Resenting the idea that I've turned into some kind of W3C Nazi the last few weeks, I decided to indulge myself with something a little more frivolous last weekend. Not many would consider reading the HTML5 specs a departure from W3C standards, let alone "frivolous", but I had something particular in mind - graphics.

I have been shying away from HTML5 for a while because most references I hear to it are in relation to the 2D and 3D graphics capabilities being added via the new <canvas> element. I don't have anything against graphics on the web (so long as they don't destroy the document structure, or use flash), but I tend to avoid such things because I have absolutely no artistic talent. Seriously, I struggle to draw convincing stick men. The reason my website uses more-or-less the default Joomla! template is not because I don't care what it looks like, and it's certainly not that I lack the technical skills to modify it. The problem is that I can't imagine what I would change it to look like instead. That's basically the reason I use a CMS at all to be honest - for the templates.

But since the W3C dropped XHTML, I figured I need to start looking properly at (X)HTML5, and knowing how things are with the web, I expect that most of the new and interesting work with HTML5 is going to be centered around graphics. So what can an aesthetically-challenged nerd do with graphics? Well, for one thing, fractals!!! :)

Just a few quick MathML examples here, stolen from Mozilla's MathML Torture Test page. This is only to demonstrate how you can seamlessly embed MathML XML markup directly within a XHTML document, in a Joomla! article. Note that you must serve your content with a suitable MIME type to just mix it into the document this way, and of course your browser needs to know how to render it.

You might as well forget Internet Explorer for this; it can't even handle some basic XHTML and CSS standards properly, least of all extensions such as MathML. But I believe there is an IE plug-in for MathML somewhere, and there are other tricks you can use (e.g. a special XSLT transform) to help out other browsers.

Opera has some limited support for MathML since 9.5 apparently, but as far as I know, Safari & Chrome are still lacking.

∴ Firefox = King of the Web :P

I made some changes to the identica Badge script the other day. It started out just wanting to make it work in a XHTML DOM, but I ended up hacking it to produce valid XHTML and CSS as well as couple of other small changes. Honestly, I can't think of a good reason that the script needs to pass validation - the changes to ensure it's output is well-formed were necessary, but that's about it. Still, I did it anyway, and then I decided to write an article as a kind of walk-through of the modifications.

Why? No particular reason. Despite appearances perhaps, I'm not just desperate for content here :D In part it's because the web as a reference source currently relies on having mountains of (largely redundant) information to say the same things in different ways given a multitude of individual and specific contexts. And the reason I did this at all is simply that Open Source relies heavily on vested interests; I wanted to make it work on my pages, to make it output valid markup, and I wanted it to be fluid width.

Looking for some nice people with OpenIDs to help me test this comment plugin...

I've noticed the occasional error when logging into Joomla! using OpenID with my own account, so I'd like to know if the problem is peculiar to me, or a more general issue. Please just add a comment below (click the article title first if coming from the front page) if you'd like to help.

Thank you!