It is impossible to write a blog post about HTML5 and embed slides in Flash in the same without suffering lots of wisecracking comments that don’t have anything to do with the content. To avoid this, I wrote Slideshare HTML and blogged in detail about how it works.

Well, I hacked and scraped and sooner or later this will always bite you in the bum. As it did when the Slideshare developers changed the URLs of the images of the mobile version which of course broke my embedding tool and got me a lot of emails asking me why oh why I have forsaken people.

Bitching on the developer mailing list of Slideshare helped and now the oEmbed API returns not only the number of slides and urls and all the other goodies but also the right image suffix to use.

So, in short words – it is fixed and as I am now using the API rather than building a ScrAPI it should work smoother.

I just released the notes of my “Using HTML5 sensibly” talk over on the Mozilla hacks blog and there are a few questions that need answering by anyone who wants to be part of publishing on the web in the future:

• Can innovation be based on “people never did this correctly anyways”?
• Is it HTML or BML? (HyperText Markup Language or Browser Markup Language)
• Should HTML be there only for browsers? What about conversion Services? Search bots? Content scrapers?
• Should we shoe-horn new technology into legacy browsers?
• Do patches add complexity as we need to test their performance? (there is no point in giving an old browser functionality that simply looks bad or grinds it down to a halt)
• How about moving IE fixes to the server side? Padding with DIVs with classes in PHP/Ruby/Python after checking the browser and no JS for IE?
• Can we expect content creators to create video in many formats to support an open technology?
• Can a service like vid.ly be trusted for content creation and storage?
• Is HTML5 not applicable for premium content?

Check the detailed notes on the Mozilla blog, and – as a reminder – here are the slides and the video of the talk:

You can get the slides on Slideshare or see them here:

You can see “Using HTML5 sensibly” on any HTML5 enabled device here (courtesy of vid.ly).

Things that made me happy this morning:

• YUI 3 is out of beta – the changes to YUI needed to run the new Yahoo homepage, smaller, faster, less code to write.
• Google Docs now has an experimental OCR conversion API – post an image to the API endpoint and get a text version as a Google Doc.
• A nice bookmarklet to show the HTML 5 structure of a document
• Mockflow is an online collaborative wireframing tool
• Kalle Saas has some good JavaScript localisation tips
• We are colorblind is a pattern library for color blindness concerns
• One sentence contained in every HTML tag there is
• Paul Carvill of the Guardian explains why front end developers matter to the future of businesses
• Another way to fix bad CSS support – eCSStender is finally live
• @mediajunkie new book features thehairofchristianheilmann

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Google’s Alex Russel released Chrome Frame, a way to embed Google Chrome into any Internet Explorer 6 as a plugin without having to uninstall the old browser. As explained in the more technical details article it is implemented as a Browser Helper Object, uses IE’s cookies, history and password-remembering, includes the WebKit developer tools and appends ‘chromeframe’ to the regular IE user agent string. All in all the feedback from the tech scene is very positive but there are also accessbility concerns about the solution.
• The latest nightlies of Safari and Firefox now include WebGL and that will mean there’s some cool 3D browser apps ahead. Check out the video showing a Spore creature inside the browser.
• MixCloud is a service that could become the YouTube for radio, shame there’s no API yet
• Vitamin D is an interesting technology to automatically recognise objects in videos. Check the report for details.
• JSNES is a JavaScript simulator for NES roms – oldschool gaming overload.
• Majx-JS is trying to become a JavaScript library to inject accessibility enhancements into jQuery and other libraries
• The FCC wants your help to understand and forge the internet of the future at Open Internet .gov
• Here’s quite a detailed Internet Explorer 6 bug fixing cheat sheet.
• Brad Neuberg released quite a cool Video introduction to HTML 5
• Six revisions has some very interesting infographics about the web.
• Steve Smith has a fix for Safari’s fat text rendering in Snow Leopard
• PostBin is a shorturl provider that logs POST requests to the URL to allow you to debug webhooks.
• Luke Wroblewski wrote a nice write-up about the design process and methodology at Facebook.
• Marco Zehe asks for participation in a fact finding exercise about the current state of Firefox accessibility on Mac

I just spent several splendid days at the Ajax Experience in Boston, MA and was asked to deliver a talk about the YUI. Here’s what I went for: I wanted to make very clear that while YUI is a library much like the others, the real power of it lies in the control it gives you over the whole frontend development process from start to end.

• The CSS components make sure that creating CSS based layouts and typography are as easy cross-browser as libraries make JavaScript development
• The YUI DOM control allows you to monitor the size of the browser window, the position of the document in the window and the dimensions of any element. You can use this power to control things like fixed positioning and element overlap and even monitor font resizing.
• I explained the concept of Custom Events and how the -debug versions of YUI will notify you as a developer at any moment of execution about the internal happenings.
• I showed the development tools – the YUI logger, profiler and test suite and how they make your development process much less random.

The slides are available on slideshare and here are the code examples mentioned in the slides for browsing and to download as a zip.

[slideshare id=631005&doc=yui-for-control-freaks-a-presentation-at-the-ajax-experience-631005-1473&w=425]