Dan Zambonini digs further into user activity Plotting the exact X/Y coordinates of clicks on a page.

Not sure how much use it is, but it's a fun set of data to work with.

So WHATWG  has been working again, and it seems that they've come up with something truly revolutionary just in time for xmas. Just look at the new canvas tag, and come to the "obvious conclusion" that is: to be able to play games. I'm sure that by now we've all seen the maze game rendered on a canvas tag, that really took me back 15 years. I can't wait to play a full game in a browser, I'd have to be careful not to press the backspace key - what a disaster. And I know that game makers are incredibly prudent with memory use and processor cycles, so javascript would be an ideal language to use.

What else does WHATWG say.

Maybe in the next version of html, curiously codenamed HTML5, well we get a plethora of new controls like: a gauge, calendar, menus, datagrids, an address card. Blimey I don't think that even VB4 has an address card. This is really going to make knees wobble.

Let's not forget that we'll also have web forms 2.0 (if you pronounce it "two point oh" it'll sound better.)

And how long has it taken to make these great strides in the progression and evolution of the web. Oh about:
4 full versions of windows (95 -> 98 -> 2000 -> XP)
Atleast one cycle of Mozilla (Navigator -> mozilla -> phoenix -> firefox)
The birth and maturity of open source software

Come on how can it take so long to produce something so ridiculously lame. Why are all these new elements so inflexible, what about a bit of simple GUI inheritance (XAML, XUL).

 

I'm working on a site for a client who wants to achieve priority 3 web accessibility. This shouldn't really represent a major problem but one area of concern I have is over Guideline 10. Use interim solutions.

From what I understand this section is implying that as ever the poor developer will have to develop an imperfect site - again. Take for example the Google homepage This page would fail because there is no default text in the search box. So to pass this the developer would presumably have to add something like "please enter your search criteria here." If, however, the webpage had a form field that was optional, how on earth could you provide prompt text and act on that appropriately?

Imagine the case where you could search a site for some documents by keywords and the date that the document were created. You could then have two field on your search form: a date field and a keywords field. Both of these are optional, in that you could search for all documents created on a given day, or search for all documents containing a certain phrase.

So if both can be optional you'd like to leave them both empty, which you can't do! Thus you have to find some valid default text, for the date field this could be the mask: "dd/mm/yyyy". But what could you put in the default text box? How could you server side decide whether the text posted was actually the keywords that the user wanted to search for?

It's utter nonsense, especially when you refer to the list of user agent support for accessibility and discover that checkpoint 10.4 has two items that fail: the first of which is Netscape 2.0 with a question mark! The second talks about older assistive technologies. FFS it's no wonder that the W3C rules and recommendations are ignored in 99.9%^* of sites.

^* this is my estimate please allow for a +/- 99.8% variation.

http://tool-man.org/examples/edit-in-place.html via http://www.nedbatchelder.com/blog/200505.html#e20050506T123108

Joel Spolsky will surely have set the bloggers off with this article outlining his list of features he would like to see added to HTML He's pretty much exceeded most of what I could conceive, but here I'll outline the features that I would like to add. In the main it would be great to think that these could be added without breaking older browsers, but we're all familiar with the words of a famous omlette chef about breaking eggs. So some of them particularly new elements would certainly not degrade gracefully.

I've broken the list into functional and secure features. I was going to add accessibility to the list but couldn't actually think of anything that isn't already covered by CSS.

Functionality

• Let's see an end to <input type="x..y..z" /> I know we already have button, textarea and select; But how about tree, textbox, checkbox, radio, grid, richtext, file. The file control could even cope with multiple files.
• The ability to extend the browser adding context menus, normal menus so that full applications could be written. I suppose we have XUL for this kind of thing.
• A method write wizard style forms. I must admit I baulk away from wizards preferring to know what's going on but them I'm one of the 0.01% of the populace who actually read message boxes.
• Improve programmability of the controls so that i can pull out individual specific data.
• Allow elements to contain HTML rather than plain text so that I could have for example <select><option><img src="pictureofcar.jpg"/> Please select this car</option></select>

Security

• An element to allow a user to sign the details on the form using a digital signature. So that the server can be assured of the credentials of client; yeah I know about client side certificates but pressing my digital thumb on the screen would be much easier and I could take my digital thumb everywhere with me. There's no pun intended by digital thumb btw.
• A non-secure element which would make parts of a form insecure for example images / stylesheets etc. I was going to ask for a secure element but for this to degrade gracefully would be alot more difficult than a non-secure element.

I expect I'll think of some more during the course of the day so this list may grow.