I finally got around to playing about with the <canvas> element of HTML5 and amongst other things I have written a simple bar chart creator and have written about it over at html5laboratory.

All comments welcome.

With the release of Firefox 3.6, one of the things that was promised was a HTML5 parser. Well it’s here, but the it is turned off by default. Here’s how to enable it.

1. Type about:config in your Firefox address bar
2. Click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button on the warning message that appears (and make sure you adhere to it!)
3. Type html5.enable into the filter bar at the top of the page
4. As you can see it’s currently disabled, so click it to toggle the value to true

There you go, the Firefox HTML5 parser should now be enabled.

The next question is what does it do…

As you may have noticed, I have been messing around with HTML5 a lot lately, even making my personal website HTML5 compliant. To say the least, this has tweaked my curiosity a lot and I knew that I would be playing around with the new features that HTML5 has to offer and thought that I should create a new site, in HTML5, where I can share my experiences when experimenting with these elements.

And thus HTML5 Laboratory was born!

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When I redesigned iandevlin.com as a business-card style website, I was a bit lazy when it came to the contact form. Other than making it snazzily slide down when the @ symbol graphic is clicked on, I didn’t do much else with it, leaving it the way it was – using a CGI script to send the email (I know! Seriously!)

I always had the intention of changing it but never actually got around to doing it for various reasons that range from just not being bothered to being lazy. But after reading a form of madness over at Dive Into HTML5, I decided that the time had come to actually get on with it, and to make use some of the new elements within html5. And so I have.

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Earlier this year I was pondering on how I might be able to use a custom font on a website on the entire text of the site rather than via inline or background images. It was only a passing thought, whilst I was away from a computer screen and it was quickly forgotten.

However, more recently through the brilliant bulletproof @font-face implementation article by Paul Irish and Arekibo’s post I have become aware of the @font-face CSS property and to its ever growing potential.

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A while ago I wrote a blog post on html5, and afterwards I decided to re-code my existing homepage to be html5 compliant, and now it is! Helpfully the guys at W3C have added validation for html5, albeit experimental, but it does the trick.

I’ve tested it on Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Firefox 3.5.5, Safari 4.0.3, Opera 10.10 and Google Chrome, and all seems to work fine.

Of course this blog is not html5 compliant, since it’s Wordpress and the theme itself isn’t coded in html5, but that may change in the future should I get the time.