Archive for April, 2006

The first Maker Faire is this weekend:

Join the creators of MAKE magazine, the MythBusters, and thousands of tech DIY enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, science clubs, students, and authors at MAKE’s first ever Maker Faire! Browse the complete online program!

Quick pointer: Great, long, interesting article on the the state of the internet in China. Censorship, culture, business, morals.

Discusses the experiences of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!; Cisco on the hardware/router side; local players like Baidu, Sina and Sohu; several journalists and bloggers active within China; and what it all might mean.

There are multiple eye-opening descriptions of cultural forces at play in China, and how those influence Internet usage in general.

All and all, a helpful and enjoyable primer.

What is the significance of the brand-new Opera 9 beta being released on Earth Day? Probably nothing. It’s just that I wanted an excuse to point to the Opera 9b release as well as earth.yahoo.com.

sorry for this second test post, but I’m testing and it couldn’t be avoided. Thanks for your understanding.

I’m not sure how I missed these two articles, one from 2005.12.06 and the other from 2006.01.25. They are both writen by Edd Dumbill, Chair, XTech Conference, and are cross-published to the XML and Web architecture sections of IBM’s developerWorks site.

In these two articles, I’ve presented the salient points of both WHATWG’s HTML 5 and the W3C’s XHTML 2.0. The two initiatives are quite different: The grassroots-organised WHATWG aims for a gently incremental enhancement of HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0, whereas the consortium-sponsored XHTML 2.0 is a comprehensive refactoring of the HTML language.

• The future of HTML, Part 1: WHATWG - The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group’s approach to improving HTML
• The future of HTML, Part 2: XHTML 2.0 - Examining the W3C’s approach to improving HTML

I recommend reading both (though perhaps start with the second), because together they’re a authoratative, thorough and current introduction/summary of where we are today and where we’re going. If your development practice involves thoughful consideration of your markup layer - and it definitely should - they you’ll want to know this stuff.

They quickly cover significant ground, offering concise overviews of W3C & WHATWG, HTML 5 & XHTML 2.0, some specifics like canvas, Web Forms 2.0, XForms, Web APIs, and Web Application Formats, and make a strong case for “Why XHTML 2.0?”.