The second day of CSSConf Australia ’15 took place last Friday.
The day started with Sara encouraging developers to switch to SVG rather than unsemantic CSS hacks, and finished with a call for the open-source community to welcome designers by Una.
Here are my notes from day two.
CSSConf Australia ’15 is on at the moment.
The first day started with Matt reminding us to consider the human element of design, and finished with Ben showing how animation can be used to cheat time and add delight.
Here are my notes from day one.
I had the pleasure of speaking at Web Directions Respond yesterday. It was a great opportunity to listen to designers and developers from both Australia and internationally.
I took notes throughout the day, some of which you will have seen if you follow me on Twitter. The full set are in bullet point form below.
A disclaimer upfront, this is the first conference I’ve spoken at where tickets cost more than $50. Attendees invested a substantial chunk of their PD budget to be there. The quality of my notes waver as a I get various waves of nerves & adrenaline crashes. Chris Wright has published his notes too.
Over the next couple of weeks I’m looking forward to using Noter Live to live tweet a couple of conferences.
I’ll be running it locally while at Respond and CSSConfAU to minimise network connections over conference wifi or 4G.
I’m using Noter Live as it will make it a cinch to convert the tweet stream to a blog post after the talk.
I like a much reduced set of body classes when coding up a WordPress theme. Two template types, two main classes.
Oh, and I put it on the HTML element too. To call my coding opinionated is somewhat of an understatement.
As I work on patterns for my site redesign, I generated two templates without consideration for microformats. The two templates I created were for a WordPress archive template and an article/page template.
Microformats add structured data to a web site. Using microformats allow machines reading a site to know find information such as the:
Working out the basic HTML before adding structured markup is the right thing to do. It ensures content is the focus of your basic HTML structure. If at all possible, this is the ideal structure for your web page.
When it came time to add the structured data to my page, I added both microformats2 and microformats1.
Big Search (Google, Bing, etc) use version one of microformats when reading structured data for your site, so I consider it must have.
Webmentions use microformats2 to determine the type of mention sent, the title of the post sending it, and a bunch of other stuff. I accept webmentions, so this becomes a must have.
I’d added structured data to the page, posts, comments, comment authors, and taxonomy data and was happy with the way things were looking good. Aaron Parecki’s mf2 parser was showing decent results.
Google’s structured data testing tool on the other hand, was less than optimal. Google was crediting my posts to my first commenter.
As a single author blog, I hadn’t included any author information. The author is inferred, an inference that needs to be reflected in the structured data.
To get Google’s structured data reader to parse the author data correctly, I had to add an h-card as a child of the post’s h-entry.
Within the meta information, I added to following markup:
<span style="util-Display-None" aria-hidden="true">
<span class="EntryMeta_Detail vcard h-card">
<a href="#" class="fn url u-url p-name">Peter Wilson</a>
</span>
</span>I hide the content, both visually and from screen readers as the data serves no purpose for visitors to the site.
My initial attempt to mark up the logo with an h-card failed, as it sits outside the post, so Google parsed it a separate structured markup, unrelated to the post’s h-entry.
A very nice page for testing nth-child selectors by Paul Maloney
The Filament Group continues to do great work: Font Loading Revisited with Font Events
I was discussing one click indieweb for WordPress with David Shanske on the IRC channel. The aim is to make it as easy as possible for a WordPress user – not a developer – to implement an indieweb site.
I’ve decided to put it up as a brain dump.
There are two aspects to consider: features and data attributes.
calc isn’t a new feature, but at the time of writing MDN describes it as experimental:
this technology’s specification has not stabilized, check the compatibility table for the proper prefixes to use in various browsers. Also note that the syntax and behavior of an experimental technology is subject to change in future versions of browsers
– MDN
According to caniuse.com, it’s a little safer than MDN suggests.