Web Standards News & Articles

What does 2013 hold for the future of HTML5? If predictions by industry analysts are correct, mobile will be its calling card. And rightly so -- HTML5 has the power to help smartphones, feature phones, tablets, notebooks, desktop PCs, televisions and vehicles come together through cloud services.

There’s not really much you can do about web tracking, so you might as well figure out how you can take advantage of it.

This was the theme of Web Tracking for You, a session at the tenth Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas presented by Gregory Fleischer.

Twenty-first century technology may be considered our servant, but the question of who exactly it serves is one that is coming up more and more as we advance into the Internet age. As far reaching in so many people’s lives as the Web tends to be, fundamental questions about privacy have not yet been answered.

If you have ever thought, “If I was defining standards, I would have never done it that way.” Here is your chance. Open standards organization the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) announced it is accepting participants for its newly created technical committee, the OASIS Open Data Protocol (OData) Technical Committee. The committee will be responsible for developing the first OASIS version of the OData standard.

 Although the standards organizations are notoriously slow, somehow, it can seem almost impossible to keep up with long list of technologies the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) suggests, develops and approves. If you’ve been wishing for some sort of quick guide to the many standards the organization has developed, today’s your lucky day.

Mobile is a rapidly evolving medium, with a constantly expanding range of devices. As a result, designing for mobile sites can be particularly challenging -- even more so given the need to keep your brand strong by maintaining cross-channel consistency.

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).