HTMList.com, A Web Development Blog by Synapse Studios

From time to time, we like to survey the tech community around us and see who else swims in our pond. Our clients are from all over the country (nay, the world!) and while we’re “competitors,” there is *plenty* of work to go around. Plus, we’ve found that sharing our experiences and making friends only helps us better ourselves and each other.

That said, one of our competitors has attempted one of the stupider things I’ve seen online: a MediaWiki-based corporate website. I’m not one to typically outright pan those in the same space online; we all do dumb things from time to time. But this just seems righteously boneheaded to me.

Intrigo is a web development company in Tucson. They service mostly small businesses and startups. And their corporate website is a Wiki that anyone can edit. Without creating an account or logging in or anything.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

Tagged with: collaborative editing, corporate sites, idiocy, intrigo, mediawiki, Rants, stupid, wiki

Posted in: Rants

HTML 5 is coming our way. So goes the theory, anyway. (Recent chatter puts widespread adoption by user agents at close to a decade out from now… or more.) It is still a moment that many of us are eagerly anticipating. I remember drooling over my keyboard while reading through the HTML 5 Specifications the first time. We have been stuck with HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0 for a long time and it is time to see some changes.

(In fact, HTML 4.01 has presented us with the longest gap in HTML revisions—it’s been 10 years since it was released; HTML 3.2 only lasted about a year, from 1997 to 1998.) There are some great things we have to look forward to that will make life a lot easier for us developers and designers. We’ll take a look at a few of them after the jump.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

Tagged with: attributes, browsers, css, dom, html, html 5, javascript, tags, w3c, websites, xhtml

Posted in: Design, Development, Tech News

John Resig (creator of JQuery) posted an absolutely great piece on how JavaScript/DOM debugger/profiler extension Firebug is truly powering a web revolution.

He examines in good detail some of the things Firebug has enabled developers to do: Things like real-time analysis of applied styles to elements of the DOM and how exactly your stylesheets cascade, let alone the ability to manipulate them in-browser. Things like the ability to profile JavaScript and network performance with a level of granularity and accuracy you could only dream of before—let alone the ability to monitor AJAX calls and debug them. And a bunch more.

He also posits what’s next for Firebug, with some good suggestions for things like visual performance profiling, AJAX-request manual triggering and a few others.

What’s most fascinating to me, though, is the sheer volume of downloads of the Firebug extension. We’re talking 6.2 million downloads since its release. Consider that number for a second. Even if 70% of those are duplicate downloads and only 30% of those downloads are unique users, that’s still 1.8 million developers. Now, Firebug isn’t an add-on for regular users. It’s strictly a power-user/developer tool. Hell, even the Firebug plugin YSlow has over 380,000 downloads.

I think it speaks volumes about the state of the industry and the real web revolution we have on our hands here: Creating applications, making useful tools and delivering quality results are elements within reach of so many more individuals, with such lower barriers to entry, considerably lower costs and a greatly smoothed learning curve.

Powering A Web Revolution [John Resig] | Firebug Extension

Popularity: 7% [?]

Tagged with: add-ons, debugging, firebug, john resig, jquery, profiling, web revolution, yahoo!, yslow

Posted in: Cool Stuff, Development

Adobe announced today that they were delivering a special optimized Flash player for search robots, allowing search engines like Google and Yahoo to index not just a page’s non-Flash content, not just the content of the static data already indexed within a Flash movie, but the entire contents of each path taken throughout the Flash interface, entirely:

Adobe has provided Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! that allows their search spiders to navigate through a live SWF application as if they were virtual users. The Flash Player technology, optimized for search spiders, runs an SWF file similarly to how the file would run in Adobe Flash Player in the browser, yet it returns all of the text and links that occur at any state of the application back to the search spider, which then appears in search results to the end user.

This is an interesting approach that will really change the game for a lot of rich internet application providers. Anyone developing applications on the Flex platform knows that lacking the ability to make their dynamic content indexable is an IMMENSE drawback, especially when so much traffic is driven by search engines now. This changes the game. More on how, after the jump.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

Tagged with: adobe flash, flash, flash indexing, flex, flex applications, google, indexable swfs, search, search engines, swf, yahoo!

Posted in: Cool Stuff