How do we know it’s holiday season? Sure, it’s getting colder, and possibly even snowing where you live. But the real sign for web nerds is that 24Ways, the annual advent calendar for web geeks, is shining in all its standards-promoting glory.
This year 24Ways is, along with the rest of us, embracing HTML5 and CSS3. Among the useful hints, tips and tutorials so far this year are Christian Heilmann’s take HTML5’s Local Storage API for offline content and Scott Schiller’s The State of HTML5 audio.
On the CSS side, Inayaili de León has a great CSS wishlist, which includes comments from Tab Atkins, a CSSWG member who addresses many of the possibilities raised in the piece. One particularly noteworthy item in de León’s piece is something we didn’t know existed: the :-moz-any() selector group. Although not yet a formal part of the CSS spec, it looks like the any() selector has a good chance of making it in one day.
The any() selector would be useful for shortening code, for example, because HTML5 encourages multiple h1 tags, which might be at all sorts of depths within the page, you could simple write (to borrow Mozilla’s example):
-moz-any(section, article, aside, nav) h1 { font-size: 25px; }
Again, the any() selector is a just a proposal at this point, but it does work in the latest beta of Firefox if you’d like to test it.
Other good articles so far in this year’s 24ways include a look at design workflows and how you can improve your own, and everyone’s perennial favorite — how to avoid the flash of unstyled content when embedding fonts in your page.
This year’s 24Ways also has a new twist: when the series is finished, there will be a limited edition print annual. You can order a copy today, and all proceeds will go to UNICEF.
Altoids Advent Calendar photo by Kim Taylor/Flickr/CC. For instructions, visit her blog.
