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Thursday, November 25, 2010

5 Reasons HTML5 is Awesome

1: Video and Audio

What is that exactly? — Well, the video tag and audio tag are embeddable into your html5 page and make use of the browser's media player instead of requiring the browser to have a specific plugin to playback any video or audio.

It's also great because it's fully styleable as well. You can use javascript, or CSS to manipulate the size, color, etc. on the fly. Another really cool feature of the new video tag is called "poster". You can add a screenshot frame for when the movie isn't playing. Look at the example below:


Sorry, your browser doesn't support the HTML5 Video tag yet :(




Code:
<video src="http://dillonchristensen.info/cinema/ap.mp4" poster="http://dillonchristensen.info/cinema/ap.jpg" width="320" height="280" controls></video>


2: New Input Types and Attributes

What's so great about these? Well, for a few they add extra features to the generic inputs. tel, for iPhones make the telephone keypad come up instead of the full keyboard forcing the user to have only numbers, star and pound as options. email, again for the iPhone makes the keyboard with "@" and ".com" appear in place of the space bar.url, makes the iPhone keyboard with ".com" and "/" take the place of the space bar.search, isn't iPhone exclusive. Search-type input gives the user an 'x' button, or a clear field button, inside the input after the user has typed something.number, requires the user to use numbers only, no letters or special symbols can be inserted.


Besides new types though, there's a new attribute called "placeholder". This one is great! How many of you can type:
<input type="text" name="user" onfocus="if(this.value=='Username'){this.value='';}" onblur="if(this.value==''){this.value='Username';}" />

...in your sleep?

But it was pretty awesome to do that! Well, now it's soooo much easier. You literally set the placeholder attribute to what you want your example value to be and you can forget javascript altogether.
<input type="text" name="user" placeholder="Username" />

iPhone users, test these fields out.

Tel:

Email:

Url:

Search:

Number:


3: Cut Out Extra Meta Crap

I didn't know to describe this one. But for me it's a plus. Basically I'm trying to refer to how the doctype declaration was shortened, meta charset was shortened, and stylesheet's types aren't necessary, neither is declaring your <script> as type="text/javascript".

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
...

This makes it easier to remember how to properly code without needing a template. You could just start it up from scratch. Not a huge deal, but I like it.


4: Phasing Out <div>

Html5 started using a <section> tag which is basically the same thing as a div, but sounds cooler. With section, you can add a <header> tag and place your h1,h2,h3's and so forth inside to signify the heading of the section. You can also add a <footer> to signify the about properties of the section. All in all, weak, but new.


5: Five Reasons is Hard

I really was excited for the video and audio tags, but, really that's all that's awesome. When I write a CSS3 post, I will have almost unlimited reasons why I'm looking forward to CSS3 becoming standard! So reason five will be, canvas. I totally forgot about canvas. Canvas is actually pretty cool. Basically it's like the browser rendering an image based off math. So, if you're good a math, it's cool. I made a square. Then again, canvas isn't made to replace img but still, that's what I want!

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Team Coco Shirts for Free

If you're on twitter a lot, or never even, but you like Conan O'Brien you should follow @teamcoco for a free shirt tomorrow. The deal is posted on their site teamcoco.com for the full scoop. But the long and short of it is, they're giving away 1,000 free shirts to the first people to use the promo codes they tweet for 10 days (10/31 is day two, so you have eight more days/eight more shirts). 1,000 a day. So if you miss the message and check it 30 seconds later, it'll be too late. @Teamcoco has 83,483 followers as of now. So make one of them the 'out-of-luck'ers. After all, it's free. I got the zombie one today! Whoo!

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Visit Pawnee, OK

Pawnee Oklahoma

Why do you need to visit Pawnee? What the heck is Pawnee? Well, the answer to both of those questions is, I eat massive amounts of spaghetti. Pawnee is named after the Pawnee Indians. They were known to be bloodthirsty mad men. And the town reflects this history. It's a tiny place with a little over 2,000 inhabitants. Largely Indian population of course.






This past Monday, my wife and I and one of our friends decided to travel down to Pawnee, my wife's old stomping grounds. We left for there at about ten at night. It was starting to cloud up overhead, and the moon was full and gorgeous! It really was a perfect night. Our first stop was my wife's old home, which her mom still owns, that is currently vacant. We dropped off our supplies, guzzled some Amps and hit the town. Our first stop was the lake.


Pawnee Lake


We went to the lake and the wind was so strong. There was clearly a storm coming our way. It was seriously such crazy strong wind, we wondered how bad the storm was going to be. The wind was howling so loudly in the trees nearby. So spooky, and awesome! After we toured the lake and the bath house, we headed to the cemetery.


Cemetery


We stopped by the cemetery, and walked through to see what was sparkling back at us as we parked. It was shining bright at us, but it turned out to be a stupid shiny piece of paper. There was a weird glowing cross gravestone though. That was super creepy. But after the cemetery we parked the car and walked the town.


Downtown


We walked all up and down downtown. One of the biggest deals, aside from Indian stuff, in Pawnee is Dick Tracy. Yes, Dick Tracy. Every store sells Dick Tracy stuff, or has a Chester Gould mention, he created Dick Tracy. Chester Gould was from Pawnee, and Dick Tracy is Pawnee's claim to fame.


The Orphanage





The Orphanage is the creepiest place of all. The video is a walk through I did of the building. The door was literally wide open, totally inviting me inside. My wife was too scared to go inside so she stayed outside in the car. The story behind the orphanage is a weird one. The caretaker of the orphanage that had recently taken over, was not a people person. She certainly wasn't a "children" person. She thought the orphans were deplorable. So one night, as the kids were being particularly noisy, the caretaker locked them all in the upstairs for the night. Well, unfortunately, a fire broke out and the little girls couldn't escape because of the door being locked. All twenty of them burned to death. I don't think the holes in the floor in the video are from the fire, but, that place sure is in disrepair.


Those are just a handful of the millions of reasons you should visit Pawnee, OK. But if you don't live anywhere close, don't waste your vacation.