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Adapted from HTML5 For Web Designers (A Book Apart)
By Remo Camerota

HTML is the unifying language of the World Wide Web. Using just the simple tags it contains, the human race has created an astoundingly diverse network of hyperlinked documents, from Amazon, eBay, and Wikipedia, to personal blogs and websites dedicated to cats that look like Hitler.

HTML5 is the latest iteration of this lingua franca. While it is the most ambitious change to our common tongue, this isn’t the first time that HTML has been updated. The language has been evolving from the start.

As with the web itself, the HyperText Markup Language was the brainchild of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In 1991 he wrote a document called “HTML Tags” in which he proposed fewer than two dozen elements that could be used for writing web pages.

Sir Tim didn’t come up with the idea of using tags consisting of words between angle brackets; those kinds of tags already existed in the SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) format. Rather than inventing a new standard, Sir Tim saw the benefit of building on top of what already existed—a trend that can still be seen in the development of HTML5.

Read further on Graphics.com

The new Magic Trackpad is the first Multi-Touch trackpad designed to work with your Mac desktop computer. It uses the same Multi-Touch technology you love on the MacBook Pro. And it supports a full set of gestures, giving you a whole new way to control and interact with what’s on your screen.

The iPad is a great tool for both jotting down ideas quickly and working out concepts in detail. Here are three free apps that I recommend for slightly different sketching uses.

Adobe Ideas

Adobe Ideas is a good multi-purpose app to sketch things out. If you only want to use one app for both diagrams and designs use this.

British street artist Banksy recently made a trip to Detroit, Michigan, there to create several of his inimitable works. One situated in the post-apocalyptic site of the long-abandoned Packard Motors factory (shown above) has sparked a polemic. The work makes sense in its context, within in the sprawling, spectacularly rundown site of the Packard plant, where its plaintive message can't help but resonate with those pining for the mythic era in which the United States had yet to be decimated by the impact of capitalism gone wild.

The piece was apparently later removed via forklit, wall and all, by an entity known as the 555 Nonprofit Studio and Gallery, raising questions about ownership and whether the work should have been left to its fate in the great outdoors. It's worth visiting the Autoblog site to get the background on the tragic saga of the Packard plant, complete with a photo gallery that looks more like a movie set than an echo of long-gone industrial glory. And where is the elusive Banksy in all this? Who knows.

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Chris Dickman
Founding Editor, Graphics.com

The newly released free Flipboard app for iPad brings back the magazine style reading to social media. If you enjoy the layout of shiny periodicals but prefer to read what your friends are talking about then Flipboard is for you.

Here is a video and a few screenshoots to show you how it all looks like.

Provided as a full-screen application or widget for Mac users, or just as an app for Windows, 27Letters attempts to feature images from 250 "mainstream media sites and opinion-forming blogs." Rather than displaying the most popular photos, its ambitious goal is to every few days feature "the most used, referenced and talked about" images in a wide range of categories. How it does this, whether hand-picked by humans or via algorithm, is not made clear but the breadth of imagery is so far quite diverse.

The interface is slick, with floating boxes each devoted to a letter of the alphabet. I started out with E is for Extra Dimensional Artforms. Clicking the Source link for that leads to a YouTube video about 3D televisions. Zooming out then shuffles things around so that E was then represented by Exposure and Time, which linked to The New York Times photography blog. Once in a while (surprise!) a link will lead to a photo on the Getty Images site but thankfully this isn't overdone.

All in all, 27Letters winds up being a mildly diverting way to discover new sites and different approaches to using imagery, and there's nothing wrong with that.

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Chris Dickman
Founding Editor, Graphics.com

Mashable reports Adobe is working on a new kind of creative software specifically intended to help you publish digital magazines for tablet devices such as the iPad, the company revealed today.

Check out Pentagram's promotional microsite What type are you, which tells you just that, what typeface fits best your personality. You just need to answer four questions to get your typographic profile.

You can also check out how many people are like you?

I'm Universal, how about you?

Steve Jobs convincingly argues that there is nothing inherently wrong with the iPhone 4. Every smartphone can be shielded with your hands as they demonstrate it with 4 popular phones from various vendors running different operating systems. The death-grip issue affects a very small subset of users. Apple admits to have incorrect formula to display signal strength, which is now fixed in iOS4.01. Basically the signal was showing 5 almost all the time, instead of showing the real value. Apple is giving free bumpers and full refunds if you don't like the phone for any reason for 30 days. They also report the return rate on iPhone 4's is lowest ever. Drop call rate increased marginally only according to AT&T.

Apple handled the antennae gate issue well. They did what they could and I'm buying an iPhone 4 when my old 3G stops functioning. What's your take?

The winning 2010 FIFA World Cup Brazil™ emblem named “Inspiração” (Inspiration) is created by Brazilian agency Africa. The design stems from an iconic photograph of three victorious hands together raising the world's most famous trophy. As well as depicting the humanitarian notion of hands interlinking, the portrayal of the hands is also symbolic of the yellow and green of Brazil warmly welcoming the world to their country.

How do you like it?