Posts Tagged ‘html5’

WhatWG Twitter account

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

We woke up today with a strange message from the @WHATWG twitter account: “fuck off”

There was some astonishment and a couple of small giggles, but I think we largely ignored it. Later, though, we got a few more strange entries.
I think some kid somewhere had stumbled upon the form, which was located on the front page of whatwg.org. Just on the front page, with no password.

UI Fail to the extreme.

Anyway, there was a slew of messages as friends contacted friends and everyone realized they could tweet from the WHATWG twitter account. John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Dickwad Theory proved true. Almost everyone who posted to the account sounded like ten-year-olds.

There were a few gems in the pile, though:

  • We’re scrapping HTML5 in favor of HTML 4.5, a more modest update to the spec. Look for it this fall.
  • The HXTML 2.0 spec has been finalized with only one tag which is <text>.
  • ZOMG I’m a BLUE PENIS
  • <audio><video><disco>
  • Considering an <o rly=”ya”> tag.
  • Won’t someone please think of the children?!
  • My name is Robert’; DROP TABLE students;
  • </html> tag replaced with </kthnxbai>
  • Hello. I am WHATWG and I am EXCELLENT
  • WHATWG announce working group on emoticons. Homer says (_8(|) ~doh!

After ten minutes, it seems they ran out of API. Now it’s starting up again.
I’ve emailed Hixie, but I’ve no clue when he’ll wake up.

The @WHATWG channel started with over 1307 followers, and have since dropped to 1255.

More news in the future!

Edit:
More as they come.

  • WHATWG to start work on “Bible5” http://bit.ly/TwZcX
  • Trapped in twitter factory, send help!

Followers: 1207. I believe this will continue every hour until someone changes the site.

More edit:
This from the IRC channel:
# [16:33] <beowulf> i say abused, i think it’s important that people buy viagra
# [16:34] <gsnedders|work> Are we going to have to get “I abused @WHATWG” t-shirts
# [16:34] <miketaylr> I’ll take a size M
# [16:36] <Lachy> beowulf, did you really tweet about viagra on @whatwg?
# [16:36] <gsnedders|work> Someone did.
# [16:36] * gsnedders|work glares
# [16:36] <miketaylr> the twitter status is about to hit critical mass a la reply-all ‘stop hitting reply-all’
# [16:37] <svl> The follower count is going into freefall

Edit (19:00GMT):
After another round of spamming, which seems to have left them with 1166 followers, several measures have been taken. Everyone started spamming Twitter’s @spam account with details about the spam, I flooded @WHATWG with wrong passwords — which locked the account — and others mentioned in the IRC that they disabled the form.
So, it appears to be over.

CSSquirrel should do a comic on this! It was epic!

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HTML5 Video

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

I’m not exactly strong at javascript, but I spent the last hour picking apart the YouTube HTML5 <Video> test to figure out just what was needed to get the video to play. It turns out it’s not as simple as the put-it-in-and-go of <img> tags; it requires a kickstart with javascript. I whittled away at the HTML file and the javascript file until I was left with the following lines:


<body onLoad=”document.getElementById(‘vid’).play();”>
<video id=”vid” src=”vid.mp4″ />
</body>

That can fit in a twitter, so it’s not too much.

Oh, god, that’s going to become a new measurement:
“Hey, how long is that story you wrote?”
“Oh, about a hundred twitters.”

At any rate, toss the above code into an blank text file, rename it to .htm, and open it in Safari 4 or Chrome 3 or whatever else has <video> support.
(Beware a quote that becomes a question mark. I think wordpress does something funky and makes one of those good-looking quotes that doesn’t translate well to ANSI.)

As a final service, to anyone who tries to talk about html tags in forums and has the forum eat the tags, you need to type them like this:
&lt; becomes <
&gt; becomes >
&amp; becomes &
So to write <video>, you actually type in &lt;video&gt;

EDIT:
It looks like the code is fickle, so things I was trying before weren’t working. The following code runs a movie:
<video onClick=”this.play();” src=”vid.mp4″ />

I like to use the following:
<video onMouseOver=”this.play();” onClick=”this.pause();” src=”vid.mp4″ />

Another thing I’ll mention is that I’m referencing an mp4 video, which is a proprietary codec. Theora is an open-source codec that seeks to replace it.

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