How much do you know about the humble <title> tag? It has been there since the earliest HTML specification. The 1995 spec says: There may only be one title in any document. It should identify the content of the document in a fairly wide context. It may not contain anchors, paragraph marks, or highlighting. Remarkably […] Read More
I spent 15 years in the mobile phone industry - working variously for big mobile operators, with phone manufacturers, and consulting with industry groups. I say this not to brag, but to let you know that I have experience with these matters. Web browsers are often called a User Agent. They are a software agent […] Read More
This is a sketch of a proposal for a new HTML element to simplify displaying maps on a website. I'd like your comments and criticisms before I submit it. This is born out of my frustration of using different JavaScript mapping solutions - my phone has a mapping app, why do I need to share […] Read More
Twitter have just released Periscope for Android. I'll do a full review of it later (tl;dr it's Qik with worse resolution) - but for now, I want to focus on the sign up process. You can only sign in with Twitter. That's fine, it's a Twitter product. So I pressed the sign-in button and this […] Read More
I have a (very minor and polite) disagreement with Matt Gemmel's argument against dates in URLs. Before I start, let me be very clear; your blog = your rules. If you want to write your URLs as a series of Emoji or in Klingon - go right ahead. There really is no such thing as […] Read More
tl;dr - If a mobile web browser recognises an Emoji, it should display it natively. If not, it should fall back to a supplied web font. Is this possible? When Android and iOS find Emoji in text, rather than display them as black-and-white fonts, they show them off in gorgeous colour. For example, the unicode […] Read More
Running a website is hard. Let me clarify - setting up a website is dead simple - keeping it running and updated is tricky. Now, for some of us, it doesn't really matter whether our sites live or die. But for big companies like McAfee it's not simple to switch off a site - especially […] Read More
Search Engine Optimisation is the (dark) art of getting a site to the top of Google's ranking algorithm. If you're in the business of selling decorations for ponds, you want your shop to be right at the top of the results when people search for "bespoke synthetic frog spawn." The problem is, there are lots […] Read More
In October, I was interviewed in Econsultancy about the BBC's new "responsive" website. I said: The BBC's mobile site is fairly responsive. If you view it on different sized phones and tablets it adapts quite well. But it is an entirely separate site from the main BBC news site. The BBC are doing device detection […] Read More
Image adaptation and resizing is a hot topic at the moment. With devices of varying screensize accessing your site, how do you ensure that the crappy 240*240 phone gets a reasonable experience while still making everything look gorgeous on the retina-busting iPad? One of the very first things we're taught in HTML school is that […] Read More