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.

Simplequiz #4 asks about alt text on images that are captioned using HTML5 figure and figcaption. Steve Faulkner moderates this week.

This is a bit of a special Simplequiz this week. Simon Pieters, who works on multimedia QA for Opera and is one of those working on the HTML5 spec, asked us to run a quiz that would help the spec writers decide on a new aspect of the language.

A few years ago, Dan Cederholm published a series of articles called Simplequiz in which he posed some options for marking up a specified piece of content and invited readers to choose the one they felt was the best way to mark that up. The value was in the comments in which people said why they made that choice and debated the options (which means it is THE LAW that you read the preceeding comments before adding your own).