Smoky Cogs

Wouldn’t it be great if you could look at the web page you are developing and be able to instantly tell if something is amiss. Say you forgot to add alt tags to your images, or you are using deprecated markup.

This might be a case for Holmes, the CSS Markup Detective.

What Holmes does is add CSS styling to elements in an HTML page that do not conform to standard, and will highlight any markup that is non-compliant, deprecated, or missing required attributes. All you need to do to make it work is to include a single CSS file in your web page, and you can then see the results immediately.

Since Holmes uses the W3C HTML5 standard (as it stands now), it is particularly useful for modernising old websites or existing codebases without too much trouble.

I came across an article today (which can he found here) that said that the team drawing up the spec for HTML 5 are dropping the open-source video codec, Ogg Theora, which was hopefully going to become the standard because Apple was opposed to it, and instead wanted to implement their own H.264 codec, which, surprise, surprise, is a proprietary codec with certain licensing issues.

They have now decided to leave the video codec in the spec undefined, thus opening up the market to do pretty much anything they want. And we all know where that can lead.

Now, in order to support all browsers out there, a developer would need to have video content which supports both codecs, and then dish them out depending on what the browser supports.

Since the beginnings of the Internet, there have been conflicting technologies and specs competing for dominance like this. It would be nice if for once, everyone sat down and put aside their differences and came up with a common standard.

As a developer, this issue hits home particularly hard. Every web developer in the world is painfully aware of the headache caused by having to write web sites and applications that work equally well in Internet Explorer as well as Firefox, and then there are still all the other browsers with their own idiosyncrasies.

Maybe one day I might be able to code a web app and it will just work in all browsers, but that is certainly in the very distant future.