One of the biggest limitations of markup languages, in my opinion, is how confining they are. Even large vocabularies like Docbookhttp://docbook.org have limited functionality out of the box. HTML4 is non-extensible and HTML5 limits how you can extend it web componentshttp://webcomponents.org/ are the only way to extend HTML5 I'm aware of that doesn't need an update to the HTML specification. By creating our own markup vocabulary we can be as expressive as we need without adding complexity for writers and users and without adding unnecessary complexity for the developers building the tools to interact with the markup. Why create our...
Because we use XML we can't just dump our code in the browser or the PDF viewer and expect it to appear just like HTML content. We need to prepare our content for conversion to PDF before we can view it. There are also front-end web development best practices to follow. This chapter will discuss tools to accomplish both tasks from one build file. What software we need For this to work you need the following software installed: - Java version 1.7 or later - Node.js 0.10.35 or later Once you have java installed, you can install the following Java...
Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software And More was an article first published in Wiredhttp://www.wired.com/2012/02/github-2/all/ in February of 2012. It was an interesting article about a company which work I value enough to pay for the service. The article itself wasn't what caught my attention. It was the Github repositoryhttps://github.com/WiredEnterprise/Lord-of-the-Files that Wired created to go with the article. Their experiencehttp://www.wired.com/2012/02/github-revisited/ highlights a big potential of technology for the publishing process: It makes collaboration at all stages of the process easier. While researching this idea I came across this blog posthttps://github.com/blog/1939-how-github-uses-github-to-document-github All this made me think about how...
With the latest set of web technologies coming down the W3C/WHATWG pipeline it is now possible to create top-of-the-line responsive experiences that can also work as ofline applications. HTML5 web is more than capable of competing with native applications. Chrome and Windows apps have shown as much capability as native apps, if we let them. What needs to happen now is the developer shift to thinking about the web in terms of application logic rather than the rules we want the web to play by. Athena is a proof of concept for such an application. It uses ServiceWorkershttps://github.com/slightlyoff/ServiceWorker/blob/master/explainer.md for caching...
> Note: While I talk primarily about ePub e-books, the same process, markup and scripts apply to a standard web page. After finishing a draft of my fixed layout ePub I went back and researched the accessibility requirements for video on the web and how well supported they are in ePub e-books. I will present both the rationale and coding based on my ePub-based research and the article I wrote for the Web Platform Documentation project https://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/concepts/VTT\Captioninghttps://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/concepts/VTTCaptioning > Working with video in your ePub book presumes that you're familiar, if not comfortable, with the process of manually creating an e-book....
The problem There is a tricky issue when working with CDN during development. CDN requires an active Internet connection to actually load the script referenced as the source. If you are not online then jQuery will not load the first time you access the page or application and all other scripts will fail as they depend on jQuery which couldn't load from the CDN and had not local backup I first came across this issue when building a site that used carousels and jQuery based animations. I started working on the project while on the train and using the standard...
This is the first pass at a script to generate a basic package.opf file for epub3 ebooks using Python 2.X. What it does When you run it from the root of your ebook, the script will create a package.opf file, populate it with basic metadata as required by the epub3 specification, it will also create metadata and spine sections based on the content of the OEBPS directory. How does the script do it The script only uses modules from the default library. I want the a portable script and I don't want to worry whether a module is compatible with...
Rather than adopt a paged media model for printing HTML5/CSS pages let's look at how to move our content to make for a better printing experience. The idea for this stylesheet came from Evernote's simplified article capture mode. This will be very dependent on the layout of your page but there are some common rules we can use everywhere, both css3 and HTML. > NOTE: I wrote all the material below using SASS SCSS syntax. This will allow me to use them with other SASS-based projects and stylesheets while remaining compatible with CSS. Also note that this is by no...
I'm sad to see the potential of exclusions not being used. No browser vendor supports the complete exclusion specification. IE 10+ is the one that comes the closes but doesn't support the full set of exclusion features. This is the best we have and yes, it still feels weird to say that IE is the best we have in terms of a web feature The idea of exclusions is complementary to that of shapes. As a matter of fact, there was only one specification addressing both shapes and exclusions but they were split in 2012, I guess to ease development...
One of the things that I find infuriating about multi device development is that people can't seem to agree on a resolution or a device aspect ratio. This has become even more complicated with the advent of retina devices both hand-held, laptops and desktop devices. Trying to keep an identical layout in different screen sizes is impossible. Even if we could create identical experiences, the amount of image replacement we have to do to accommodate the different resolutions so our images will not look like crap just is more than I'd like to deal with. A compromise solution is to...
