved I was able to propose writing it as a javascript game instead. With html 5′s new features there will be very little to elevate Flash above javascript any more in any context. Html 5 can even natively embed video.

Everything’s going to be alright.**

*I’ve been watching peep show this morning and feel constant urges to write a bit like Super Hans or Jeremy.

** or Mark

The new specs for HTML 5 and XHTML2 are being hammered out at the moment, and I think for many year hence too. While reading the Jungle Book in the park just now and ruminating on how best to build a certain navigation without too much superfluous html it occurred to me that there were two reasons for trying to minimize the extranuous html:

1. More tags means a higher code to document ratio, which means lower rankings in Google
2. The extra tags are confusing for screen readers

Then I thought of a possible solution to part 2.

Empty tags (such as the <em>’s used in the navigation of this site) and other meaningless bits added to the html for the sake of making the design work could be wrapped in special tags that:

1. Semantically mean “the thing inside me has no meaning”
2. Can easily point out to screen readers that what is inside them is to be ignored

Thus making the designer’s life easier without compromising accessibility

These tags could be <nomeaning><empty><e>, or anything really. There’s plenty of possible unused words.