Dear old IE, however, doesn’t allow you to use the new tags, such as <article>, <nav> etc in your CSS.

There is the popular ‘HTML5Shiv’ which basically does the following in JavaScript:

document.createElement("article");
document.createElement("nav");

But what if you have to make your sites work 100% in IE without JavaScript? Well, you can do the following using conditional comments:

Obviously then, you need to use the classnames, not the elements themselves in your CSS.

Ugly? Yes. But it works!

The result was equally interesting. A ‘hung’ parliament; no one party won a majority. The result of days of discussion is a coalition Government, with Conservatives and Liberals sharing power. I’m pleased with this result, and I thought I’d explain why, given that so many of my friends seem to be so aghast at the concept of the Tories being in power.

I’ll start by raising my concerns, and I think I share the same thoughts as a lot of my friends. A Conservative Government means the following is almost inevitable:

• Massive cuts in public spending. There will be less benefits available. The unemployed will get less money. The sick will get less money. Poor families will get less money.
• Tax rises. Quite big ones.
• An increased divide between the rich and the poor.

The above makes for grim reading. So why, given that I understand the above is inevitable, could I possibly be pleased?

Immigration

My first reason is one that people tend to feel strongly about, and that is immigration. Under a Conservative Government, it will drop. Sharply. This is an unfortunate necessity, in my opinion, of the situation Britain finds itself in. And, ultimately, a positive thing.

I am privileged to live in such a multi-cultural city as London, and no doubt the plethora of nationalities and cultures is a positive thing. Some of my best friends and most esteemed colleagues are from abroad. However, it is clear that there is a rise in the number of people who are not so willing to embrace being ‘British’, and contributing back through their skills, hard work and culture.

They are more interested in our liberal distribution of wealth by means of easy-to-acquire benefits. Our welfare state is all they are interested in, not our culture. In fact, they are determined to retain their culture, and wave the flag of political incorrectness and xenophobia at us if we so much as dare to point out that maybe completely covering your face with a veil may not be polite. We’re not a religious country either and people living here need to appreciate and accept this, and not claim we are xenophobic if we, as a nation, are not so up for following a faith and making it as much a part of our lives as would be normal in other countries.

A multi-cultural Britain is a good thing. A loss of national identity is not.

Benefits and taxes

Again, I am delighted that we live in a country where we have a welfare state. I was shocked to hear some of my American friends opinions on free healthcare reform recently – it just does not compute to me, that you should not be entitled to healthcare if you are sick. It’s one of the things that makes this country so great.

A few years ago I was running a startup company with my good friend Pete. I was earning a pittance, working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. I paid my rent, my council tax, my income tax, the business tax, the tax tax, the tax tax tax….you get the idea. I would have been much better off (financially) to have gone and worked at a supermarket, earning the minimum wage; an income of around £12k a year. Or, equally, just stay unemployed; claim housing benefit, tax credits, not paid council tax etc etc. Same amount of disposable income, just less work.

Maybe it was just my unique, personal experience, but this for me was a common trait of the Labour Government.  My strive to succeed, to start my own business, to move up the social rung to the next level of income; there were so many barriers to it. The extra work simply did not equate to extra income. The jump from ~£10k to ~£20k income was painful, to the point where I very nearly gave up.

If you’ve owned and run a small business during the last 5 years, you’ll likely agree with me. Labour didn’t tax the poor as much as tax the aspiring poor. Stay lower class, stay doing ‘alright’, after all, that’s their base of support, so they want to encourage that slice of society.

If you’re happy in your job at a supermarket, bar, high street chain, and you don’t aspire to anything more, a Conservative Government will not help you. If you feel you want to do something more, want to go from doing ok to doing well, then with the current Government, this will be a lot easier. I welcome this.

It is unacceptable to not give aid and benefits to the needy, but those with skills or drive should not be discouraged from bettering themselves, and subsequently, bettering the country as a whole.

The National Debt

I hope, one day, to settle down, to start a family. I want my children to be able to enjoy a prosperous Britain.

Our current debt, as a nation, nay, as a world, is out of control. The proposed cuts by the Conservatives, whilst harsh are, in my opinion, necessary. I did not agree with Labour’s approach to spend their way out of recession.

The current coalition, happily, includes members of the Liberal Democrats. They’re raising the threshold for tax-free income to £10k – this is fantastic news. Those on the minimum wage, earning around £12k, working a 37.5 hour week at their local high street store will benefit from this new Government.

My tax bill, however, is going to increase, probably dramatically. And you know what? I’m not unhappy about it at all. I would rather pay now, while I’m young, able, and working; in 5 years time, this period of extreme taxation, harsh truths, spending cuts; when I do eventually settle down, and my children grow up, the country will be in a much better state.

We’re fucked, financially, as a country. You can be selfish – no-one wants to pay more taxes – or, you can accept it’s something that unfortunately we need. ‘Blaming’ Labour is easy – I don’t think it’s their fault, per say; but we, as a country, cannot afford a Labour administration. And ‘blaming’ a Conservative Government for tax increases is not their fault either. It’s a necessity.

The ‘now’ is fucked regardless of who is in power. The future is what we should look to, and I believe a Conservative Government is best for our country’s future.

Benefiting the rich and why it’s kind of a good thing

Given my above point, this is one of the reasons why I actually don’t mind the Conservative’s perceived agenda of benefitting the rich, at the expense of the poor.

Sure, some of the rich will sit in their castles, counting their money.

But some of them will invest; some of them will take advantage of the current markets and expand their businesses; the super-rich are the people that go into other countries, buy up their industries, and relocate them back to their native country. We need super-rich British people to go to countries in trouble, buy their assets, buy their companies, and ultimately be providers of jobs, for the working class.

We need to encourage the rich to come (or stay) in our country. Need it. For our future.

Gordon Brown

I don’t need to elaborate any more than to say I didn’t vote for him, I didn’t like him, and I’m glad to see him go. I didn’t vote Labour (no shit sherlock) but I did vote against Gordon Brown. If Labour had appointed a new leader prior to the election, my vote may have been very different.

The ‘best loser’ won, and we have Liberals with power

Regardless of the media bullshit, the disaffection with Labour and Gordon Brown and everything in between; The Conservatives ‘won’. They had a larger slice of the vote. We live in a democracy and regardless of whether you agree, more people voted Conservative than any other party. For the two losers to take power would have been a travesty of justice. Are the rules wrong? Possibly, and I expect a change in one form or another. But by the rules, which we all knew, Conservatives ‘won’, and, in the British spirit, we should respect that.

We don’t have an exclusive Conservative Government. We have a coalition. Nick Clegg and Vince Cable will keep the Conservatives honest; David Cameron can’t be seen to ignore or discount their opinions; we’ll have 5 years of Conservatism (the clue to why that’s good is in the name) and the Liberal votes will ensure that Thatcher-style long-term damage is not caused. After their term in Government, we’ll get the chance to make a choice again.

By the way, I voted for the Liberal Democrats.

I’ve spent the last week working on some initial ideas on and off and you can see the fruits of my labour at http://fakedarren.github.com (preferably on an iPhone, and definitely in a webkit browser).

I’ve got some basic styles down, with not one image in sight so far (CSS3 is amazing), and the most interesting thing so far is extending my friend’s existing Touch class with Gesture support. I can now add events to elements such as ’swipe left’ and ‘pinch’ – pretty damn cool. I want to make this very important part of the toolkit rock-solid and a joy to use, so how far it has come in such a short time is really encouraging.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be completing the HTML templates – forms need a lot of work, for instance – and I want to get a really solid set of templates and easy-to-manage CSS so theming is a cinch.

Once that is done, I’ll push on into getting animations between pages done; sliding, flipping, rotating, fading etc. That’ll keep me busy for the foreseeable future but there are a lot of other things I want to be able to support in the final version.

Check it out on your iPhones or fork it on github and let me know what features you’d like to see!

I currently work at an awesome company called Abacus E-Media and I enjoy it, I really do; but recently I’ve been getting more and more involved with open source projects like MooTools and I get so busy at Abacus I really don’t get time to contribute.

Next year though, I get to go (hopefully) down to a part-time contract; this gives me 2 days a (working) week to do something that pushes my skills that bit more; to do things that are closer to the ‘bleeding edge’; it’s really exciting for me. I’ve got a lot of options and I’m excited by all of them.

First of all I want to continue the great work we’re doing at Abacus. I’d love to help on the next iteration of their CMS which could turn out to be something quite special.

I also have a burning desire to finish my CMS, ‘Excalibur’. WYSIWYG content editing in the purest form. I also hope to release the codebase as open source, and also hope to be able to provide some demos / examples in the real near future.

I also have an opportunity at GigJunkie that I’m super-excited about; I really think I can help them with their front end and it sounds like they have their head screwed on with regards to how they want to take their site forward. I’m intrigued, and would love to be involved.

Last of all…..MooTools. Goddamn. Next weekend I get to host a hackathon for some of the best JS developers in the world – more about that next weekend – but I think the MooTools project has everything it needs to really be a success in 2010. So many awesome, passionate developers; a very solid codebase; so many ways it can grow.

We have so much awesome just waiting to be unleashed. Server-side implementations, a brand new and stupidly good selector engine (Slick), the new Class system; that’s without the massive improvements to our community, demos and tutorials.

Basically – 2010, regardless of what the Chinese calendar tells you, is the year of the Moo. And I for one am looking forward to it loads.

I’ve been meaning to for absolutely ages, just never got round to it. But recently I’ve been getting more and more annoyed with myself for not taking the time to do so.

Hopefully, the content on this here blog will be of interest to people. I’ve got grand plans – how well they are executed remains to be seen – but basically I hope to be able to write a ton of awesome articles about the various tricks I’ve learnt over the years. I’ll mainly be covering MooTools, CSS, C# and PHP, with the odd sprinkling of HTML5, accessibility, ActionScript and hell, maybe even some jQuery.

And goddamn am I looking forward to it!