The Jan­uary 06, 2009 edi­tion of A List Apart fea­tures two arti­cles about the devel­op­ment of HTML 5. Anyone who works in web devel­op­ment or who has an interest in learning about it should take a look. HTML 5 is a huge, ongoing, con­vo­luted project which appears to be the result of too many cooks in the kitchen. Given the impor­tance of HTML to both our work as web devel­opers as well as to the world of acces­sible infor­ma­tion, it’s not sur­prising that everyone wants their chance to stir the roux. What this means to me is that HTML 5 is likely to rep­re­sent a com­pro­mise of inter­ests rather than the best pos­sible solu­tion for web devel­op­ment and dig­ital publishing.

In unre­lated news, I have been searching for Man­darin Lan­guage edu­ca­tion resources online and for the iPhone. So far the only thing I have been able to find is a free Chinese-English dic­tio­nary, but I think it requires an internet con­nec­tion to work. I have also found a pod­cast that is pretty good. How­ever, the asso­ci­ated learning resources (avail­able online in PDF format) is $110/year to access. That seems a bit much, but I don’t have a real frame of reference.