Last weekend I was sat on the tube (London underground to international readers), picadilly line to be exact, heading into central London. A young man got on and sat down opposite me. He got out a little ASUS netbook, turned it on and swivelled the lid to use it as a touch screen. "Awesome", I thought, "he's got one of those cool touch screen netbooks running Windows 7, I'd love one of those, it'd be so convenient".
Did you know, HTML 5, the spec that will be completed in 2022, but with some bits available now, will have a whole new set of form elements designed to make complex forms available natively from the browser. I've been to a few talks where Opera's Bruce Lawson has demoed and talked about these upcoming features that have been implemented in the Opera browser. From an accessibility standpoint it looks great; no longer will screen readers have to rely on labels to infer the type of data to be entered into forms. From a developer's standpoint, you won't have to code javascript date pickers any more, nor have to rely on javascript for validation.
Of the upcoming CSS3 modules that are coming into common use: selectors, borders, text etc, the multi-column layout module interests me the most. I've always been a fan of newspaper style layouts and that was one of the key looks I was going for when re-designing this site. The big problem is that the module just isn't ready yet.
If you're like me, with an eye on Google Reader even over the holidays, you won't have failed to notice the upcoming Apple event at which the Apple touch-screen tablet, likely to be called iSlate or the Slate, will be announced. Such is the predictability of this event, given the number of rumours that have appeared, it is now completely without interest. Even the stock market takes more notice of Apple's rumours, rather than their product announcements.