My Review of HTML5: Up and Running

Originally submitted at O'Reilly

If you don't know about the new features available in HTML5, now's the time to find out. The latest version of this markup language is going to significantly change the way you develop web applications, and this book provides your first real look at HTML5's new elements and attributes. ...

HTML5: Up and Running

The Linkable Book of HTML5

By hnh12358 from Havana, Cuba on 8/18/2010

 

5out of 5

Pros: Helpful examples, Accurate, Well-written, Easy to understand, Concise

Best Uses: Intermediate

Describe Yourself: Developer, Designer

Being sincere HTML5:U&R doesn't turn in the book I was expected. My expectation was a book that augments the set of volumes that with slightly practice examples, coupled with less enthusiastic transcriptions of the standard, make their way to the last page. My bad from tag to tag, the truth is that the subtitle could not be more accurate for a book so simple and yet useful.

I haven't read too much pages before I realized that I was reading the archive of a blog never published, sense that remains until the end of the material. Like a blog post the text used hyperlinks extensible not just in the "Further Reading" section of all chapters but instead in the whole book. At least for me this can be very annoying while I'm reading other than the digital version, but it proves to summarize the value of the book: avoid extensive research of the standard from the reader while advocate meticulous resources on the internet (W3C documents included). In the presence of and HTML book, kudos goes to the author for using this approach.

Really there is nothing hard to grasp within HTML5, which is his joy. The dare is, of course, archive the same output from different browsers, a subject that Mark Pilgrim had well covered for the reader. Each chapter starts with a short (and kind of epic) introduction followed by a well-timed table about the implementation state of the features that will be discussed. Next is the zealous discussion about how HTML5 help you to write better webs pages.

Beginning with a bit of www history and how we can be proactive against the lack of HTML5 universal support the author will visit several topics of relevance, local storage, offline access, demystify video codec's on web development and microdata excerpts among others. Summarizing this book is like the HTML5 dominical school we don't have, and surely if you read it will learn something new and start applying it quite immediately.

What I missed most? An appendix containing hyperlinks other than those included in "Further Reading" sections:

1.Web sites that remarkably uses some of the HTML5 features. There is any social network that inserts microdata on their profile pages?
2.Where I can find more "accepted" microdata.
3.Applications that build over HTML5 semantic assess other that Google's. A GreaseMonkey script maybe…
4.Developer tools that support the creation of complain HTML5 documents. Are WebIde and Dreamweaver recognizing HTML5 tags and attributes?
5.JavaScript libraries or web frameworks that already used HTML5 tags whenever is possible.

Conclusions? Basically if the reader of this note builds web pages on daily basics and has time for 190 pages he or she shall read this book and became easily inducted into the future of web development. Maybe when nobody remember IE6 and the support for is native in IEx and Google finally has taken the world, the web sites you build the next three years (applying the recommendations of this book) will be that kind of old HTML set of documents completely transparent to the future first-class semantic engines.

Hopefully when that time comes the W3C also had long time issued a mandatory rule to browser vendors, that if they intend to provide support for input tags (like date time) they should ensure make it with style or at least mimic the OS theme (and I'm not suggesting anything to Opera Software ;-).

(legalese)

Verificar si una matriz es Sudoku con un ciclo y con ninguno

Voy a compartir un pequeño divertimento de como verificar si una matriz de 9x9 cumple las condiciones para ser un Sudoku utilizando un ciclo [MATLAB] y ninguno [F#]. El objetivo no es reducir líneas de código sino hacer el código más declarativo (es decir que el código “hable por sí solo” o casi).

Las condiciones que debe cumplir una matriz son que en cada una de sus filas, columnas y celdas de orden 3 deben estar todos los números del 1 al 9, es decir no puede haber repeticiones en cada uno de los 27 conjuntos.

Para verificar estos conjuntos debe observarse que la suma de las potencias de 2 cuyos exponentes son sus elementos es igual 1022:

2^1 + 2^2 + 2^3 + 2^4 + 2^5 + 2^6 + 2^7 + 2^8 + 2^9 = 1022

O bien que dicha sumatoria dividida por 1022 es igual a 1

Por otra parte si agrupamos cada uno de los 27 conjuntos en tres grupos (filas, columnas, celdas) resulta que cada uno contiene 9 elementos. Esta enumeración nos lleva a utilizar un solo ciclo para analizar la terna de la fila, columna y celda n. Donde si aplicamos el criterio de verificación anterior como una función, a cada uno de los conjuntos de la terna su suma debe ser igual a 3:

C(Fila[n]) + C(Columna[n]) + C(Celda[n]) = 3 

Cualquier otro valor indicaría que el conjunto no tiene todos los números naturales menores que 10 y por tanto que la matriz no es un Sudoku.

Llevando lo anterior a código de MATLAB quedaría como sigue:

function R = IsSudoku(SU)
f = @(x) sum(sum(power(2,min(10,max(0,x))))) / 1022;
R = 1;
for n = 1:9
    r = sum([1 2 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 7 8 8 8 9 9 9] == n);
    c = sum([1 2 2 3 3 3 4 5 5 6 6 6 7 8 8 9 9 9] == n);
    if sum([f(SU(n,:)) f(SU(:,n)) f(SU(3*r-2:3*r,3*c-2:3*c))]) ~= 3
        R = 0; return;
    end
end

Lo más destacable es la obtención de cada uno de los conjuntos a partir de la sintaxis que soporta MATLAB para extraer submatrices, en especial la submatriz correspondiente a la celda. Una manera de sacar la formula puede verse en la siguiente imagen:

Nótese que aunque podria haberse creado una función con condicionales, al obtener los resultados mediante 3k-2 es más sencillo plantear una función en forma de vector que tome el indice de la celda y obtenga el k para calcular el valor deseado. 

Una implementación enteramente funcional (sin ciclos) con el lenguaje F# quedaría así:

let isSudoku (m : FMatrix) =
    requires (m.Dimension = (9,9)) "Not a Sudoku Matrix"
    let f (a : FMatrix) = (a.Items |> Seq.map (fun x -> Math.Pow(2.0,Math.Min(10,Math.Max(0,x)))) |> Seq.sum) / 1022.0
    let pos arr n = arr |> Array.filter ((=) n) |> Array.length
    let h n = 
        let r,c = pos [|1;2;3;4;4;5;5;6;6;7;7;7;8;8;8;9;9;9|] n, 
                  pos [|1;2;2;3;3;3;4;5;5;6;6;6;7;8;8;9;9;9|] n
        f(m.[n .. n, *]) + f(m.[*, n .. n]) + f(m.[3 * r - 2 .. 3 * r, 3 * c - 2 .. 3 * c])
    seq {1..9} |> Seq.map h |> Seq.forall ((=) 3.0)

La clase FMatrix se encuentra en un proyecto de CodePlex, dicha clase  implementa una convención de F# para permitir una sintaxis de extración de submatrices equivalente a la de  MATLAB. En esta versión para no utilizar ciclos se utiliza una secuencia (seq {1..9}) como secuencia de entrada, un mapping (Seq.map) para aplicar el criterio y el operador forall que consolida  la secuencia final en un valor booleano obtenido de comprobar que todos los elementos sean iguales a 3.

El performance de los dos códigos es bueno, en parte gracias a la instrucción: min(10,max(0,x)) que previene de evaluar una potencia de 2 costosa al tiempo que mantiene el resultado final. En el caso de MATLAB no estoy 100% seguro que no se utilicen otros ciclos en el proceso de hallar la submatriz, para el código en F# puede comprobarse que los iteradores involucrados (incluso los definidos en la biblioteca de F#) no utilizan variables de estado para soportar contadores.

Espero que les haya resultado interesante.

-hnh

__

Currently Reading: Frank Herbert – Children of Dune; Aldous Huxley – Brave New World.