When Adobe released InDesign it included a novel feature that was otherwise unheard of to the average agency — the ability to import content into its page templates from XML data. Having developed a web content management system (QuantumCMS for those of you interested in hiring us), we had selected…
The W3C has taken a step toward gathering all the information relevant to the mobile web, as authored by its disparate working groups, under one umbrella as a singular (recurring) reference source: Standards for Web Applications on Mobile: February 2011 current state and roadmap (read the accompanying W3C blog post).…
On February 2, Microsoft released a plug-in for Chrome on Windows 7 to allow users to play H.264 video directly in Chrome. In addition, Microsoft has said that it will support WebM (VP8) when a user has the codec installed. And so began the fragmentation of the HTML video model,…
In November I wrote up a post (How Many Users Support JavaScript?) outlining the process and results from Yahoo’s study about how many users have JavaScript disabled (How many users have JavaScript disabled? and Followup: How many users have JavaScript disabled?). The Numbers In those articles, Yahoo stated that even…
Forrester Research is an oft-cited source by businesses when making decisions or declarations about trends and technologies. In many circles Forrester is something of a de facto standard for analysis. As such I fully expect to start dealing with a recent statement from its CEO claiming that the web is…
Last month Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer will be adding a “tracking protection” feature to its browser, allowing users to prevent advertising sites from tracking their activity on the web (ad targeting, really). This move was partly to stay ahead of an FTC push to mandate that browser makers add…
If you pay any attention to the plodding chaos that is the development of HTML5, then you’ve probably seen the discussions around the video element and how best to encode videos. Over a year and half ago Ian Hickson gutted the video and audio portions of the HTML5 specification to…
I can’t turn on the TV, surf the web, or peer into my Twitter feed without stumbling into another year-end wrap-up of 2010. These dime-a-dozen contrivances abound like the proverbial lemming to the cliff (lemmings don’t really do that, it’s also a contrivance). However, there have been enough of some…
This may be somewhat old news by now, but given the hubbub last night that Apple and some makers of apps for the iPhone are getting sued over tracking users without consent, it seems that the struggle between privacy and features will never be old news. Back at the dawn…
In an effort to help educate the general public about its browser, Chrome, and the web in general, Google released an online “book” called 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web. Done in the style of an illustrated children’s book that allows readers to flip through the pages,…
Today Opera Software released data about how users of its Opera Mini mobile web browser use the web. Opera does this periodically to give some insight into how its users may be surfing, but what we don’t know is how much Opera Mini users correspond to the web in general.…
This is one of those posts I started back in mid-October and sat on, suspecting that there would be more follow-up, backlash, challenges, and general bickering. There has been some, but then it died down a bit. And then I remembered I should post this. The Yahoo Developer Network posted…