Web Standards News & Articles

There are indications that e-books and the reading devices, like Kindle and the Nook, are becoming more mainstream and as a result they are having an interesting impact on the way we interact with content, both online and in print.

Apache Chemistry (we introduced you to some time ago) is progressing under the watchful eye of Enterprise CMS vendor Nuxeo (news, site) and other contributors. The latest news -- updated Nuxeo Chemistry bindings to allow for better support for CMIS.

On the last day of the J. Boye 2009 Conference, Aarhus heard its mayor’s plea and slightly warmed/dried up. The event folk exclaimed, “It’s almost summer!”

The rather standard for this time of the year weather was followed by the web content management standards talk. David Nüscheler, the CTO of Day Software, presented his take on the top WCM trends for 2010 from the architecture and standards standpoint.

There is no best web content management system. But there is probably a good Web CMS for what you’re trying to do. With that, we kicked-off a heated debate on Inconvenient truths and unsolved WCM industry challenges at the J.Boye 2009 conference in chilly Aarhus, DK.

And despite strenuous protestations by Aarhus mayor, Nicolai Wammen, who addressed the delegates at the opening ceremony today, the weather has not improved. Thankfully plenty of hot air warmth was radiating from the conference discussions, including the one on how to fix the WCM industry with all its problems and challenges. But why fix it, I ask, if it ain’t broken?

Mobile seems to be where the future is and the W3C (news, site) is guiding us there with its latest set of guidelines and best practices.

ocPortal (news, site) has been incubating version 4.2 of its Web CMS for some nine months now. Finally out, what delights does it offer?

Summer has come and gone and we still haven't seen a public review of the Content Management Interoperability Specification (CMIS). But while many of us have been impatiently waiting, it does appear that things have been happening.

Twitter is all a flutter with one individual tweet from enterprise content management vendor Nuxeo's Florent Guillaume (@efge):

#CMIS 0.70 soon official draft, and to be submitted for Public Review. Still on track for standardization near end of year!

On September 4th, the President took another important step toward a more open and transparent government by announcing a new policy to voluntarily disclose White House visitor access records.

Aside from a small group of appointments that cannot be disclosed because of their necessarily confidential nature, the record of every visitor who comes to the White House for an appointment, a tour or to conduct business will be released. As historic as the President’s announcement is, it is also a good illustration of what is missing from the administration’s technology infrastructure plan -- a coordinated approach to providing data standards.

The telling of stories is perhaps the most ancient of human arts. And as most of us know, it's not one easily mastered -- who hasn't told a joke that flopped or recounted a hilarious scenario to group of blank faced friends?

Webtrends 9 (news, site) has been officially released today, and with it comes a new model of web analytics story telling. We spoke with the company's CEO, Alex Yoder, about the art of the UI, and most importantly the fact that great UIs will never be enough -- open APIs and open schemas are the real way forward for intelligent analytics.

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.

With a public review of the Content Management Interoperability Specification (CMIS) (news, site) expected to be announced sometime soon, it's definitely time to check in and see what the various player have been up to.

Reminder: CMIS is an OASIS specification. It may well end up as a standard (and we hope that this happens), but it's not there yet. Here's where things stand today.

The World Wide Web Consortium's OWL (Web Ontology Language) Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of the "OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Document Overview." Go ahead. Grab a dictionary. We'll wait.

This document is the first in an exciting thirteen volume escapade through the syntaxes, sub-languages, along with other details behind OWL 2 and its differences from OWL 1.

In the march toward creating the semantic web, web content management systems such as Drupal (news, site) and many proprietary vendors struggle with the goal of emitting structured information that other sites and tools can usefully consume. There's a balance to be struck between human and machine utility, not to mention simplicity of instrumentation.

With RDFa (see W3C proposal),  software and web developers have the specification they need to know how to structure data in order to lend meaning both to machines and to humans, all in a single file. And from what we've seen recently, the Drupal community is making the best of it.

Internet Explorer 8 has been officially released. Now it's time to download it and start seeing what it really does to your website or web application. For some, things may go smoothly, for others, not so much. Trouble is, IE8 may be new, but is it already obsolete?

It's no surprise that HTML 5 is coming. However, it's been a bit easier to miss that a lot of work has also been going into the issue of Web forms.

So much so, that the HTML Working Group has announced that Web Forms 2.0 have been superseded by HTML 5.