After The Great Vendor Prefix Hullaballoo of April 2012 comes The Great Responsive Images Brouhaha of May 2012. We look at the main competing formats for adding adaptive images to HTML – the <picture> element, and the <img srcset=""> attribute.

HTML5 (or now, the WebRTC spec) gives us getUserMedia, a way for JavaScript to access streams from a device’s camera and microphone. Find out how to use it and normalise the syntax differences between Opera and Chrome with the gUMshield.

Your friendly neighbourhood doctors are often contacted by journalists and analysts who have questions about HTML5, usually from a consumer of business perspective. This is great, as we spend many more hours every week mutely shaking our heads while reading the ill-informed columns from journalists or analysts who haven’t contacted us.

Last Wednesday saw HTML5Doctor win a Critters award for best blog.

For the last couple of years, it’s been fashionable to have “fat footers” in websites. Take, for example, Jeffrey Zeldman’s footer…

Recently Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, announced that HTML is the new HTML5, meaning that the WHATWG will drop the numeral “5” and just call their spec “HTML”. Giant brains John Foliot and Bruce Lawson engage in an intellectual clash of the titans over whether or not you should care.

HTML5: Designing Rich Internet Applications by Matthew David (Focal Press). I’ll be honest and up front, this is a pretty negative review. I’ve been sitting on it for months, but decided to post it as people have asked our opinion of this book.

We Doctors like the proposed HTML5 logo from the W3C; it’s down there, glistening in our footer. But we think that the definition of HTML5 that the W3C offers is too broad to be useful.

Through our handy Ask The Doctor service, we get a lot of e-mails asking us about HTML5′s effect on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). While we can’t answer in great detail (Messrs Google, Yahoo, Bing, and their friends haven’t sent us in-depth details of their algorithms), we’ve rounded up some useful facts from Google, the world’s most dominant search engine.

Here’s nice and simple Simplquiz for Christmas. Imagine a new site, with a news item in an <article> element. Within that are several user-submitted comments, each of which is in its own <article> element, as the spec recommends. Most commenting systems ask the commenter for his/ her URL, which is published in the header of the comment, usually as a link with the commenter’s name as the linked text.