Web Standards News & Articles

OpenSocial is to Google as OpenGraph is to Facebook. Some might say that’s all you need to know about OpenSocial 2.0. But as leading technologists and innovators takes sides for and against it, there is much more to the story.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is holding its first ever conference in November. If you're interested in the latest news on HTML5 and the open web platform, mark your calendars and book it to Seattle.

This year, almost every browser implemented a "do not track"  feature, prompted by privacy-conscious consumers and the Do Not Track list proposed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Now the concept is gaining even more support. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced a standardization effort for user web privacy.

How do you use Stumbleupon? The discovery engine is reportedly responsible for delivering more than half of all social media referral traffic in the U.S. -- even more than Facebook and Twitter. What does this mean and why should you care?

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 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (news, site) has been busy making the web a more accessible place. In focus today is a project dubbed the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) -- it aims to help software vendors make better web content authoring and management tools, including WYSIWYG editors, word processors and web content management systems.

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."

In a move that may shift the balance of power a bit, Google has begun indexing the attribution of content to content authors, rather than just websites.

The Web, according to Jon Udell, is constructed of a number of small, easy to understand building blocks. Yet while billions of people make use of the Web every day, few really understand its fundamental concepts. This leads to a poor use of the Internet and greatly reduces the reach and effectiveness of the information produced.

According to Udell, by creating products and information services in accordance with the key concepts, we can make the Web a better place -- one that is is more useful to humanity as a whole.

Udell's seven key Web concepts:

1. Authority
2. Indirection
3. Structure
4. Naming
5. Scope
6. Publish / Subscribe
7. Services

This morning at the J. Boye 2011 conference in Philadelphia Jon expanded on each of these ideas. In the following video is he spends 44 minutes digging through the details and illustrating them via a pet project called Elm City.

You may want to skip around if you're viewing this at work. We also apologize for the dim video lighting -- we were shooting in a low light environment with a bright background. Not ideal.

Here is a section index for the video: Topic Introduction (00:00-07:18), Elm City Example Project Intro (07:18-10:18), Authority Concept Discussion (10:19-14:39), Indirection Concept Discussion (14:40-19:28), Structure Concept Discussion (19:29-26:10), Naming Concept Discussion (26:11-34:34), Scope Concept Discussion (34:35-38:38), Publish/Subscribe Concept Discussion (38:39-41:10), Services Concept Discussion + Wrap-up (41:11-End).

What I enjoyed most about Jon's talk was the discussion of tags as information services. I think this is an extremely powerful idea and one that is probably under appreciated. We tend to rely on Google or some form of an index to locate information we want. But tags used well have almost the same mind-boggling power as a major search engine, without requiring anything like the same brain or CPU power. Jon illustrated this with a Yahoo! Pipes example and discussed the concepts more generally in the "Naming" part of the video (minutes 26:11-34:34).

It's either a shame or a triumph for the developers (perhaps a bit of both), but many of you take your WYSIWYG content editor tools for granted. For the most part they just work and you go on your merry way.

But under the editor hood there's a lively universe to behold. We find quite a few public domain editor choices on the market, including a number of custom-built tools for specific publishing products. But one of the most widely used editors -- thanks in part to its association with Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous, Jive and others -- is TinyMCE.

More recently, noted WYSIWYG editor vendor, Ephox, has teamed with Moxiecode to produce the Ephox Enterprise TinyMCE editor product. The latest 3.4 version was announced on March 29th and following this the team will be running a live online review and training session on April 20th (you can sign up here).

The latest version of Enterprise TinyMCE features:

• YouTube IFRAME support
• An upgraded Flash player
• Plugin's for lists and auto-linking
• Improved handling of malformed input
• A complete rewrite of the HTML serialization (output) engine
• Web accessibility enhancements (WAI-ARIA)
• Enterprise support for tracking changes and accessibility verification
• Numerous bug fixes and more

Ephox is a provider of commercial licenses and support services for Enterprise TinyMCE, and they want to make sure you know all about the new and improved capabilities it has. So join them on Wednesday April 20th at 8:30am PT / 11:30am ET for an interactive webinar that takes a deep dive into the latest features for developers and content managers alike. Reserve your seat for the interactive webinar.

Microsoft (news, site) adds new powers to Silverlight, as it unveils a new version that helps play content happily on iPads and Windows Phone 7, bringing high class visuals and interactivity to your apps and data.

If you think RDFa and the semantic web is only for geeks, it's time to take a second look. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is advancing the standards for tomorrow's Internet and web content management vendors are getting on-board. The result is going to be a smarter, more findable Web.

Last year Google's Rich Snippets launch initiated a big semantic web push. The snippets enable website managers to show richer search results, making it easier to determine content within a particular page before you've even visited it. The initiative was reviewed at this year's Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco, revealing usage statistics that will likely influence the future of Google Search. 

Despite the pessimism from some corners, the impending death of Enterprise Content Management is overstated. Rather, from what I see, the intelligent content race is on.

Microsoft vs IBM; Atari vs Commodore; Firefox vs Internet Explorer -- the biggest battles in computing pale into insignificance compared to the spat between Apple (news, site) and Adobe over Flash.