Open Standards News & Articles

Step aside CMIS for a few minutes, the new Web Experience Management Initiative (WEMI) needs a little attention. The first face-to-face meeting was recently held in Copenhagen and there were plenty of Web CMS vendors in attendance -- a sign that many are ready to play nice.

Last week, W3C’s Authoring Tool Accessibility Guideline Working Group released new working drafts of two documents focused on web development tools and accessibility. Today, W3C announced an agile track for developers and businesses to create Web technology within W3C's international community of experts. In other words -- diversity breeds innovation; anyone may apply.

The W3C (news, site) has formed the Government Linked Data working group, the mission of which is to "provide standards and other information that help governments around the world publish their data as effective and usable Linked Data using Semantic Web technologies."

Mobile applications are the future of content deployment, as evident with the hundreds of thousands of apps for the different mobile platforms. With this, Brightcove (news, site) has evolved from its earlier focus on online video to a fresh product line focused on making content and applications for web and mobile.

Articles with titles like “Goodbye JCR, Hello CMIS” have been growing in numbers. The voices suggesting that the Java Content Repository standard is no longer relevant in a market dominated by non-Java content management systems are growing. Is JCR really dead?

It takes money to keep the web open and accessible. This week the Internet Society, a nonprofit group dedicated to the open Internet ecosystem, announced that it was donating US$ 1 million to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the global organization responsible for Web standards and accessibility.

Florent Guillaume, the head of R&D at Nuxeo (news, site), brought the wonders of CMIS to the attendees of Nuxeo World.
 

Earlier this month, CMSWire guest contributor Aaron Levie asserted that “Mobility is the next great frontier for ECM.” (read: Mobile: The Next Frontier for Enterprise Content Management). He could very well be correct. When we talk about “agility,” and read its thesaurus alternatives like activity, adroitness, quickness, spryness or liveliness, how can we not feel a sense of forward motion?

Vendor lock-in is no longer the biggest problem organizations face. Thanks to open standards, like CMIS, we can stop worrying about information silos and focus our attention on avoiding content lock-in.  

Microsoft announced the new odata.org website at MIX10 this week, continuing their efforts in open standards and interoperability.

WCM Field Notes is a regular column written in collaboration with Jon Marks (@McBoof), Head of Development at LBi. This second issue looks at what Open Source really means, and suggests ways for you to sensibly include both open source and proprietary systems in your Content Management System selection exercise. 

In order for real communication to happen, especially among people from different regions and dialects (let alone people from different countries and languages altogether), terms have to be clearly defined so that everyone is starting from the same point. The problem with such definitions is that the devil really is in the details.

These days the UK government seems unusually savvy when it comes to technology, open source and open standards. Now they've embraced another open movement, that of open data. And they've appointed Sir Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web, to help.

When an open source advocate, open standards advocate, or, well, pretty much anyone that competes with Microsoft (news, site) sees an extended hand from the software giant toward better interoperability, they tend to look and see if the other hand's holding a spiked club.

Even so, the Redmond, WA company continues to push the message that it has seen the light regarding open standards and interoperability.

OpenID has gotten a big lift this week with two big announcements coming from two very different camps. First, Microsoft has announced that Windows Live will officially support OpenID for login and that users will be able to log into any OpenID site with their LiveID account. Second, Google has announced that it will also be a provider of OpenIDs.