John Cox

Blogs · @wyome · Now · Shelf

Interesting

25 Essential HTML5 Tutorials and Techniques | Template Monster Blog

This is a curated collection of HTML5 tutorials and learning resources covering semantic markup, APIs like canvas and offline storage, form improvements, video implementation, and CSS3 integration for modern web development. The post presents links to various guides aimed at helping developers master HTML5 features through practical techniques, from basic layout coding to advanced topics like drag-and-drop functionality and mobile app creation. Rather than providing original analysis, it serves as a directory pointing readers toward external tutorials for understanding HTML5's major new standards and capabilities.

Permalink

BBC News - Lung cancer risk 'cut by B vitamin'

A large European study found that people with high blood levels of vitamin B6 and the amino acid methionine had roughly half the risk of developing lung cancer compared to those with low levels, regardless of smoking status. However, experts caution that the correlation may simply reflect healthier overall diets and lifestyles rather than proving that B-vitamins directly prevent cancer, and that quitting smoking remains far more important than any dietary supplement in reducing lung cancer risk. Further research is needed before recommending B-vitamin supplementation as a cancer prevention strategy.

Permalink

Simon Collison | Colly | The Celebrated Miscellany

I don't have a saved article to summarize for you. What you've shared is your own creative biography—a poetic timeline tracing your development as a designer, writer, artist and musician from 1973 to 2022, punctuated with musical references and formative moments. If you'd like me to summarize an article you've saved, please share the text or link to it, and I'll provide a concise summary explaining what it argues or reports.

Permalink

HTML5 Microdata: Welcome to the Machine

HTML5's Microdata specification adds five global attributes (itemscope, itemtype, itemid, itemprop, and itemref) that embed machine-readable metadata directly into existing HTML markup, allowing search engines like Google to better understand and display contextual information about people, organizations, products, reviews, and events. The author argues that Microdata is superior to competing formats like RDFa and Microformats because it's simpler to implement while maintaining the principle that the same markup should serve both human readers and machines. Though still maturing and subject to change, Microdata enables richer search results and allows applications to automatically extract and repurpose structured data without requiring separate markup or scrapers.

Permalink

roomle.com - the online room planning platform - GET THE IDEA!

Roomle's Rubens platform is a 3D configurator system that lets eCommerce businesses and retailers enable customers to visualize and personalize products in real-time through interactive 3D views, product configuration tools, and room design features. The tool claims to increase conversion rates by 90%, reduce returns by 40%, and process 50 million product configurations annually, with documented success among furniture makers, manufacturers, and design brands. The platform integrates with existing systems to streamline quoting, production, and customer analytics while giving buyers confidence in their purchases through realistic visualization before buying.

Permalink

20 Elegant Fonts for Clean Design | Freebies

I can see this is a comments section from a blog post about fonts, but I don't have access to the actual article content itself—only the reader comments praising various fonts like Sacre Blue, Adelle Basic, Sertige, and others. To write an accurate summary of what the piece argues or reports, I would need to see the original article text. Could you provide the article content or a link to it?

Permalink

Making Your First Google Chrome Extension – Tutorialzine

This tutorial walks through building a simple Google Chrome extension that displays an RSS feed preview in a popup next to the address bar. The extension uses a manifest.json configuration file, HTML5/CSS3 for the popup interface (including webkit-specific effects like box-reflect gradients), and jQuery to fetch Tutorialzine's latest posts via Yahoo's YQL API with localStorage caching to improve performance. The guide demonstrates Chrome's developer-friendly approach to extension development, where developers can load unpacked folders directly for testing before packaging into .crx files for distribution.

Permalink

Efficiently Rendering CSS | CSS-Tricks

Browsers parse CSS selectors right-to-left, starting with the "key selector," making ID selectors fastest and universal selectors slowest; avoiding tag-qualified selectors (like `ul#nav`) and long descendant chains improves efficiency. While CSS3 selectors like `:nth-child` are more resource-intensive than simple selectors, modern computers have made CSS rendering efficiency less critical than it was a decade ago, so following best practices (unqualified IDs, avoiding deep descendant chains, leveraging CSS cascading) is sensible without being dogmatic about it. The real lesson is balancing performance optimization with semantic markup and maintainability—giving every element a unique ID for speed would be technically fast but practically ridiculous.

Permalink

Introduction to MySQL Triggers | Nettuts+

MySQL triggers are database rules that automatically execute additional operations when data is inserted, updated, or deleted, allowing developers to handle data integrity, logging, and business logic at the database layer rather than in application code. The article demonstrates three practical applications: maintaining referential integrity by automatically deleting related records, auditing changes by logging modifications to separate tables, and enforcing business rules like automatic price calculations based on cost updates. While triggers add modest performance overhead to individual queries, they reduce overall latency by eliminating multiple round trips to the database and move critical data logic away from the application layer where it's easier to enforce consistently.

Permalink

Introducing Slippy - HTML Presentations - Seld.be

Slippy is a lightweight HTML presentation library built on jQuery that transforms standard HTML markup into browser-based slideshows, making it especially suited for technical talks with its built-in syntax highlighting and live code execution capabilities. The tool can run JavaScript code samples in real time during presentations and display results in custom styled alert boxes rather than browser dialogs, allowing presenters to demonstrate code interactively. The project is open-source on GitHub with example slides and documentation, though the creator acknowledges it's still under development and plans to improve styling and add more comprehensive docs.

Permalink

HTML5 Video Player | Video JS

Video.js, a web video player that has dominated its category for 15 years, has undergone a complete architectural rebuild for version 10 to meet modern web standards. The rewrite separates the UI from media rendering into independent, modular components that work through open APIs, enabling smaller bundle sizes through tree-shaking and code splitting. The project is on a release roadmap extending through late 2026, with Mux (founded by Video.js's original creator) now serving as the corporate steward following Brightcove's tenure.

Permalink