The immense CSS3 proposal (which has been on the W3C's table for years) is now seeing a significant number of draft modules being implemented in browsers and most of these modules are explicitly geared toward reducing our time in Photoshop. In this comprehensive how-to, Marco Carag (TheKnot.com) will run through all the new properties you've been reading about and anticipating, including @font-face, rgba, gradients, drop-shadows, transforms and animation. Using both focused proof-of-concept pages and actual production examples from The Knot and other websites across the web, attendees will see the impact of CSS3 on the average front-end workflow and understand how it improves or affects your users' experience across all browsers.

CSS3 and the Death of the Background Image
17 March 2010 . 7:00 pm
reBar
147 Front Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201 [map]

RSVP now!

Please contact The Mechanism if you'd like to present at a future New York Web Standards meetup.

Geeks are funny creatures. If this device was called an “iTab” they probably would have made soft drink jokes – All that talent and occasional genius is sadly wasted on a single, albeit funny observation instead of trying to figure out some undocumented and innovative uses for the thing. Trust me, as soon as someone starts waving real development cash at the naysayers, they’ll be singing the praises of the “innovative” and even “magical” iPad; salivating to build apps quicker than you can bark the word “Pavlov”…

For those who are interested in actually using the device, it really doesn’t matter what the thing is called – as much as what it can and cannot do.

The iPad has a couple well-documented drawbacks:

• iPad doesn’t do Flash (more about that later). This means no Hulu, YouTube or other currently Flash-enabled video sites for you on the iPad Safari Web browser…
• iPad doesn’t multitask, so you can’t listen to music while penning your brilliant blog post, notes or novel. This is a “deal breaker” for the countless hordes who apparently planned to brutally smash their trusty old iPod on the way out of the Apple store with their iPad. The truth is, people have grown accustomed to hoofing around several devices in their backpacks, shoulder bags and/or pockets. Despite our Utopian dream of “one device to do it all,” as technology changes and new things are devised to keep us from having actual conversations with other live humans, there will always be another “thing” to stuff into our ever expanding satchels o’ plenty.

The iPad’s strength isn’t that it plays music, movies, games or that it surfs the Flash-less Web. The iPad gets it’s real mojo as a comfortably-sized, compact and usable device that doesn’t require an attached keyboard, a mouse or a constant power source to input notes, data or, more importantly, read published materials. Everything else it comes loaded with, simply helps to justify the price point. The iPad could really show true muscle for students, teachers and classrooms and by eventually saving and/or enhancing the suffering magazine publishing business. But to do this effectively, Apple needs to cozy up to college kids to make the iPad truly a thing of “magic”.

So, while we’re waiting for the iPad to do a keg stand at a college dorm near you, here are some things that Apple and it’s partners should concentrate on to help the iPad live up to it’s promise:

1. Create an exclusive network for students. College textbooks should be available via a subscription service on the iTunes store so you can burn those oversized, overweight, overpriced books like Guy Montag and plant some trees. As a specific textbook’s information is enhanced or corrected, it should automatically be updated, just like your iPhone/iPod currently informs you when a purchased application has been updated. Software developers for the iPad should focus on applications that will make lecture note taking and sharing, as well as commenting on digital textbooks simpler. Imagine downloading a textbook for your class and having the benefit of seeing the best notes from a global network of past students. To avoid reading irrelevant notes, a system could be put into place allowing students to rate other students notes, making only the useful stuff rise to the top.
2. Expand the iTunes store to include magazine and newspaper subscriptions asap. Save that dying, ink-laden, forest-chomping horse as fast as you can. Obviously publications will need to embrace HTML 5 for any video content, so start brushing up, if you’re planning on developing for a future publishing industry.
3. Allow musicians to plug in. With GarageBand already part of iLife, in the future I hope to see musicians with guitars, iPads and a dream sprawling out in Prospect Park writing tons of crap they can sell to their relatives on iTunes with the help of TuneCore.
4. Advancement and advocation of the HTML 5 specification. Apple has been very clear: they refuse to get into bed with Flash. They view Flash as an uncontrollable source of application crashes – not to mention a bandwidth and processing hog – and as a designer and developer who has worked with Flash, they are partially correct. Many of Flash’s novice developers know only a little about the scripts and techniques required to deliver the most processor-efficient experiences. ActionScript, the scripting language behind Flash has been massively changed and enhanced over the years, leaving the true Flash programming to true programming wizards who have worked with it since the introduction of ActionScript 1.0 with Flash 5 in 2000. The future promise of HTML 5 has begun to make the use of Flash increasingly irrelevant and unnecessary for simple video and audio players. Even Hulu will come around as well if first the audience – and eventually their advertisers request it. This prospect of course, sours the folks at Adobe. They will run myriad ads over the next couple months attempting to convince the masses of the perceived inferiority of the iPad because it doesn’t have Flash. But it’s really just fear.
5. Shhh…the word on the street is that the iPad may have a camera. In fact, the Software Developer Kit (SDK) for the iPad currently has “Take a Photo” as a programmable menu item, so maybe the dream of video conferencing or even augmented reality with the iPad will come true (or not)…or some Mountain Dew-gorged developer at Apple has just gotten a “mouthful of fist” from Steve Jobs because they forgot to remove the “take a picture” menu item from the iPad SDK…

Apple has a history of using current devices to test out and eventually surpass the last one. Look at the history of advances that have been made to the iPod since it came out in 2001. I’ve got 4 of them, each with enhanced features.

Just like the iPhone was a jacked up phone with a serious music player and a savvy integration into a robust online store, the iPad jacks things up further, but in a slightly different direction. Who wants to seriously read books or watch movies on your iPod or iPhone? You can right now, you know. They’ve been testing out the iPod and iPhone as an eBook reader and video player to lead us like slobbering zombies to the iPad. Whether the vast Apple audience realize it or not, we support their innovations by historically testing them and upgrading our devices to the next big thing.

Will the iPad be larger than life? Will it raise Apple stock prices and Apple profits? Will Google become the new Microsoft?

Regardless, is the amount of chattering, twittering and blogging out there an indication of how quickly the masses will line up for a shiny new iPad?…

…Possibly, iSay.

For the third year in a row, good citizens of the web, we ask that you take a few minutes to tell us about your professional skills, educational background, career prospects, job benefits, and more.

Photos and discussion of CERN and Tim Berners-Lee. How the web was actually developed by Tim at CERN. Pretty hilarious.

CSS a response to potential destruction of HTML's markup language with presentation elements. Currently CSS still relies too heavily on images and the occasional table hack.

HTML5 + CSS3 = WEB8. CSS3 is not a single specification, a series of specifications.

CSS1 could style text in an element. Some borders. A revolution when it came out.

For this presentation, Håkon is using a special build of Opera that isn't publicly available.

text-shadow. Web font: Safari, Firefox and Opera.

Håkon believe web fonts is going to be the big new thing. Will create a pre- and post-font Web.

@import url(path/to/font);
font-family:Cardiff;

IE is the only one that does not not support this. Argument now breaks out between Håkon and Pete LePage

IE has supported a broad range of fonts since IE 4, but .EOT. However, the above @import is all TTF. IE uses .EOT because font foundries want support for DRM. Check out Fontdeck and Typekit.

At Standards.Next, IE pledged support to add support to TTF along with EOT.

rgba()

background: rgba(0, 0, 255, 0.4); See Molly's presentation.

A review of Opera's support for the CSS 3 features discussed by Andy Budd.

Opera Unite

Turns browser into a server. Allows people to access your machine via http://. Can be quite useful.

It's not the cloud. This service is close to machine and useful for local collaboration. Millions of phones use Opera. Peer-to-peer model. Can take picture and easily

Question/Answer

Q: When will the geolocation build be integrated with the shipping version?

A: Not sure; no date yet. Will probably not occur until the standard is more fixed.

IE 8

IE 8 is a hybrid, has two engines; IE 9 will have three engines: IE 7, IE 8 and IE 9. This way can ensure site works in future versions of the browser.

IE 8 supports session and local storage (see presentation by Marcus Lofthouse to the New York Web Standards Meetup). Added addition to spec: a way to remove all.

Mutable DOM prototypes: take a DOM element and add properties/methods to it. Add method to img. There are a number of things not implemented in IE 8. Can write a chunk of JavaScript that adds functionality to browser. This will be used by people writing the JavaScript frameworks (jQuery, Dojo).

Native JSON support.

Network events

CrossDocumentMessaging and CrossDomainRequest

Selectors API

Fixed getElementById.

Demos at ie8demos.com (browser-sniffs and only wants to work in IE 8).

IE 9

• Faster; speed is important. Finally comparable to FF.
• A lot of work on standards-support. Will implement border-radius. Acid3 score went from 20 to 32. IE 8 Current CSS3 support is vertical-text. Hope to more than double it in IE 9.

Questions/Answers

Q: Why always trying to play catch up? Why not just adopt Webkit?

A: A lot of things that make adopting Webkit or Gecko more difficult than it seems.

Q: Any release date for IE 9?

A: No dates as of now

Q: Still trying to get Canvas out of the spec for HTML5?

A: Not sure; might be a miscommunication

Q: Any major updates planned for IE 8?

A: Probably not; next major version will be 9. Security updates will be released for 8, but the rendering engine will not change.

RGB: Additive synthesis

Red, Green, Blue: Add colors to get result color. In print world, subtractive. Remove color to get result. R + G + B = white

RGB color notation

RGB in percentage values or RGB in integer values. Not equivalent; so don't use both (mix in a single rule)!

NOT rgb (60, 100, 50%);

Firefox and Opera will ignore the incorrect rule. Safari and IE (5–now) will attempt to correct and end up with a severely washed-out result.

HSL color

Hue, saturation and lightness. Easier and more intuitive way to get to colors we want as designers. Value from 1–360, then adjust saturation and lightness.

• Hue value comes first, using the hue's angle on the color wheel as represented by an integer.
• Saturation comes next, using the percentage of saturation you'd like
• Lightness is next, using the percentage of lightness you' like

HSL advantages

• Not CRT specific
• Easier, more intuitive to work with
• Working with a set of colors allows for easy palette creation
• Reduces errors
• Reduces dependency on charts and other value lookup tools

As adjust saturation, lightness, base-hue remains the same.

RGBA and HSLA

Alpha transparency for both RGB and HSLA.

Notation is the same in both. a value is alpha transparency from 0–1.

Allows for fully opaque to fully transparent.

hsla(0, 100%, 50%, .25)

Supported by Firefox, Webkit and Opera.

Questions/Answers

A: Best article out there on HSLA is Wikipedia. Useful to have the color wheel.

Q: Why is a value decimal instead of percentage?

A: Not sure. No one remembers a discussion about it.

Q: Is this part of the spec?

A: Yes. It is all part of the CSS3 color module.

Border radius

-webkit-border-radius: 30px;

Safari, Chrome, Webkit suppot it. Gecko does as well, but the syntax a bit different. IE 9 to support border-radius as well.

• Currently not supported in Internet Explorer
• Problems with images overlapping corners

Border image

border-image: url(border.png 25% 12% 30% 20%;
-webkit-border-image
-moz-border-image

An ad-hoc discussion of why vendor-specific extensions exist:

• Useful for testing out features, instead of a general release and then breaking general release codes.
• To become a proper standard, must exist with two different implementations.

Multiple background images

Example Silverback app

background-image: url(path), url(path);
background-position: 150% 0, 40% 0;

Older browsers get no background a'tall.

Borders and backgrounds are coming soon (general release).

Gradients and reflections

Buttons are generally bitmap images. Can now create a beautiful button using gradient and reflection purely in CSS.

-webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#abe143), to(#cccccc));
-webkit-box-reflect: below 2px;

[Will need to do some demos of these things]

box-shadow

Box shadow property attaches one or more shadows to box. Offset, size, blur and spread. Can also do inset box shadows. Exactly the same as working with box shadows in Photoshop.

Example: http://2010.uxlondon.com/

Transforms

Can scale, rotate, flip, skew, etc. Can use translate to create animations/move over time

Demos: http://remysharp.com/demo/rubiks/
http://webkit.org/blog-files/leaves/

Questions

Q: Box-shadow has recently been removed from the spec, even though it has been implemented. Should we use it or not?

A: When younger, Andy Budd would have said, "If it's not in the spec, don't use it." Now, he's more tolerant. Not as impressed with the W3C as he once was. Doesn't always give designers what they need.

Molly: It has been difficult to get designers involved with the creation of the spec. As a volunteer, tech spec heavy group, difficult to keep designers active.

Q: Regarding animations, between JavaScript, Canvas, SVG and CSS, what do you think the best technology to bet on is?

A: Easiest is best, why Andy favors CSS.

Q: For individuals, CSS might be easy, but not so for large organizations where designers/developers have a large codebase to absorb. And what about object-oriented CSS? And mixins, variables, etc? (Nicole Sullivan's work)

A: Andy is opposed, because CSS is used more often by designers than programmers. Thinks it’s an interesting concept, but not necessarily the answer.

Having gone from table-based design to CSS-based layouts, works well with 5-6 page templates, but with very large sites, doesn’t necessarily scale. This is where an object-oriented CSS approach comes in use.

Andy thinks the framework is not useful. There is no one size fits all framework. He develops site-specific frameworks. A lot of libraries and components that are re-usuable, but specific to site.. Hates Blueprint, 960.

Q: Tips/techniques on testing?

A: Creates a central page that uses all components. Creates a type of regression testing. If change anything, can scan that page to see if anything is broken. Testing does not occur at the end of the process; testing should be occurring throughout the process. This includes cross-browser. Use VMware.

Introductions from various audience members. Who they are, what they do and challenges they face.

A brief discussion of Internet Explorer and a plea for tolerance from Molly Holzschlag.

http://standards-next.org/ built using HTML5 and CSS3.

• CSS3 Mastery
• RGB, HSL and Transparency in CSS3
• Future of Internet Explorer
• CSS3 for Working Web Designers

Marcus Lofthouse (tunecore.com) will continue the HTML5 series by exploring the following web storage techniques:

• Session and Local Storage—providing a javascript accessible interface to key-value storage.
• Web Databases—relational database support for storing structured data inside the browser.
• Application Cache—providing the ability to define a list of files the browser should store locally and not request from the server again (until you explicitly signal the browser that you have something new to offer). Strategically used, this allows for the creation of web applications that can be used completely offline.

HTML5 storage techniques

• Session/local storage
• Client-side browser databases
• Application cache

Current techniques

• Server-side storage
• Cookies: often used for customization
• Plugins (Google Gears): Not used as extensively as server-side storage or cookies

Some issues (server side)

• Requires persistent connection to the internet
• Large data sets have to be downloaded each time the page is loaded
• Can be processing intensive

Some issues (cookies)

• Difficult to work with in JavaScript
• Get sent to and from the server with each request (whether used or not)
• Limited to 4k depending on the browser

Session storage

• Allow 5–10 mb of storage
• Works in Firefox, Safari and IE 8
• Easy to use

Using session storage

sessionStorage.setItem(key, value);
sessionStorage['key'] = value;
sessionStorage.key = value;
sessionStorage.getItem(key);
sessionStorage.length;
sessionStorage.removeItem('key');
sessionStorage.clear();

Local storage

• Exactly the same—only different
• Different in scope & persistence

Session storage scope

• Accessible only to one instance of a browser tab or window
• All data is destroyed when window is closed
• Newly created windows or tabs will get a unique copy of sessionStorage; they will diverge from that point forward
• Prevents data leaking between windows

Local storage

• Accessible to all windows or tabs (for site—obeys same origin policy)
• Persistent storage between browser restarts

The base features are the same cross-browser, but each browser has its own specific extensions.

More than simple key-value pairs; can also store large chunks of XML or JSON.

Client-side database

• Provides persistent storage of well structured data
• Currently only supported in Webkit

Comments and concerns

• No standard web SQL dialect
• SQLite doesn't enforce types
• SQLite doesn't enforce data lengths

Positives

• Asynchronous DB calls keep the UI responsive
• JS interface provides an easy way to clean your data and avoid SQL injection attacks
• All database calls wrapped in transactions
• Database versioning

Opening a database

var name = 'cheesedb';
var version = '1.0';

Execute SQL statements; two flavors

executeSQL(sqlStatement, arguments);
executeSQL(sqlStatement …

Security issues

• Same origin policy
• Tools can allow users to modify their own local data.

What is an application?

• Desktop: compiled source, images, config/data files
• WebApp: HTML, images, CSS, JavaScript, config/data files
• Largest difference is delivery mechanism: webapps require you to access the sources via the internet

Application cache

• Allows you to instruct the browser to keep a local copy of a set of files.
• These files can be used offline, but more importantly won't request the resource from the server until told to do so again.
• If you specify all of the files needed to run your application you will be able to run it offline.

Application caching

• Cache manifest

Cache manifest

• Simple text file
• First line contains CACHE MANIFEST
• Following lines contain paths to files to be cached
• Document is declared as HTML5: <!DOCTYPE html>
• The cache manifest file is served with …
• New attribute for the html element: <html manifest="cache.manifest">
• The cache manifest automatically includes the file it is called from.

Other options

• Network section for content never to be cached

Updating cache manifest

• Browsers check to see if the cache file has been updated by doing a byte by byte comparison of the cache manifest file, not by looking to see if the server resources have been updated
• If the file has been changed the browser will download the new assets in the background
• Cache updating is atomic. If any file is not found, the cache manifest will re-download everything (304 or 200 requests).

Batteries about to fail; signing out