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Updates

29th June 2009

Since I’m doing a lot of my browsing these days on my iPhone, a few best practices have becomes apparent for the design of websites for smartphones. I’ve bundled that together with a brief history of mobile browsers in a new tutorial, designing for mobile. We’ve also finally launched our web hosting & domains section. Years ago, I tried writing my own reviews of different web hosts, which quickly became an impossible task. Now, I’ve partnered with a company that feed in fresh information about the features and pricing of thousands of different web hosts every day. Check it out and see if you can get a good deal.

2nd April 2009

One of the nice things that I just realised about switching back to HTML 4.01 markup is that when readers check the source code of the page they’re viewing here they don’t see any crazy XHTML syntax like the space-backslash parts of “<br />”. Even though I rewrote the code for this site in 2002 to use XHTML, I have always written all code examples in HTML 4.01, as this is the most straightforward version of HTML to use. It did cause some confusion though, when I was teaching the use of <br>, but using <br /> myself in the source code of the site. Now, this is all cleared up!

1st April 2009

The site now has almost 200 tutorials, so I’m bound to have missed some things as I went through them bringing them up to date. I could use your help here — if you see something you don’t agree with, please give me a nudge and point me to the offending passage. Thanks!

30th March 2009

And so, like Jurassic Park, HTMLSource is back online, and back up-to-date!

The major change for this 2009 update is that we’ve cast off our underlying XHTML code and gone back to good ol’ HTML 4.01, like old times. XHTML was hot way back in the space-year 2000 when it first emerged, and just about everybody was gushing about how it was the future of markup. Since then, this brave new future hasn’t materialised as originally expected. There were some missteps, like a draft of a now-dead XHTML 2 that nobody wanted to use. Work on a new version of HTML, which was becoming increasingly desperately needed, stalled in the somewhat slow and stodgy W3C (who normally take care of these things), as they were putting their efforts into XML, XHTML and assorted other languages. An outside group calling themselves the “Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group” (WHATWG) stepped up and developed a pretty nice specification for a new version of HTML, which naturally they called HTML 5. HTML 5 is the new hot.

HTML 5 isn’t ready to be used just yet, although it probably won’t be long before browsers start supporting some of the more obviously useful new elements in the specification, like sections and the video element. When they do, I’ll describe how to use them here. For now, have a look through the newly revamped list of tutorials that I’ve written over the years that have been updated to be current with what modern web browsers like Firefox, Safari and Chrome are able to do.

There are a couple of recent new tutorials too: I went a bit password-crazy recently after seeing some statistics on how poor the passwords that most people use online are. In Site Management, you can learn how to password-protect some parts of your site. To go along with that, there’s an article about how I choose my passwords to be both safe and memorable. Even if you’re not password-protecting your site as above, you should be using a strong password to protect your email account and FTP access.

10th March 2009

Yes, you read those “Last modified on...” dates correctly. HTMLSource is almost back in business. I’ll have more here in a little while. All tutorials are getting brought back up to date!