Showing all entries from: May 2007
mobile, standards, events, html5
Update: An entry about this video interview and the other interviews that Ian did at XTech is now online at the BBC Backstage site:
Backstage Blog: Video interviews from Xtech 2007
Among the videos that Ian Forrester from the BBC shot at XTech 2007 the week before last is an interview with Steven Pemberton and me. We talk about the Mobile Web Initiative, XHTML2, XForms, HTML5, the <canvas> element, and a few other things.
Use the Click to Play link below to watch the video (warning: requires Flash Player 8).
2007-05-27 ·
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browsers
For quite a while I was keeping my WebKit/Safari up to date by building from the latest sources checked out from the WebKit Subversion repository or by manually installing the lastest nightly build. Then Maciej Stachowiak pointed out NightShift to me and I’ve been using that since.
NightShift is a simple but very useful Mac OSX application that automatically downloads and installs the latest WebKit nightly build so that you don’t need to do it manually.
As far as why you might want to run WebKit to begin with, well, if for no other reason, you might want to try it just to be able to have access to WebKit’s Web Inspector tool. It’s basically a DOM/CSS/properties inspector similar to those in other browsers. But there are a couple of things that make it different:
- Inspect Element
- You can open Web Inspector by right clicking anywhere on a page and choosing Inspect Element from the context menu. The Web Inspector appears and highlights the corresponding DOM node, with the normal interactive DOM tree view to give you access to the rest of the DOM.
- The Firebug extension for Mozilla/Firefox provides the same kind of context-menu Inspect Element function, but the WebKit feature has the big advantage of being, well, a feature (that is, actually integrated into the core product, instead of requiring installation of an extension).
- Re-root the DOM-tree view
- One problem with display of DOM trees is that in a complex page with deeply nested content, you can end up a with tree view with some severe indentation and that really gives you more information at one time than you really need. So what Web Inspector does is to give you a way to “re-root” the DOM tree view so that the view is reduced to just whatever part of the DOM tree you actually want to examine at that particular time. To cause Web Inspector to re-root the DOM tree view, you just double-click in Web Inspector on whatever DOM node you want to make the new root; then the rest of the tree disappears and you just have a view of that node and its child nodes. Sweet.
2007-05-25 ·
mobile, browsers
So at the end of last month, Stefan Constantinescu over at Ring Nokia posted a blog entry with a screenshot of an “S60 UI Evolution” slide from a presentation that ended up being cancelled but that was supposed to have taken place at the recent S60 Summit in Madrid. One of the bullets on the slide says, Touch User Interface for new kinds of products.
I didn’t pay so much attention to that news until a week or so later when, while reading through mail from the webkit-changes list, I came across the commit message for WebKit revision 21303, which is related to WebKit bugzilla 13561. The description for both the commit and the bugzilla item reads:
S60 3.2 Touch: Scrolling initial implementatoin
So I guess this means we’ll eventually be seeing a version of the WebKit-based S60 browser shipping on devices with the S60 Touch UI and making use of that touch UI. Nice.
2007-05-25 ·
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