Yes, that’s the sad truth, but before all guns are pointed towards Microsoft for this, I must say there are reasons the IE development team took this road. Their blog post explains this in detail (the whole backward compatibility issue, the state of things now, and the future support for standards). Although simply putting Internet Explorer 8 into a single standards mode was expected, they chose in the end to allow web developers to opt-in to the IE8 standards mode by adding a meta tag in the source of the page, which would explicitly tell IE to render the page with the “best standards compliance possible”. The default render mode is “quirks mode” (compatible with current content) and “standard mode” (IE7 standard mode).

Compatibility seems to have been the main reason for this kind of approach in the end, as roughly half of the top 200 US web sites were in “standards mode”. A rather large discussion was spawned about this, so get ready for a few hundred comments to read. There are some really spot-on suggestions and ideas, and of course some (well deserved?) criticism. Well, at least they passed the Acid 2 Test.

Share This

Sun Microsystems bought MySQL AG for 1 billion dollars. MySQL has so far been the clear leader in open source database solutions. It’s MySQL has been the backbone of almost all websites in the past years, and puts the M in LAMP. The fact that Sun bought MySQL shouldn’t be to alarming, since Sun has openly supported open source in the past years. But, is the MySQL ownership change going to affect its further development?

MySQL has been free for years, although it made some money selling support subscriptions, but not nearly as many as there are MySQL users. The open source model is certainly a hard mouthful to swallow, especially in some cases. MySQL has a lot of users, and a community that grows on a daily basis. Now that it’s become Sun’s ownership, the company will have a great population of users to offer its other products to. Gordon Haff wrote an article on this on News.com, in which he discusses some implications of the deal.

On the one hand, MySQL will surely benefit from having a system as powerful as Sun Microsystems behind it. This should make a lot of desired development take place, and sooner too. On the other hand, there is the possibility that MySQL will simply be used as means to offer other products that require license purchase. What I’m hoping for is further development of MySQL, bringing it on level with Oracle, but still keeping it free. Sun certainly has the means to do this. Well, one can hope…

Share This

Mozilla Labs introduced Weaver, which is supposed to enrich the Firefox experience by allowing more control to the users over personal information and data. The Mozilla Labs team has set a list of principles around which the Weave project is to develop:

• provide a basic set of optional Mozilla-hosted online services
• ensure that it is easy for people to set up their own services with freely available open standards-based tools
• provide users with the ability to fully control and customize their online experience, including whether and how their data should be shared with their family, their friends, and third-parties
• respect individual privacy (e.g. client-side encryption by default with the ability to delegate access rights)
• leverage existing open standards and propose new ones as needed
• build a extensible architecture like Firefox

Basically, your browser’s meta data - bookmarks, history and more - is pushed into a data cloud (something that’s been proposed as the future of Internet and application development), and then this data is available anywhere the user is online to people the user allows to have access to this data. The goal is not to build a robust framework with many capabilities built in, but to create a development environment that would allow other developers to extend and build applications using an API.

I don’t think sharing my meta data is something that I would like to get into too easily. There are plenty of ways this data can be misused, although the Mozilla Team have stated this is just a basic prototype, with plenty of development still to come. Encryption is going to be required by default, so security is the first thing that’s going to be addressed.

Weaver is available for download as a basic prototype and works with Firefox 3.0b2pre or greater.

Share This

After having announced Internet Explorer 8 a while ago, Microsoft surprises us one more time by having successfully passed the Webstandards Acid 2 Test in standards mode. This is great news since standards compliance is not something that was readily available from any IE so far.

This doesn’t mean the new IE has all the other stuff fixed, such as layout and float peculiarities, but it’s a good start. Since this is just the “internal” vesion of IE, I am hoping there will be plenty more improvement by the time the browser hits the beta stage. Opera recently complained to the European Union about IE not having proper standards support. Having passed the Acid 2 test, IE 8 and Microsoft have fought back. Firefox has also just released its version 3 beta 2. Begin the browser wars … again.

Share This

I’ve come across WriteMaps, through Ajaxian. It’s basically a tool for creating site maps visually. It uses jQuery to create a very easy to use interface. There are two modes for working with a site map - branch chart and a standard indented list. Each page is represented with an icon, and additional descriptive information can be stored for each page by clicking the “i” mini-button on the icon.

The tool offers many ways to export the map, for example as an XML file, which is great when you want to use the newly designed site structure in some other application. Every map can be saved on the server, and it’s accessible from anywhere online. Maps can also be shared so collaboration is available for larger scale projects where there are more people involved. Here are some of the features supported in the 1.0 version, released in early November:

• Sharing (Editable and View-Only)
• Print Formatting
• XML Sitemap Export
• New Outline View
• Source Import / Export
• Edit and Presentation Modes
• Contextual Undo / Redo
• Page Url and Notes Fields
• Save / Save As
• Deleting Sitemaps
• Help Content
• Increased Browser Support

They have a FAQ section and a blog for up-to-date information about everything concerning the service. Sign-up is very easy and takes literally a minute, while the tool itself is quite browser and processor intensive, so I’d recommend not opening too many tabs at the same time. While WriteMaps supports collaboration, I’d still use it for smaller projects for now, maybe up to about a hundred pages. It can be a great companion when recording an idea about a site structure on the road. You can later export the map and put it in a mind manager application for more detailed idea development. I would like to see some more advanced features in the future, like the ability to drag pages and rearrange the hierarchy using the mouse (click and drag). Adding features such as these shouldn’t be a problem. Also, maybe a plug-in for graphing interlinking between the pages, and indicators showing a page’s internal incoming/outgoing link ratio. Yes, this may be more SEOish than development, but SEO must be integrated in development if a site is to achieve anything on the search engines.

Anyway, a nice and easy to use tool, and best of all it’s free. Bookmarked!

Share This

Lachlan Hunt from ListAPart wrote a post explaining the new HTML5 specification with small examples of what is to come as changes are introduced into the existing HTML4 specification that has been around for ten years. What we can expect are more descriptiive tags, that should arguably make our lives easier. From what I saw the new tags are well thought out, although they are pretty tied to the usual blog-like site massively adopted today. Here’s a scheme of a layout done using the new tags:

It’s clear the new tags can replace the usual DIVs. The new tags allow for a prestructured markup and elements on the page with predetermined properties that will allow for more consistent design. Along with tags pertaining to text and images, there are also new tags that deal with video and audio content. This may prove to be a great development, since embedding multimedia content into a web page can be a somewhat tiresome job. There is plenty more information on the new HTML5 specification and examples here and here. Of course, Lachlan’s post is also great because it gets down to it in a more concise form. I have already mentioned HTML5 with the client-side data storage HTML5 based API some time ago, so take a look at that as well.

Share This

Google has released an API that allows us to embed charts into our pages as simply as making an HTTP call to the API which generates a PNG image using parameters passed in the call. Here are some example of what can be done:

More information about this API here. This is a simpler, very useful alternative to a more complex, but surprisingly powerful, jQuery library called Flot which uses “canvas”.

Share This

OpenID started months back as an idea about sharing personal information on the Web. The project grew meanwhile, gaining support from numerous industry giants like Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo.

The new release, announced yesterday, involves two new specifications - OpenID Authentication 2.0 and OpenID Attribute Exchange 1.0 as final specifications. Many open source libraries are already shipping with the new implementation of OpenID.

Share This

After many months of silence, the Internet Explorer development team announced that IE8 (or IE Next) is coming soon. In a somewhat arguably humorous post, which discusses the possible name for the next Internet Explorer version, we are given a hint that the new browser will be released soon. As far as the features, well, we’re going to have to wait the next announcement, hopefully more serious than this one.

“You will hear a lot more from us soon on this blog and in other places. In the meantime, please don’t mistake silence for inaction.”

I don’t think silence was the right way to accompany work on the new IE version. Microsoft has even asked for webmasters to give feedback about the features for the new browser in the past months, but haven’t publicly given any notion as to what the new browser will be housing under the hood. Better late than never, I guess, but I wish we could at least know what to expect. Are we looking at a standards fully compliant browser, or another Microsoft vision of how things should be. In other words, are developers going to have to spend additional hours tweaking code to work in IE8, if that indeed is going to be the name for the new version. Bill Gates seems to use “IE8″ in his communication with the team, so I guess IE8 is the new name for it.

Share This

Flashphone is a Russian based service that offers users free phone calls over the Internet using their Flash web-based software. Free calls can be made towards a limited number of countries, listed on the site. The list is quite large, although I couldn’t find Serbia on it, even though it’s listed in the country list when registering to use the service. The service is still in Beta so there will be more developments over time, and I’m guessing the list of countries available for free phone calls will expand.

There is a limitation to using the service. Each user gets three calls per day, with each call limited to three minutes, for now according to the site. The interface is quite simple - it looks like standard mobile phone layout (numbers and function buttons). Even though the design is a bit too simplistic, I don’t find it to be disagreeable. The fact that it’s web based and relies on software (Flash) available on almost all computers attached to the Web, makes Flash Phone quite interesting. Having to have your browser open all the time in order to make calls may be a small negative characteristic, but at the same time I don’t think that is a big issue. In the end, you have to launch something to use the service, so it may as well be a browser, why not? Skype is different in that aspect as it is a separate application that requires installation on the system, and is platform dependent (special versions for different OS), while Flash Phone is web based, and thus platform independent. All you need is a properly setup headset and microphone, and you’re set.

The service currently has some 1850 registered users. I’m expecting this number to grow drastically as the services gets coverage over the coming weeks. If it proves to work ok, I see no reason for it not to gain a lot of popularity. Well, of to use my three calls for today!

Share This