http://www.radiantcore.com/ All of the Radiant Core posts tagged with jonhicks. en-ca Copyright 2006, Radiant Core Inc. All rights reserved. webmaster@radiantcore.com webmaster@radiantcore.com Jay Goldman <info@radiantcore.com> http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/25/10/2006/foxoutofthebag http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/25/10/2006/foxoutofthebag http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/25/10/2006/foxoutofthebag#comments www.getfirefox.com and play with all the pretty things we helped to build. I encourage you to download it on every computer you can and help to spread the word, as well as to throw a Firefox Party to likewise help with the celebrations!

Also, it's really hard to argue with a top-notch publication like CNET when they review your product and say things like 8.3/10 and Editor's Choice, and "Mozilla Firefox 2 is a winner, beating Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on security, features, and overall cool factor and deserving our Editors' Choice award." We were especially touched by statements like "The new shiny-glass look is much more sophisticated, as are the rounded tabs and the hairline borders around the address bar and the search engine box." and "Firefox is truly innovative, yet it's also very practical for everyday use.", which is like getting a big pat on the back for a job well done.

Our congratulations go out to the whole team and to everyone we got to work with, both inside Mozilla (Mike Beltzner, Mike Connor, Mike Shaver, Mike Schroepfer (notice a theme?), Chris Beard, John Lilly, and Paul Kim) and outside. A special non-Mozilla thank you to Sean Martell (designer extraordinaire), the denizens of the #foxymonkies IRC chat room who helped out immeasurably (especially to Gavin Sharp, Seth Spitzer, and Lucy), Joe Hughes, Ben Goodger, Brian Rakowski, Pam Greene, and Linus Upson (all from Google), Steven Garrity (from SilverOrange), and the highly-esteemed Kevin Gerich, Stephen Horlander, and Jon Hicks, all of whom lent their time and advice. It was an honour and a privilege to work with such a team and it is truly awe-inspiring when one has to choose between linking to their prolific and popular blogs or to their Wikipedia entries (apologies if I missed anyone or anyone's links - please comment and I'll update).]]> Taking Care of Business Wed, 25 Oct 2006 23:17:00 GMT Jay Goldman <info@radiantcore.com> http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/23/06/2006/microformats http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/23/06/2006/microformats http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/23/06/2006/microformats#comments Microformats are a little hard to rap your head around at first, but I think they meet the JPC. The basic idea is that you continue to build your webpage using HTML with no special sauce added - definitely not any proprietary special sauce - but by using specific classes in your HTML structure, you indicate that the data you're marking up has some special, standardized meaning. By following one of the many Microformat standards (e.g.: hCard, hCalendar, and hReview), visitors to a page can make use of the "meta" information without needing to dig through your source.

Microformats aren't particularly well supported by the current version of browsers (or, really, at all), but if you're running Firefox then you can install the Tails Export extension and play along (caveat: the Mac version doesn't do export really, just identify). You'll get a nifty little Microformats icon in the status bar of your browser, which will light up as soon as it spots content on the page. We've encoded our contact info in the hCard format, so grab the extension and go take a peek. It's been a bit of a chicken and egg scenario since Tantek first thought them up, but today's big announcement of support from Yahoo! Local seems to be the first step towards mass adoption.

The highly esteemed Jon Hicks has put together an excellent little proposal for adding Microformat support in Safari, which was then followed up by some great design work by Ben Ward in his Microformats in Web Browsers post.

Anyway, I think Microformats qualify as JPC because:

• They're really easily to implement. In fact, they're almost exactly as much work as you were doing before, only slightly different. You don't have to generate a proprietary file format or add any configuration to your web server - just some simple HTML markup.
• Because they're just HTML, you can easily style them with CSS and it means that your CSS files contain some more standardized class names, which makes maintenance a bit easier.
• If the site visitor doesn't have Microformat support in their browser, it gracefully degrades to simple display of the data.
• Search engines crawlers and other web indexers can use the metadata encapsulated in Microformats to get a better and more rich understanding of the content that they're indexing.

Go forth and Microformat! There are handy generators for hCard and hCalendar on the Microformats.org site, so now you have no excuse. We'll be shifting our efforts to adding support in our client projects, so keep an eye on the portfolio section for some more examples. Have you done something cool? Leave it in the comments!
]]> Tech Geekery Fri, 23 Jun 2006 12:34:00 GMT