Google has announced that they will be discontinuing their Knol project. Knol was a web publishing platform that was used by members of academia to make their research available in what was considered a more credible context than traditional blogs. While Knol will be ending, researchers still have a migration option.
The prescribed migration path is for authors to export their Knol to WordPress, using the Annotum theme. Features of this theme, specifically developed for scholarly writing, include internationalization, inline references and footnotes, an equation editor and structured XML editing within the TinyMCE editor. This last feature is central to the idea of a WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) editing experience, and supports a subset of the National Library of Medicine XML specification called Kipling DTD.
normalize.css is a project available on github that seeks to do for CSS what libraries like jQuery did for JavaScript a few cycles ago. That is, rather than wipe the slate clean like CSS solutions such as Eric Meyer’s Reset, the library, well, “normalizes” rendering of elements across browsers.
It does so for IE6+, FF3+, Chrome 10+ and Safari 4+. It starts out by setting up the display for HTML5 elements for pre-HTML5 browsers, and handles such other inconsistencies as odd text resizing in IE6 and IE7 that occurs when the body font size is set in ems. It even goes so far as to prevent iOS text resizing when the orientation is changed. Even Chrome’s idiosyncrasies are dealt with, such as its odd display of the outline around focused anchors.
It does all this and more, in a brief, well documented stylesheet, which its authors, Nicolas Gallagher and Jonathan Neal, intend to be used as a starting point for projects. They humbly suggest that it not be taken wholesale as a “black box”, but should be considered fully customizable.
An insider from the W3C Working Group responsible for maintaining and extending the CSS spec has taken to offering his viewpoint on the process, and detailing how the group operates “in reality”. He discusses the roles people play within the group, how communication is managed, how decisions are finally made, how modules of the spec are broken out and how the spec itself is created.
Most interesting is the final installment in the series, which highlights sources of inspiration and innovation. Advocates for implementation, design and standards each take the lead at various points throughout the process. This is valuable insight into the fact that innovation can come from any angle, or that “…to pretend that useful innovation can only come from one source is to be blind to the reality of crafting a Web standard.”
A camera positioned at an unknown location in New York City documents the change in color of the skyline every five minutes. The average color is computed, and is represented on a grid of hex colors on a website. Presumably this installation art of sorts, accessed through the humble web browser, has been running since June 28, 2011 at 4:00 PM and will be continuous for the foreseeable future.
The code for the site is a minimal combination of HTML5, JavaScript with jQuery, and a PHP backend for getting the most recent photograph and doing the computations necessary for averaging the color and converting it to hex format.
For example, the custom JavaScript written for the site is no more than 29 lines: a few UI niceties leveraging jQuery (fading the image/color in and according to mouse events) and a request to since.php on a five minute timer.