Live Q&A: Guilherme Müller on HTML, 5th August at 4PM (EST)

@guilherme after having made Introduction to HTML Media. What’s are some methods or the best method you found to combat this?

The way I see it is to let the browser run its default player. If the browser does not support audio or video playback, you can set up a fallback easily between the opening and closing tags.

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Another interesting perspective on icon fonts, from SitePoint’s @alexmwalker: The Final Nail In The Icon Fonts Coffin?

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I think I was just answering that one!

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Hi @guilherme, this question was submitted to us in advance by one of our readers. They’d like to know: Which HTML5 APIs do you find most useful?

What are the most common HTML mistakes you tend to see from developers these days, and are there lessons from the past that have still not been learned?

This is super interesting. What are your biggest HTML mistakes @guilherme?

Secondly, what are yours @chrisofarabia?

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Thanks @aleksia!

Usefulness can change depending on the project. But I’d say that, generally, the Geolocation, Canvas and the HTMLMediaElement APIs may be the most useful, as they have moved the web forward by a lot in a little time. It’s great that we don’t need to rely on plugins for these purposes. Basic development tools for the web should be free, so these APIs help a lot in this regard.

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If you could remove any one feature from browsers/html what would it be? (If anything!)

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What’s the thing you most want to see change with t
web development in the coming year

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Yes, interesting question indeed. I guess my most common mistake in HTML would be to misuse the sectioning tags. That can be difficult some times! But nothing major, as we can always review the code and make changes.

As for a more general approach, I think that people tend to rely too much on frameworks and end up using too many tags. For more novice developers, “div-itis” is still a problem. I also see that a lot of people that I give classes to have difficulties in separating in their heads the structure of the document from the layout. They end up building the markup based on what the page will look like, rather than structuring the content properly and later thinking what they’ll really need with CSS. That’s a challenge that we as developers and teachers have to face: how to communicate the “developer mindset” to the students.

Also, for people that don’t work with HTML too often and are not in the field (I have a client that works with real-estate and would like to learn some HTML), thinking of layout with tables is much easier for them, and that’s unfortunate. We are still using hacks to solve layout in the web. Maybe with flexbox and CSS grids we will start to change that.

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I know that Massimo Cassandro is working on an ‘Switching from icon font to SVG’ piece’ for SitePoint at the moment, so keep an eye out for that is the next few weeks.

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Also, web fonts are scary. :slight_smile:

Why NoScript Blocks Web Fonts
https://hackademix.net/2010/03/24/why-noscript-blocks-web-fonts

Vulnerability in Microsoft Font Driver Could Allow Remote Code Execution

Very glad to see the transition away from anything that mandates a web font.

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@kelle, interesting question! Let me think…

Maybe I would remove floats from layout purposes once we have the grid framework! Maybe not a great one but that’s what’s come to mind!

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If you were going to recommend the best way for someone to learn RWD from the ground up, with a view to ensuring they have a solid structural foundation for it, what learning resources would you recommend?

Russ Weakly has a course on Premium called [Introduction to RWD][1] :wink:

I’m sure @guilherme has other suggestions for you though. :smile:
[1]: https://www.sitepoint.com/premium/courses/introduction-to-responsive-web-design-2889

Personally this is why I’ve gone to using susy with sass as I feel you can promote cleaner and more semantic code and have seperation of concerns in the css

Hmm… Maybe improvements on how we can deal with responsive design. I think that there are very intelligent people working on that right now! Media queries are great, but we definitely need more.

Agreed. Coming from the Print side, my brain remembers that when you spray ink on paper it tends to stay where you put it. But we do miss the structured control of layout we have in print design. But tables… cringes Source of more pain that I’d like to think about. I’m looking forward to more intuitive layout/coding tools.

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Yes, we are desperately needing them! I’m tired of clearing floats!

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Yep, a few mentioned here, for reference:

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I tend to use less the tags that still do not have much support in browsers. I know that polyfills can be used, but I think that they only go so far. I like the idea of the page working well without JS and CSS. There are other tags like kbd and dfn, that are for very specific cases so we’ll end up using them less. That said, there are other well-estabilished tags that I still need to use more, like dl, dd and dt.

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