Yahoo Launching English Version of Meme

After achieving fair success in the Portuguese and Spanish versions, Yahoo is getting ready to launch the English version of its microblogging platform 'meme'. From the recent developments it gets quite vivid that yahoo is playing all its cards to impress 'Twitter'. But may be acknowledging the huge competition its now concentrating upon developing its own 'twitter' version. The Portuguese version was shown the daylight earlier this year and they soon followed it up with a Spanish version. This service comes with almost all the features that could be found in twitter. It provides the scope for sharing photos and videos with fellow users. It also dishes out the option of reposting the messages of other users. I, like many other over enthusiastic net freak waiting eagerly for this service to get launched. It will be really interesting to see how yahoo tries to elbow out twitter on their very own ground.

CSS code structure for HTML 5: some useful guidelines

In this post I want to illustrate some useful guidelines about how to implement a well organized CSS code structure in view of introduction of HTML 5 markup language. They are not general rules but simple suggestions you can follow in order to improve the readability, manageability, and general organization of CSS code. These suggestions are especially useful if you have to work on complex CSS files that otherwise can be difficult to manage.


I prefer to separate CSS code in three distinct sections: a first section that contains general HTML tags; a second section that contains structure tags; a last section with custom classes.

Section 1: General HTML tags
In this section I divide the code in two subsections. A first subsection that contains code to reset HTML standard tags and a second subsection that contains code to redefine HTML standard tags.

Section 1: Subsection 1
How you know, regarding CSS reset, this practice is used to reset default browser styles for HTML standard elements (body, h1, p, ul, li, ...). One of the most popular files for CSS reset is the Eric Meyers CSS reset. For HTML 5 I suggest you to take a look at the Richard Clark CSS reset based on the Mayers file. These files reset all existing HTML tags and therefor contain a lot of lines of CSS code. In reality, in the majority of cases, the only frequently used tags that require to be reset are body, h1, h2, h3, p, ul, li, form, input and rarely table, tr and td. So if you prefer, you can use a shortened version of these files that includes only HTML elements you really used in your pages:

/* Subsection 1: CSS Reset */
body,
h1, h2, h3,
p, ul, li, form, input,
table, tr, td,
header, nav, article, section, dialog, figure, aside, footer {

border:0;
margin:0;
padding:0;
font-size:100%;
...

}

In the previous code I highlighted in bold some HTML 5 new tags you could need to reset (see after for a short explanation about them).

Section 1: Subsection 2
In the second subsection of the section 1 I simply redefine HTML standard tags:

/* Subsection 2: Standard HTML tags redefinition */
body,
form, input {

color:#000;
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size:12px;

}

h1{font-size:24px;}
h2{font-size:18px;}
h3{font-size:13px;}

a:link, a:visited{color:#0033CC;}
a:hover {color:#666;}

If I need to define a standard tag (for example <h1>) with different properties depending on the position of the tag on the page (<h1> for post titles and <h1> for sidebar titles) I prefer to add the related CSS code into the section that contains structural tags (Section 2). For example, for the sidebar:

aside {...}

aside h1 {...}

Section 2: Structural tags
In this section I define all CSS elements that define the page structure. As I anticipated, HTML 5 introduces new tags that improve the semantic of the code. Some of these tags are: <header>, <nav>, <article>, <section>, <aside>, <footer>... You can use these tag instead of more common DIV layers we used until now (for example: <div id="nav">...</div>).
Shortly, the picture on the right represents a typical two columns layout that use HTML 5 tags to define page structure. If you want to know more information about this topic, I suggest you to take a look at these excellent articles:

- Smashing Magazine: HTML5 and The Future of the Web
- Steve Smith: Structural Tags in HTML5
- Lachlan Hunt: Preview of HTML5

CSS code is very simple:

header{...}
nav{...}
article{...}
section{...}
aside{...}
footer{...}

Practically it's identical to the code we are using with DIV layers:

#header{...}
#nav{...}
#aside{...} /* sidebar*/
#footer{...}
...

For each HTML element you can define its child elements. For example if this is the code for the navigation bar:

<nav>

<ul>

<li>...</li>
<li>...</li>
<li>...</li>

</ul>

</nav>

...the related CSS code is:

nav{...}

nav ul{...}

nav ul li{...}
nav ul li a{...}

As I said before, in order to improve code readability, I suggest you to use indented code, and alphabetical order to list properties of elements:

nav ul li a{

font-size:12px;
height:24px;
line-height:24px;
text-align:center;
text-decoration:none;
width:100px;

}

What changes respect to HTML 4? Not so much:

<div id="nav">

<ul>

<li>...</li>
<li>...</li>
<li>...</li>

</ul>

<div>

Simplifying, this kind of structural tags in HTML 5 are DIV layer with a specific ID in HTML 4:

#nav{...}

#nav ul{...}

#nav ul li{...}
#nav ul li a{...}

Section 3: Custom Classes
In the last section of my CSS files I add custom classes I can reuse in several sections (header, sidebar, footer,...).

/* Custom Classes */
.left-align{float:left;}
.red{color:#FF0000;}
.small-text-gray{color:#999; font-size:11px;}

That's all. If you have some suggestion about this topic please leave a comment, thanks!

 

Now its Microsoft-Yahoo-Amazon vs Google in the Book Settlement issue

The challenge has become tougher for Google in the Book Settlement issue, as America’s largest online retailer and web biggie Amazon joins the hand with Microsoft-Yahoo against them. And to add salt to their wound, strong supports have been enunciated from many quarters. With a steadily growing support, this coalition is now looking to pose a serious threat to dismiss the deal that Google had struck with Authors Guild last year.

According to this deal Google gets the right to make the published books available on the Internet and in return they give back a certain percentage of revenue generated from the ads that run along these books. This deal was struck after almost a three and half year old tussle between Google and Authors Guild over the dispute regarding publishing of the books online by Google through their book search segment. But just when it was looking everything has been sorted out, it suddenly went wrong from Google's point of view. It seems that their steady growth and envious success has amplifying their enemy list rapidly.

The reason behind this new dispute is stemmed out of the concern that this deal will provide Google with an unfair advantage over other players in the digital book market.

As several groups of authors, libraries and publishers are uniting against the deal, and libraries like Special Libraries Association and the New York Library Association, supported by American society of Journalists and Authors are joining the coalition, it seems that Google is going to have a tough time ahead.