Html News & Articles

HTML5 defines the 5th major revision of the core language of the Web. In a recently published work the W3C details the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5 and provides insight into the thinking behind the changes.

The Web's days of innocence -- where it was just used to post the digital equivalent of static brochures -- are long past. Today we expect to do everything over the web, no matter how forced and cludgy it has to work under the hood to accomplish our goals. Fortunately, there are people willing to wade into the mind-numbing realm of protocols and data streams in order to improve it all.

The W3C (news, site) has been busy. They've released seven documents related to HTML, one of which is of interest to anyone working with HTML and another to anyone involved with the semantic web.

When Dries Buytaert founded Drupal (news, site), he intended it in part to be a platform where he could test out and play with new technologies. Drupal, for example, was an early adopter of RSS. With the pending release of Drupal 7, this goal isn't changing, and the Drupal 7 team is asking for feedback from the "pedantic web community" on how its implemented some new features.

A new partnership between Irish enterprise web content management developer pTools (news, site) and document conversion specialist Riverdocs will extend pTools WCM by enabling users to transform PDF’s and Microsoft Office documents into searchable HTML pages.

Any day now (if not already), the newest version of Apache's Solr (news, site) project hits the streets. A year in the making since the previous release, the Java-based, open source enterprise search server Solr 1.4 offers some exciting feature and performance improvements.

Without complex decision trees helping computers determine what pieces of text relate to what, it's nearly impossible to make use of the wealth of data available on the web.

In the case where you're only interested in people reading your pages, that's fine. But what if you want other sites to access and use the data you're offering with a full understanding of the context? We're one step closer to a standard that defines exactly how to make this clear.

For months now we've been talking about RDFa and how this proposed standard leads toward the semantic web. Recently, this vision took a step further toward reality.

Mashups may be all the rage, but can expose the enterprise to all manner of security risks. Enter the OpenAjax Alliance (news, site) and its new standard for more secure mashing.

The W3C Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has released the latest version of the Candidate Recommendation CSS Specification -- CSS 2.1. The newest version corrects some errors in the previous version and adds some features that have been highly requested.

You’re probably all aware that MySpace has been losing the social network popularity contest as of late. In what seems like an attempt to get back into the game, they recently released Profile v2.0.

The two most significant changes included in this optional upgrade are advanced privacy options and the near complete adherence to W3C HTML standards. Granular privacy controls allow users to assign different privacy settings to different sections (something Facebook still lacks).

Other new features include drag-and-drop profile customization and a handful of themes that are only marginally more impressive than the ones available for version 1.0.

Unfortunately for MySpace, word on the street is that in spite of the new privacy features and the ever exciting column width customization option, users don’t really like it. Complaints heard ‘round the Webverse include that the resizing doesn’t work, many of the layouts offered on free customization code sites aren’t compatible and that it sucks in general.

Fortunately for users, MySpace will save old profiles for a total of 90 days, and should you want to switch back you can do so at any point during that timeframe. Interestingly, MySpace doesn’t make it exactly easy to switch back, as the button to do so is misleading. Of course, complaints have surfaced about that as well.

Love it? Hate it? Got a better reason than, “It’s cool” or “It sucks”? Let us know.

Defining and reaching consensus on web standards is a daunting task indeed. Trying to get the entire internet community to concur on new standards may be best compared to the time honored cliche of “trying to herd cats”.

Every developer has their own ideas on the “right” way to do things, compounded by how the customer wants them done. Not to be ignored, is how the site visitors want the site to work. Everybody has their own vested interest.

The CSS Working Group just released an updated draft of “Multi-Column Layout,” a version of Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 - otherwise known as CSS3.

Hoping to build on the previous releases of HTML and XHTML, the World Wide Web Consortium has announced that it will again be reworking the Web Standard to be known as XHTML 2.0