Email is not dead yet.

Google announced support for embedding and using semantic information in gmail messages in either Microdata or JSON-LD. They currently handle several use cases (actions) that use the semantic markup and a way to define new actions.

Providing a way to embed data in JSON-LD should open up the system for experimentation with other vocabularies beyond schema.org. Since the approach just leverages the general ability to embed semantic data in HTML it is not restricted to gmail and can be used by any email environment that supports messages whose content is encoded as HTML.

We hope that this will lead to many exciting ideas, as developers experiment with applications that use the mechanism to embed and understand concepts, entities and facts in email messages.

Hidden away in the depths of the CSS specification you’ll find CSS counters. As the name suggests they allows you to count a thing on your page with CSS incrementing the value every time it appears on the document.

This is principally useful if you have a tutorial website — whether that be about cooking or web development — they all have steps to follow, and you’ll most likely have to write the step number before the actual content. CSS counters can help by doing that automatically, you can even use it to count the images on your file and add figure numbers before captions.

In this example I will be demonstrating how to achieve this by creating a simple recipe for pancakes and making CSS search for the beginning of each paragraph and adding the number of the step before it.

The HTML

<section>
    	<p>Place the flour in a large bowl, make a well in the centre and pour in the milk and eggs. Give the liquid mixture a quick whisk before incorporating the flour. Continue to whisk until you have a smooth batter.</p>
    	<p>Now add 1 tbsp vegetable oil and whisk thoroughly.</p>
    	<p>Take a crêpe pan, or large frying pan, dip some kitchen roll in the oil and carefully wipe the inside of the pan. Heat the pan over a medium heat for one minute.</p>
    	<p>Add just under a ladleful of batter to the pan and immediately start swirling it around the pan to produce a nice even layer.</p>
    	<p>Cook the pancake for approximately 30-40 seconds. Use a palette knife to lift the pancake carefully to look at the underside to check it is golden-brown before turning over. Cook the other side for approx 30-40 seconds and transfer to a serving plate.</p>
    </section>
    

The objective in this HTML is that each paragraph is a different step and with CSS we can add those dynamically by writing as little as 3 lines of code.

The CSS

CSS counters use the property counter-increment. It has been around for a while it was actually implemented in CSS 2.1, to use it we must first reset the counter’s default value to 0 before anything we want to count shows up on the page, so it’s a good idea to define this in the body styles, like so:

body {
      counter-reset: steps;  
    }
    

This line just sets the counter back to 0 and it also names it, allowing us to later call it and also allowing us to have more than one counter on the page.

The next step is to use the pseudo element :before to target all the paragraphs and add the step number before all the text begins. To do that we need to use counter-increment, then specify the content. We can just use the number or we can append or prepend some text , in this case we’ll prepend “Step ” before the counter’s value, like so:

p:before {
      counter-increment: steps; 
      content: "Step " counter(steps) ": ";
    }
    

We should also make this content stand out a little and to do that we’ll give it a bigger font-size than the paragraphs and make it bold:

p {
     color: #242424;
     font-family: arial, sans-serif;
     font-size: 16px;
     line-height: 20px;
    }
    
    p:before {
      counter-increment: steps; 
      content: "Step " counter(steps) ": ";
      font-weight: bold;
      font-size: 18px;
    }
    

If you want to see this idea in action, you can see the pen I created.

Browser support

A constant concern when working with CSS is the browser support, but since this is a CSS 2.1 implementation the browser support is great: it’s supported by all major browsers, desktop and mobile , the only significant browser that doesn’t support it is IE7, and according to my stat counter IE7 is used by only 0.61% of people so I think we can say that IE7 will be departing soon. Whether or not you need to support IE7 is dependent on the stats of your own site.

Conclusion

CSS counters is not something that you will use in every project but it’s something that you should keep in the back of your mind because someday it may come in handy.

Have you used CSS counters in a project? What uses can you see for them? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, counting image via Shutterstock.

Magnolia: 150+ Professional Infographic Elements – only $9!

Hidden away in the depths of the CSS specification you’ll find CSS counters. As the name suggests they allows you to count a thing on your page with CSS incrementing the value every time it appears on the document.

This is principally useful if you have a tutorial website — whether that be about cooking or web development — they all have steps to follow, and you’ll most likely have to write the step number before the actual content. CSS counters can help by doing that automatically, you can even use it to count the images on your file and add figure numbers before captions.

In this example I will be demonstrating how to achieve this by creating a simple recipe for pancakes and making CSS search for the beginning of each paragraph and adding the number of the step before it.

The HTML

<section> <p>Place the flour in a large bowl, make a well in the centre and pour in the milk and eggs. Give the liquid mixture a quick whisk before incorporating the flour. Continue to whisk until you have a smooth batter.</p> <p>Now add 1 tbsp vegetable oil and whisk thoroughly.</p> <p>Take a crêpe pan, or large frying pan, dip some kitchen roll in the oil and carefully wipe the inside of the pan. Heat the pan over a medium heat for one minute.</p> <p>Add just under a ladleful of batter to the pan and immediately start swirling it around the pan to produce a nice even layer.</p> <p>Cook the pancake for approximately 30-40 seconds. Use a palette knife to lift the pancake carefully to look at the underside to check it is golden-brown before turning over. Cook the other side for approx 30-40 seconds and transfer to a serving plate.</p> </section> 

The objective in this HTML is that each paragraph is a different step and with CSS we can add those dynamically by writing as little as 3 lines of code.

The CSS

CSS counters use the property counter-increment. It has been around for a while it was actually implemented in CSS 2.1, to use it we must first reset the counter’s default value to 0 before anything we want to count shows up on the page, so it’s a good idea to define this in the body styles, like so:

body { counter-reset: steps; } 

This line just sets the counter back to 0 and it also names it, allowing us to later call it and also allowing us to have more than one counter on the page.

The next step is to use the pseudo element :before to target all the paragraphs and add the step number before all the text begins. To do that we need to use counter-increment, then specify the content. We can just use the number or we can append or prepend some text , in this case we’ll prepend “Step ” before the counter’s value, like so:

p:before { counter-increment: steps; content: "Step " counter(steps) ": "; } 

We should also make this content stand out a little and to do that we’ll give it a bigger font-size than the paragraphs and make it bold:

p { color: #242424; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 20px; } p:before { counter-increment: steps; content: "Step " counter(steps) ": "; font-weight: bold; font-size: 18px; } 

If you want to see this idea in action, you can see the pen I created.

Browser support

A constant concern when working with CSS is the browser support, but since this is a CSS 2.1 implementation the browser support is great: it’s supported by all major browsers, desktop and mobile , the only significant browser that doesn’t support it is IE7, and according to my stat counter IE7 is used by only 0.61% of people so I think we can say that IE7 will be departing soon. Whether or not you need to support IE7 is dependent on the stats of your own site.

Conclusion

CSS counters is not something that you will use in every project but it’s something that you should keep in the back of your mind because someday it may come in handy.

Have you used CSS counters in a project? What uses can you see for them? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, counting image via Shutterstock.

Magnolia: 150+ Professional Infographic Elements – only $9!

On Thursday May 23^rd starting at 1pm LDAP master, Kerberos and Webadmin will be taken down for system maintenance.  During this time account creations and password changes will be unavailable.  The maintenance window will allow staff to apply needed security and application updates.  The outage window is expected to last three hours with services being restored by 4pm on Thursday May 23^rd.  

The new Offscreen Magazine has launched and it features none other than our very own Ryan Carson. It’s no secret that Offscreen is one of my favorite magazines for its integrity, in-depth interviews with the internet’s brightest, great photography, amazing layout, and useful features.

Creator Kai Brach has clarity of intent and passionate conviction when building each issue and it shows in the final product.

Hey Look, It’s Ryan!

It was really cool to see Ryan in this issue of Offscreen, and to read about how passionate he is about family, life and the mission of Treehouse.

If you’d like to peek inside the life of the man that is leading the future of tech education (we’re not biased or anything), then grabbing a copy of issue #5 would be the perfect way to do it.

Real Interviews You Can Learn From

One of the elements that I appreciate most about Offscreen is that Kai gets to the heart of what makes our internet heroes tick through well-executed and personal interviews.

Anthony Casalena is the Founder and CEO of Squarespace, which he started from his dorm room in 2003. I learned a lot from his interview this issue and I got to see what it was really like in the beginning of such a great product. During the company’s early years, Anthony acted as the sole engineer, designer and support representative for the entire Squarespace platform, allowing for it to be a stable and profitable business without the need for large teams.

Anthony’s interview is just one of the many great interviews that Offscreen consistently delivers issue after issue.

We’re Giving Away 3 Copies

Here’s the deal dear readers of the Treehouse blog. We want to give 3 copies away to the people that will use its information the most.

In the comments, tell us the story of a project that you hope to complete by the end of this year. (It’s important to note that I am “of age” and I can smell B.S. a mile away.) Don’t worry about selling or being overly-clever, just be yourself and let us know what dream you want to build.

I’ll pick the best stories myself and announce the winners via Twitter on next Thursday, May 23rd. I can’t wait to hear about your great ideas!

Update: Winners Announced!

The winners of the Offscreen Mag giveaway are Sebastian, Ricky E Eckhardt, & Jordan Earle! Congrats!

Send an email to josh@teamtreehouse.com to claim your prize!

The post Giveaway: New Offscreen Mag Featuring Ryan Carson appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

KoolSpan lands Samsung's security arm

Bill Flook

Bethesda-based mobile security startup KoolSpan Inc. notched a big customer win this week: Samsung's S-1 Corp.

KoolSpan announced that S-1, the security arm of the Korean corporate behemoth, will use the Maryland company's voice/text/data-encryption chip — dubbed TrustChip — as the backbone to S-1's "SafeTalk" smartphone security offering.

The startup has raised some $20 million in venture funding, according to CrunchBase, most recently with a $5 million funding in November 2011. Shortly after that investment, KoolSpan snapped up the engineering team and some assets from SRA International Inc. At the time, CEO Gregg Smith estimated that as much as 70 percent of the company's business came through the federal government, although he anticipated the enterprise world would become more interested in their combined hardware-software products.

And there you have it. It appears Smith's prediction is coming true.

Of course, this isn't the first telecom player to sign up with KoolSpan. TrustChip is also the anchor to AT&T's Encrypted Mobile Voice technology.