HTML5

On many sites and apps, you’ll often have to mark up and style a button that is not part of a list of links, and that basically stands alone, apart from surrounding content.

How should a single, standalone link or button be marked up? As with many things in web development, there isn’t really a right or wrong way to do this, but here’s a summary of some of the different methods.

With all the hype surrounding the new APIs and the fancy parts of CSS3, I had almost forgotten about the new reversed attribute that allows you to write a descending list of numbered items, as opposed to the default ascending list of numbered items.

You can get full details in the specification, but here I’ll summarize what it does and I’ll offer a solution for the fact that there is (from what I can see) no browser support for this attribute.

One challenge that developers have faced when creating forms is the inability to separate a form control from its parent <form> element without having to resort to some undesirable methods to get that form control to submit its data along with the form.

If you tried to do this in HTML4 or XHTML, the form would not submit the information from the form control that’s structurally outside the form.

As a result, if you wanted the data from the orphaned control to be submitted along with the rest of the form data, you’d have to implement some fancy JavaScript tricks to pass the information into the submission — which has many obvious drawbacks.

The topic of scoped CSS styles in HTML5 came up twice in the comments of a recent post by Chris Coyier.

The post itself was discussing the contenteditable attribute, but a few users brought up HTML5’s new scoped attribute, used on the <style> element.

Let’s take a brief look at this future HTML5 feature and see how it might be useful in the ever-changing web development landscape.

Ever since HTML5 has started to gain wider use, many developers have wondered what syntax style should be most prevalent. When coding HTML in XML format, it was easy–because the validator forced you to code in a consistent manner.

Well, since code validation in HTML5 is a bird of another feather, a consistent coding style is going to be extremely unlikely across the web. While an exact coding style across all sites is not really necessary, I think some level of consistency is in order. People’s concerns in this area are valid.

So here are my own personal point-by-point recommendations for clean and consistent markup, and some reasons behind the decisions.