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by George Paterson.
Being a new father i haven’t had much time to write articles and have spent most of my effort working within repositories on Github.
One thing i’ve been meaning to do with this site for some time now is change it to a responsive design. This is what i’m doing with the Aether theme and i’ve updated this site with the first incarnation of that theme.
by George Paterson.
Release 1.3 is now available on GitHub. This release includes a number of improvements to the code including requests from ursbraem, Colin-Insivia and papandreou.
by George Paterson.
Release 1.1.1 is now available on GitHub. This release includes a number of performance enhancements and fixes but retains the existing settings from the first release. Additionally i’ve created a number of public methods for the plugin, this will allow access to some of the internal features of the plugin.
by George Paterson.
In 1974 Richard Feynman gave the commencement address at Caltech and coined the phrase cargo cult science. Cargo cult can be used to describe any process using a flawed model of causation.
The term cargo cult is used in anthropology to define the religious cults that spring up in the wake of a technologically advanced society interacting with a technologically primitive society. Most recently this happened during World War II in the Pacific South West when Allied and Japanese forces created military bases on islands with limited previous contact with the modern world. The military base would commonly use air fields to import war materials.
The technical details of why and how the air field is set up would be beyond the basic understanding of the local populace but they would be able to see the process and witness the outcome which would be bountiful supplies of cargo brought in from the sky.
by George Paterson.
At LBi London we’ve had the good fortune to get a Logitech Revue with Google TV. It’s an interesting piece of technology and i fully support the web enhanced TV experience.
As a web developer what interests me is the web experience designed for the TV, what Google calls spotlight. At first glance it is a rich experience that should do well in the consumer market. The problem i see is how that experience was created.
When first using spotlight you could be mistaken in believing you are visiting the existing web site enhanced for Google TV, promoting the One Web experience.
You’re not.
by George Paterson.
HTML5 is the newest standard for HTML development, it has a range of additional features that will change the way we interact with the web. This is great for web development, there is a problem though, older browser versions specifically IE 6, 7 and 8 do not support the new HTML5 elements so that you cannot attach CSS to those elements.
Fortunately Sjoerd Visscher, Remy Sharp and John Resig amongst others have promoted a technique in mitigating this problem by using JavaScript to create a new DOM element of the same name as the required HTML 5 element, this then allows the browser to attach CSS to the element.
The fundamental problem of this though is that you are reliant on JavaScript for this to work and if the new elements have a structural role in the design then your design is going to fall apart.