If the telephony could be worked out, I don’t see why a phone couldn’t be made to run on a thin, browser-like OS that accesses almost all its content on the Cloud. As HTML5 is helping web content become more app-like, and as more of users’ content is stored online, there may soon be little need for onboard apps at all. We may be doing everything we need with Web apps. This may be the end of the OS as we know it. No more bloated platform-dependent apps. Microsoft never was a trailblazer, and Apple isn’t blazing trails anymore, either. Apple is announcing iCloud and OS X Lion tomorrow, and I’d say they’re just playing catch up. Microsoft say Windows 8 is going to have an HTML5 panel screen instead of a desktop, and by the time it comes out in a year or so, it will be as old news as Windows 95 = Mac 84.

As someone who embraced platform-independent Web development before it was popular, I am thrilled to see that HTML and CSS have now taken us to the point where just about any app can be a Web app. Pretty soon, there won’t be a need for five different Facebook apps; there will just be Facebook as a web app anyone can use the same way on any device. You won’t have to wait for your favorite Website to come out with an app for your device’s operating system, because web standards and powerful web functionality will make the question of device and OS moot.

I’m already doing just about everything online with the Chrome browser now except for editing photos and videos and opening Office documents on my iMac. The only thing I do on my laptop other that the Net is Microsoft Office if I have to, and I’m already using that less as I use Google Docs more. I’m ready to move away from bloated software and over to something simple, fast, and standard. Chrome is the OS of today.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Related Posts

• Features of Good Web Design
• Style Sheets Demo Page

This is me singing Cole Porter’s song “I Concentrate on You.” I used YouTube’s “Captions and Subtitles” feature to upload a subtitle file. I hand-coded the subtitle file in BBEdit using the subtitle (.sub) format. To view the video with captions, click the up-arrow button on the bottom-right corner of the screen and choose CC, English: English captions.

A Demonstration of CSS Font Properties

Using the Shorthand font Property

Daniel Greene first published this document in February 1998.

Results are shown when using the following embedded CSS declarations [now done with inline CSS because this blog doesn't allow embedded CSS.]:

code { font-family: Fixedsys, "Lucida Console",
"Courier New", monospace; }
.p { background: #CFC; /*lightest green*/
     color: black; }
.v { background: #CFF; /*lightest blue*/
     color: black; }
.d { background: #FCF; /*lightest purple*/
     color: black; }
.samp { background: #FCF; /*lightest purple*/
     color: black;
     margin: 1em 3em;
     border: thin solid black;
     padding: 5mm; }
.test { background: #CCC; /*lightest gray*/
     padding: 1em; }

Here’s how it looks in your browser:

This is what it looked like in my browser (MSIE 4.72.2106.8 for Win95):

Notice how the background colors of the SPAN elements in the top left corner paint all the way to the top border of the DIV, and how the bottom border of the P element abuts the bottom border of the DIV?

Here are a couple of screen shots someone sent me, showing how it rendered on his browsers:

Now, MSIE 4.0a Mac version seems to have gotten the SPAN background coloring right (the colors stay within the line of text, as they should, rather than painting up to the top edge of the DIV), but the bottom edge of the P (The quick brown fox…) still abuts the bottom edge of the DIV, which is wrong. NN4.04.1 Mac seems to have done the best job; the span colors are painted correctly, and the P does not seem to abut the bottom edge of the DIV, but respects the 1em padding that’s supposed to be there.

I hope you found this illustration helpful. Thanks to Sue Simms for encouraging me to complete this little demo, and for linking to it.