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As you may know, HTML 5 is coming on its way and I wanted to emphasize some major differences between the new version and the current one, namely 4.

Firstly, it is a very powerful attribute that HTML 5 will be backwards compatible.

Character encoding is possible by using 3 different settings:

• At the transport level. By using the HTTP Content-Type header for instance.
• Using a Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM) character at the start of the file. This character provides a signature for the encoding used.
• Using a meta element with a charset attribute that specifies the encoding as the first element child of the head element. <meta charset="UTF-8"> could be used to specify the UTF-8 encoding. This replaces the need for <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

The HTML syntax of HTML 5 requires a DOCTYPE to be specified to ensure that the browser renders the page in standards mode.

There are some new elements in HTML 5:

• section represents a generic document or application section. It can be used together with h1-h6 to indicate the document structure.
• article represents an independent piece of content of a document, such as a blog entry or newspaper article.
• aside represents a piece of content that is only slightly related to the rest of the page.
• header represents the header of a section.
• footer represents a footer for a section and can contain information about the author, copyright information, et cetera.
• nav represents a section of the document intended for navigation.
• dialog can be used to mark up a conversation like this:

  <dialog>
   <dt> Costello
   <dd> Look, you gotta first baseman?
   <dt> Abbott
   <dd> Certainly.
   <dt> Costello
   <dd> Who's playing first?
   <dt> Abbott
   <dd> That's right.
   <dt> Costello
   <dd> When you pay off the first baseman every month, who gets the money?
   <dt> Abbott
   <dd> Every dollar of it.
  </dialog>

• figure can be used to associate a caption together with some embedded content, such as a graphic or video:

  <figure>
   <video src=ogg>…</video>
   <legend>Example</legend>
  </figure>

Then there are several other new elements:

• audio and video for multimedia content. Both provide an API so application authors can script their own user interface, but there is also a way to trigger a user interface provided by the user agent. source elements are used together with these elements if there are multiple streams available of different types.
• m represents a run of marked text.
• meter represents a measurement, such as disk usage.
• time represents a date and/or time.
• canvas is used for rendering dynamic bitmap graphics on the fly, such as graphs, games, et cetera.
• command represents a command the user can invoke.
• datagrid represents an interactive representation of a tree list or tabular data.
• datalist together with the a new list attribute for input is used to make comboboxes:

  <input list=browsers>
  <datalist id=browsers>
   <option value="Safari">
   <option value="Internet Explorer">
   <option value="Opera">
   <option value="Firefox">
  </datalist>

• The datatemplate, rule, and nest elements provide a templating mechanism for HTML.
• event-source is used to “catch” server sent events.
• output represents some type of output, such as from a calculation done through scripting.
• progress represents a completion of a task, such as downloading or when performing a series of expensive operations.

…and it continues. For more information, please check W3C’s relevant webpage.

NOTE: HTML5 is still a draft! 

This post intereste mostly my Turkish readers administrating their own website. If you didn’t read the recent post in shiftdelete.net, please continue to read this post.

I will list you some tools to check the speed of your website:

• Test the loadtime
• Test dead links
• Validate your CSS and HTML codes
• Clean and optimize your CSS code
• Compare the screenshots of your website in various browsers (to check the compatibility)
• Check the familiarity of your website with the search motors.

Please consider also Google’s webmaster guidelines for web page quality.

Doodlekit is a new project to build your own personal website in a minutes - and online!. Worth to check it out.

Doodlekit is an online website building tool and content management system that allows you to manage your website with ease from anywhere. Going beyond the average content management systems, Doodlekit stores your information permanently in a database, allowing you to create your own Blog entries, Forum discussions, Shopping Carts, page security, photo albums, file uploading and much more.

As I was surfing this week on the net I have found many generator websites for webpage design, logo design, label design etc.

Here is a list where you can find many sources for the mentioned subjects above:

(There can be similar websites in each lists I gave, I couldn’t check every webpage )

• Warning Label Generator
  http://www.warninglabelgenerator.com/
• ifx+
  http://www.ifxplus.com/post/More-than-100-Web-20-Online-Generators.aspx
• CSSjuice
  http://cssjuice.com/13-online-generators-for-web-20-design/
• 15 Excellent examples of Web typography
  http://ilovetypography.com/2007/09/19/15-excellent-examples-of-web-typography/
• 100 legal sources for free stock images
  http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2007/100-legal-sources-for-free-stock-images/
• Names of Colors
  http://chir.ag/phernalia/name-that-color/

I couldn’t write anything this week because I was a little cold and needed to rest evenings. I was also in a Kaizen workshop which kept me very busy. I decided to write a wrap-up and also number it with “#1″. That’s a sign I can post in this way this also later again!

The first thing is Kaizen. It is a great philosophy and thanks to Toyota which company is the founder of this philosophy and also the “lean manufacturing“. I had a training on Monday for the main aspects of Kaizen and applied them in other 3 days in our production line in the plant.

The second one is I’ve got a present which made me very happy. It is a very soft (I think it’s 100% polyester) football, bought from Ikea. Now I can play football at home, too! Hooray!

I’d like to recommend and/or inform you a few websites I met while I was surfing whole week. For instance, I’ve been informed that the famous PHP IDE Komodo has begun to a new project called Open Komodo. It’s kinda freeware Komodo and I couldn’t try it yet but in my opinion it is worth to try it absolutely.

Another useful site is the Cheat Sheet site, where you can find many reference books or “cheat sheets” for various subjects, especially about programming.

The last one is related with web design and I have found it while I was surfing to find a solution to my urgent need. I was trying to find some stylish icons for my new website and found out that there is an open-source project called Tango Desktop Project. You need to look at it. I am sure you’ll need that package someday.

I am a very lazy guy but I am very eager to publish my new website so I have started to code and design.

People may expect very cool effects, graphics or extreme layouts but no way, if anyone out there has seen my previous websites or projects, he/she knows that I am a very minimalist guy with a great obsession to optimization. Therefore, it will be a simple website.
(Of course, I will put some cool stuff there, don’t worry! )

You can watch the changes day-by-day from the beta section and I would be very happy if I can get some feedback about it. Anything is appreciated; thoughts, ideas, suggestions…

But as I said before, this blog stays the same, includes personal and daily posts.

I hope you don’t want me post only for PHP and related subjects right?

I am a big fan for books but I am a little selective about its content depth and quality. Because of that I will recommend you some books about PHP and webdesign for reference and guide which I think, would help you a lot.

Here is the list:

• The PHP Anthology, Volume II: Applications (Anthology)
  by Harry Fuecks
• The PHP Anthology, Volume I: Foundations (Anthology)
  by Harry Fuecks
• Professional Ajax
  by Nicholas C. Zakas
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
  by Martin Fowler
• Advanced PHP Programming
  by George Schlossnagle
• PHP 5 Power Programming (Bruce Perens Open Source)
  by Andi Gutmans
• PHP Unleashed
  by John Coggeshall
• Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design
  by Eric Meyer
• AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications
  by Cristian Darie, Bogdan Brinzarea

I hope you will take a look at these books and find them useful, too.

I encourage you to take the annual web design survey of A List Apart.

I wanted to share with my readers some useful and some funny tools that I have found on the net. You can create funny icons, test your fonts etc.

It is also possible to browse in my del.icio.us account or you take a look at the list below.

• The Ninja Text Generator
• Image Generator Links Database
• dafont.com
• typetester

If you looked at the page “curriculum vitae” on my site, you can see the mini flag icons attached for the cv languages.

I found them as a package on the net, in famfamfam.com. They are very useful, so I decided to share them with you all.