Admittedly, their marketing folks wouldn’t describe it that way, but essentially that’s what was announced today. (documentation in PDF format, closely related to what-used-to-be Konfabulator tech; here’s the interesting part in HTML) The press release talks about reaching “billions” of mobile consumers; even if you don’t put too much emphasis on press releases (you shouldn’t)…
Category: browsers
One whole evening of the program was devoted to XForms, focused around the new 1.1 Candidate Recommendation. I admit that some of the early 1.1 drafts gave me pause, but these guys did a good job cleaning up some of the dim corners and adding the right features in the right places. This is worth…
Where’s Project Gutenberg? One difficulty in launching an ebook platform is the lack of available titles. I keep hearing about 80,000+ titles, but expressed as a percentage of Amazon’s book catalog, it’s minuscule. There should be all kind of public domain titles ready to go on day one. And where’s the Creative Commons books? There’s…
OK, let me take a step back from specific technologies like RDFa, let’s go through a really simple example. On a certain web page, I refer to a book. That book has a price of 21.86 US dollars. The page is intended as primarily human-readable, but I want to include machine-readable data too, for a…
Depending on who’s asking and who’s answering, W3C technologies take 5 to 10 years to get a strong foothold. Well, we’re now in the home stretch for the 5th anniversary of XForms Essentials, which was published in 2003. In past conferences, XForms coverage has been maybe a low-key tutorial, a few day sessions, and hallway…
I’ll be doing some experimenting around here over maybe the next week or two. Specifically, setting up hAtom within these pages. Watch for falling debris and report any unusual observations. -m
It’s a common need to parse space-separated attribute values from XPath/XSLT 1.0, usually @class or @rel. One common (but incorrect) technique is simple equality test, as in {@class=”vcard”}. This is wrong, since the value can still match and still have other literal values, like “foo vcard” or “vcard foo” or ” foo vcard bar “….
Video from XTech, worth a look. -m
Go check it out. It even has a Tidy option to clean up the markup. But they missed an important feature: it should include an option to run Tidy on the markup first then validate. This is becoming the defacto bar for web page validity anyway… -m
James Clark is blogging. A few zillion people have already mentioned this. A slightly tangent observation: I had trouble reading through an entire article in web form, but had no problems returning later to the atom feed. At first I chalked it up to early morning grogginess, but it seems to be a repeatable phenomenon…
Here’s a great comparison site. Try out some searches you might run from your phone and let me know: which one did you prefer? Why? -m
Today Yahoo! launched oneSearch on their other front page, m.yahoo.com. OneSearch has been available for a while, but only from within Yahoo! Go. Now it’s available to millions of mobile devices equipped with a data connection and XHTML browser. The basic premise behind oneSearch is to replace the tri-modal search box, where you have to…
Big surprise, huh? More evidence that the XML namspaces spec is out of touch with the reality of developers ‘on the street’, a.k.a. it has cracks in the foundation. I disagree that aggregator developers are “bozonic”, as the title of the first cited article indicates. Why should any developer need to keep all that extra…
OK, RESTafarians and HTTP experts, here’s a question. Is it kosher to send a Location: header back with an ordinary, say 200, response? Scenario: the server knows better than the client what the client needs. ‘I realize you asked for http://foo.com/x, but instead I’m sending you http://foo.com/y — ready or not, here it comes..’ -m
Spotted under the headline Windows Live Search for Mobile Goes Final, Still Great (like they were expecting it to suddenly plummet in quality?) on Gizmodo. It’s a 114k jar file that runs on my SLVR, where Yahoo! Go isn’t yet available yet, so points for that. Search suggestions show as you type, hugely useful on…
Some random thoughts and responses to lots of blog discussion sparked by the XML2 article, where I asked “Is HTML on the Web a special case?” By which, I mean, if you go through all the effort of writing down all the syntax rules used by the union of browsers that you care about, then…
And a few not so open… Q: Does the iPhone (or specifically the desktop-grade Safari browser) make the “mobile web” obsolete? A: The “mobile web”, as we know it today, will become obsolete without any help. Things change. Devices improve. That said, the context in which one uses the web is different, and there will…
I have a question for the mobile geniuses out there. What’s the difference (if any) between inputmode=”latin digits” and inputmode=”user digits”? Will browsers treat these differently? How so? Which ones? Answer in the comment section below. Thanks! -m
Last week, I visited Erik Wilde, Bob Glushko, and students up at Cal. No major announcements, just some sharpening of discussion points. Since this was my first visit to Berkeley, I finally got to tell the joke “thank you for your OS”. Maybe you had to be there. The intentional web is a formalism for…
but there has never been a successful Java implementation of a commercial-grade web browser. (right?) There exist lots of huge applications including IDEs, and editors of all sorts, but nobody’s been able to nail the whole XHTML+CSS+JavaScript thing in Java. (right?) Take it a step further–no need to pick on Java–nobody has done this in…
Check this out. It’s a RAZR V3i, which has a show-stoppingly bad mobile browser built-in. (But overall, it’s still better than the ROKR!) Compared to the huge announcements from Apple earlier this week, this one comes in fairly under the radar. Could this be a trial baloon leading up to an official iPhone? If this…
A must-read posting from Mark Birbeck, who knows a few things about XForms and Web Forms 2.0. He talks about the respective approaches embodied in XForms and Web Forms 2.0, and concludes that the primary difference between them has little to do with simplicity. He goes on to analyze differences in how developers and users…
How hard could this be? A six month project if three engineers are doing it in a garage. Five years if you put one hundred programmers on it. Guy Kawasaki -m
Like with the element counts, the grain-of-salt alarms are going off with this one. But apparently IE7 passes only 54% of the CSS test suite, up from 52% for IE6. (But even Mozilla only scores 93%). It’s not entirely clear how these numbers derive from the source data, and it certainly isn’t weighted for things…
Lots and lots of blog traffic on Google Spreadsheet, but I haven’t seen anyone make a key point: The underlying message is: full-blown applications in the browser are now real. Many smaller players have been doing things like this for years, just as many smaller player were using Ajax before it had a catchy name….
New features in InfoPath 2007 make me smile Design once to work on browser and client Object model the same across client and server Both things I worked on extensively for Cardiff LiquidOffice in 2003-2004. ‘Cept we had design once and write out to DHTML, PDF, or InfoPath. :) -m
For better or worse. In no particular order. Affordable unlimited data plans Google getting into the operator business Yahoo! getting into the operator business Affordable phones not tied to carriers The iPod phone Development of strong AI (yes I say this about everything) Development of decent agent software Affordable unlimited voice plans Collapse of network…
Part of tech reviewing means dusting off a Windows machine again. I haven’t done more than check email or run Quickbooks online on a Windows machine since I was writing my book in 2003. Remarkably, Windows XP is still the latest desktop OS available. But it needs updates. Checking my update history, I had 37…
Steven Pemberton has done several recent talks on XForms, XForms tutorial at XTech and WWW The Power of Declarative Thinking – same slides for the talks at XTech and WWW I attended at least parts of both of the WWW talks, and I can report that they were well-attended and well-received. -m
Seen on Bill Trippe’s blog. Gray Knowlton, who indentified himself as a Senior Product Manager for InfoPath 2007 said the next version of SharePoint will “include InfoPath Forms Services, which will render InfoPath forms to browsers and html-enabled mobile devices, and this will not require InfoPath on the form fillers’ desktop, nor will it require…