HTML 5

Having plundered digg for more information today, I came across an interesting article on the IBM website about the new elements in HTML 5. These seem to be moving HTML to be more developer friendly, the datagrid controls seem similar to those of ASP.NET in name and possibly functionality too.

The Menu and Command elements seem useful too, although as the article points out, these were available in older versions of HTML. Hopefully some of these new interactivity elements won’t go the way of blinking text and other superfluous/useless elements in previous versions of HTML. Hopefully the W3C have learnt lessons from previous mistakes/flashes of inspiration.

Some of the semantic elements are long over due; the blog friendly nav, header,footer,article,date/time elements will make semantic markup clearer and more obvious. Video and audio are welcome but it could make it easier to have MySpace style pages which play some inane tune over and over and over… We shall see!

If you want to read the article:

IBM Developer Works HTML 5.0 Article

ja ne!

And so begins Project Oshi

I have decided to fully commit to making Project Oshi, a lesson picker/student file management system that will be based upon my experience in Japan and will serve simply as a personal project.

I’m developing it in PHP and going for an iterative build method. This is so that I am actually producing something on a regular basis rather than getting bogged down in methodologies/ER diagrams and normalisation etc!

I have started by creating the very first pages, add student and view student. At this current stage they are purely wireframes, no presentation/validation/verification or security has been added. By starting simple and getting the functionality right, it gives a good skeleton to build upon. The next part of development will be to flesh these pages out with CSS & Javascript to make it look more useable and to add some Client Side Validation.

Getting started means wracking my brains for what little PHP/CSS/JavaScript I still remember but it’s coming back thick and fast now. I should have screens in the next few days, maybe….

mata ne!

Being Open, using Open

I’ve started using Ubuntu recently. It’s an attempt to expand my knowledge of other operating systems and different development environments and because I’m on a budget when it comes to software. Not being able to afford Photoshop and the Abobe Creative Suite means  having to use the alternatives or illegally downloading and using them (obviously not a good idea!). I prefer to stay on the right side of the law.

For the development of my website and the projects I will embark upon afterwards, I’m going to be using Quanta Plus Web Development Environment, The GIMP, MySQL, Apache and PHP (oh and Firefox of course!). I have to admit I’m not terribly au fait with them but it’s going to be fun learning to use them.

Below is a screenshot of my set-up. Just for the curious!

(click on the pic to see full size)

mata ne!