Blog
Here you will find a number of articles I have written the last few years. The subjects vary but are usually around web development, especially HTML5, but other topics are explored too.
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Dynamically adding text tracks to HTML5 video
In the past I have written on how the track element can be used to add captions and subtitles to HTML5 video, but this, and many other examples around the web, used a static example. But what if you …
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Defining multiple captions and alt text for responsive images
With the welcome rise of the
<picture>
element andsrcset
attribute, we now have control over what images are loaded when, allowing us to make our images more responsive, and even to change … -
Dear Tech Recruiter
We need to talk.
I received your initial mail with anticipation, breathlessness even, but you didn’t say much. You left me wanting more, teasing me, I guess this is your plan – playing …
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Observations on the Use or Lack Thereof, of Long Titles in Writing on the Web
When writing an article, I sometimes find it difficult to come up with a title. Personally I prefer short titles, and often I find that others do too. The book I am currently reading, which was …
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Using the Web Speech API to control a HTML5 video
The JavaScript Web Speech API has been around since but has not really been implemented in any browser other than in Chrome, and even then only partially. I decided to take a quick look …
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resimagecrop – a responsive image solution
Last week I attended the excellent Fronteers conference in Amsterdam and while listening to a talk by Marcos Cáceres on responsive images, I had a thought on a potential polyfill solution. When …
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CSS stacking with display:table
With responsive design, one of the things that we often want to do is to change the stack order of certain elements, moving the aside on the left below the main text which we want to bring to the …
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Help and be nice
Those of us who work in the web community are constantly learning. New technologies, techniques, plugins, etc. appear every day, some we ignore others we dive into. As well as official documentation …
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Using !important in your media queries
We sometimes hear people arguing that we shouldn’t use
!important
in our website’s CSS as it can be incredibly annoying for others who may work on the website. While I agree with this in … -
hgroup removed from the HTML5 specification
The
hgroup
element has been on the “at risk” list for a while and the decision to remove it from the HTML5 specification has finally been made.The intention of the
hgroup
element was to … -
Mr. Sherlock Holmes
Like many other people around the world I am a huge fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. I thought I had read them all until recently I came across a list of stories and discovered …
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HTML5 Video and Background Images
Stack Overflow can be a great place to get the mind going and this evening was no exception. A question was posted asking how to get a HTML5 video’s poster image to fill the element if its …
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Circles
We all have circles of concern and circles of influence. The circles of concern are normally much larger than the circles of influence.
Concentrate on your circles of influence as the circles of …
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Inline quotes
When writing articles and blog posts we often quote comments made by others from other sources and display them with the
blockquote
element. But you can also display these quotes inline using theq …
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Link
We all know about the
<a>
tag and we use it in our work everyday. Every HTML page that we create is likely to have at least one<a>
tag within it. But have you ever looked at the … -
Point break
If you’ve been working with responsive web design then you will be familiar with the term ‘breakpoint’ being used to define a media query with a browser width (usually although …
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Further examples on using the main element
Which is the more correct page layout? – was the question posed over on Stack Overflow with regards to the new HTML5
main
element. Neither of them as it turned out, but it did make me think … -
A lesson learned
Today I thought it would be cool and useful to have the
time
element display the value of itsdatetime
attribute on hover, as sometimes the text that is displayed isn’t fine enough. So I … -
The main element
Back in I wrote about the proposed HTML5
main
element. This new element was recently added to the HTML5 specification.Actually
main
has so far only been added to the Back in … -
HTML5 Bones
Yesterday I released HTML5 Bones, a downloadable basic HTML5 template. Let’s talk about that.
Reasons
I have seen a few HTML5 templates out there, with HTML5 Boilerplate the most obvious and …