Marc's brain backups (incremental)

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This is the blog of Marc Diethelm, Javascripter, Web UI Developer and well - geek.
So, not surprisingly here you'll find a hodgepodge of cool stuff. At least cool to me.

Latest

Welcome

After all this time I finally managed to actually do this… Install wordpress, configure, look for a theme, etc, etc. I’m glad I did it, because as it turns out I’m quite happy with it. It’s totally new and not even finished yet. What do you think? For now the focus of this blog will be on Web Development. But later I’d like to write about some other topics that interest me, like Astronomy, History, Palaeontology, Politics… or just stuff that I find funny or beautiful… sometimes even sad.

Would be nice to get some traffic, comments and linkbacks here.

February 15, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

WTFWG? Developers are fed up with WhatWG over responsive images spec

Whoa! FE-oriented people should check this… There’s a shitstorm brewing with developers being disgruntled and fed up with WhatWG and Hixie in particular. This time it’s about a proposed solution to the responsive images problem. Seems some prominent developers had quite enough of being ignored and overridden…

What’s going on? A recent article at A List Apart led to developers looking for an appropriate solution to the problem of responsive images.

As a result, some discussion started on the WHATWG mailing list months ago about what to do. The WHATWG pointed out that the list was for standardizing and suggested it would be better if the discussion were moved into a community group.  Read more... (~ 1:16 min)

May 16, 2012 | Categories: Web Development | Tags: , , , | Leave A Comment »

Proposal to HTMLWG: New element ‘hd’, deprecate H1-H6

H1-H6 makes me cringe

HTML5 logoEvery time I have to use a heading element in HTML I cringe slightly. I’m forced to decide which element between H1 and H6 to use, yet most of the time I just want to semantically mark up a heading — a generic heading. Very often I’m not working on the whole document as it will be presented to the user, instead I’m usually working on a layout module. I need to get stuff done quickly and semantically correct. I already know that I will have to update the hierarchy of the headings later once the final structure of the document is finalized (pre HTML5). But having to change the element to update heading hierarchy feels wrong to me!  Read more... (~ 4:07 min)

September 14, 2011 | Categories: Web Development | 3 Comments »

Is IE9 a modern browser?

Paul Rouget, from Mozilla Europe, says no.

And he points to some interesting (and devastating for IE) tests to back it up. Good read!

Oh well, we’ll have to support it anyway. Btw. has anybody checked IE9 out for himself/herself?

February 16, 2011 | Categories: Web Development | Leave A Comment »

HTML5 renamed HTML, is a “living standard”. Good or bad?

HTML5 logoRecently Ian Hickson maintainer of the HTML5 spec at WhatWG announced that HTML5 would be renamed HTML and is essentially a living standard, meaning unversioned. Incidentally or not, that came one day after W3C unveiled their new HTML5 logo to the world. So obviously that was and is controversial.

Dion Almaer takes a look at what that might actually mean and how developers should get involved with the whole process. I recommend you read it. I think he’s smarter than I am.  Read more... (~ 39 s)

February 14, 2011 | Categories: Web Development | 1 Comment »

JS grids that neglect documenting JSON/Ajax data sources suck

Ajax BleachWhy can’t the implementers of JS datagrids provide easy to find documentation of the JSON data format they support? I’ve used and looked at Flexigrid, jqGrid, Datatables and even the new jQueryUI grid which is in development. For me setting up a datagrid to get its data through Ajax is the standard use case, I believe that’s the case for many, if not most other developers too. But hey, finding a simple example of a JSON file that would work in any of those projects just doesn’t seem to be a priority.  Read more... (~ 49 s)

February 14, 2011 | Categories: Web Development | Leave A Comment »

A better analysis of WebMs strengths and weaknesses

WebM logohttp://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/02/mpeg-la-starts-the-search-for-vp8-patents.ars

MPEG LA, the firm that licenses (monetizes) patent pools covering essential patents required for use of the MPEG standards, has called for submissions of patents to a pool that might be essential to the VP8 codec. VP8 as you might know is the codec used for WebM, the Open Source community’s choice for an open HTML5 video standard. WebM is being developed by Google and is provided royalty-free. It’s backed by Mozilla and Opera among many others. The competitor to WebM is H264 owned by MPEG LA and backed by Apple and Microsoft. Google only recently announced dropping support for H264 in Chrome.  Read more... (~ 2:13 min)

February 13, 2011 | Categories: Web Development | Leave A Comment »

Learn 10 + 11 things about JS and jQuery

jQuery logoPaul Irish lead developer of Modernizr and HTML5Boilerplate and member of the jQuery team has two really great video tutorials about everybody’s favorite library up on his blog. If you haven’t seen them I highly recommend them to any frontend hacker.

He starts out how in the beginning jQuery (any library actually) is this black box that ‘just works’ and you have no idea how. He then explains some of the basic internals and also some of the more scary (and very smart) parts of the jQuery code. But what’s really cool is that the videos are actually very funny. The first video runs for about an hour and I never got bored watching it, in the contrary some of the things he does and says will just make you laugh out loud. And you’ll learn some impressive techniques that are actually quite useful in your day to day programming work.  Read more... (~ 1:14 min)

February 12, 2011 | Categories: Web Development | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment »