HTML5 Series - Semantic Tags

5 December 2012

Before HTML5 the HTML for your page's layout was probably primarily made up of a lot of div tags with id's a class's to give them a visual structure and layout. It might look something like this...

1<div id="header">My Site Name</div>
2<div id="content">Bla bla bla site content......</div>
3<div id="footer">Privacy policy, copywrite info etc</div>

This though has 2 problems. Firstly it's not great for computers like search engines or screen readers to understand as everything is a div. There is extra code you can add to improve on this (have a look at Scheme.org). Secondly your code isn't very, again because everything is a div.

HTML5 however introduces new semantic tags like <header>and
<footer> to make your data more structured. So the above example would become...

1<header>My Site Name</header>
2<article>Bla bla bla site content......</article>
3<footer>Privacy policy, copywrite info etc</footer>

Other tags are as follows:

Tag Description

<article> For external content, like text from a news-article, blog, forum, or any other content from an external source

<aside> For content aside from the content it is placed in. The aside content should be related to the surrounding content

<details> For describing details about a document, or parts of a document

<summary> A caption, or summary, inside the details element

<figure> For grouping a section of stand-alone content, could be a video

<figcaption> The caption of the figure section

<footer> For a footer of a document or section, could include the name of the author, the date of the document, contact information, or copyright information

<header> For an introduction of a document or section, could include navigation

<hgroup> For a section of headings, using

<h1> to <h6>, where the largest is the main heading of the section, and the others are sub-headings

<mark> For text that should be highlighted

<meter> For a measurement, used only if the maximum and minimum values are known

<nav> For a section of navigation

<progress> The state of a work in progress

<section> For a section in a document. Such as chapters, headers, footers, or any other sections of the document

<time> For defining a time or a date, or both

URL parameters with Javascript

30 November 2012

So this took me by surprise the other day. JavaScript doesn't have a function to retrieve a URL parameter value. i.e. There is no Request.Querystring command! Of course it wouldn't start Request as it's executing on the browser rather than the server but you would have thought there would be a built in command to do it.

After a bit of searching though I came across this script that does it:

1// Read a page's GET URL variables and return them as an associative array.
2function getUrlVars()
3{
4  var vars = [], hash;
5  var hashes = window.location.href.slice(window.location.href.indexOf('?') + 1).split('&amp;amp;');
6  for(var i = 0; i &amp;lt; hashes.length; i++)
7  {
8      hash = hashes[i].split('=');
9      vars.push(hash[0]);
10      vars[hash[0]] = hash[1];
11  }
12  return vars;
13}

The function returns an array/object containing the parameters and their values. e.g. The following URL:

http://www.example.com/?Name=Tim&Sex=Male

Would return:

1{
2    "Name": "Tim",
3    "Sex": "Male"
4}

To use it in your code you would write

1var name = getUrlVars()["Name"];

And that's it

Browser Testing IE Versions

10 September 2009

Anyone in Web development knows that they should be testing their products on all browsers including different versions, which presents a problem when your only using the one PC. Programs like Multiple IE aren't great and often you can find yourself trying to fix a problem that doesn't actually exist on the proper version.

The best solution is the have virtual machines running on your own machine, but these take time to set up and most developers tend to have little time to spare as it is. Well thankfully if you want to test Internet Explorer you don't have to set the virtual machine up yourself, just head to the following address and you can download one from Microsoft's site. Save the address as you will have to keep downloading it every 3 months due to them building in a time bomb as it is essentially a free OS.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en

The second option also from Microsoft is Super Preview that is planned to be part of their Expression package. Currently it's only at the Beta stage but it if you enter an address it will give you a side by side comparison of a page in IE 6/7/8, plus its free. The full version when it's ready is meant to have support for all the popular browsers (but then you will have to pay for it to). However it is also limited to just being a preview so as far as testing all your JavaScript functions goes, you still need your virtual machines for that.