Microsoft has agreed to offer its users a choice of Web browsers. This has ended of a long antitrust case started by the European Union. Now Microsoft will offer a ballot screen to its European users who have Internet Explorer as their default Web browser. [Continue]
Packt Publishing has selected WordPress as the overall best open source CMS for 2009. The thing to note here is that it is in the category of overall CMS, not just blogging. Hopefully this will make it easier to convince those executives to consider WordPress for web sites. [Continue]
W3C has decided to abort the XHTML 2 effort. It is said that this will allow more time and effort towards HTML 5. There were some indications towards lack of interest in the XHTML evolution, so this is not exactly a surprise. [Continue]
The one millionth word in English dictionary is Web2.0, defined as “the next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you”. The unfortunate part is soon that next generation is soon going to move on to something else, and continue further. The phrase Web 2.0 itself has been confusing. [Continue]
OpenID just got one of its biggest promoters – Facebook. Facebook had joined the OpenID Foundation Board a while back. But unlike other OpenID supporters, Facebook accepts an OpenID to let its member use the site, by becoming a OpenID relying party. [Continue]
Google has announced a few updates to its search engine during its Searchology event. Google will now support microformats and RDFa to show rich snippets from a web page. Considering that these technologies were developed to extract structured data from web pages, search engines should have adopted them long back, and in fact helped them grow. [Continue]
Make sure you watch Nate Koechley’s excellent talk on Front-End Engineering (via Chris Heilmann). A lot of executives think it is only about the “Look and Feel”. I hope they will watch this and realize the underlying engineering objective. [Continue]
The big publishers are coming together to build the Fair Syndication Consortium to fight sploggers and online plagiarism (via Erick Schonfeld). While solutions in the past have tried to modify the content or syndication to fight sploggers, the consortium aims to eliminate the root cause. The consortium wants to negotiate with the ad networks to pay them for their content being reproduced elsewhere. [Continue]
Wikipedia is taking votes to decide on relicensing its content. In fact this applies to all Wikimedia Foundation sites, which have been currently licensed under GFDL, which was primarily intended for software documentation. If approved the content will be dual-licensed under CC-BY-SA along with GFDL. [Continue]
The Web has been busy trying to find a way out of URL shortner services. Kellan Elliott-McCrea has worked out a solution which lets the publisher gain control over the shortening. I think using rev to indicate the shortened version might get confusing, but it is also true that it seems to offer the best balance in the current situation. [Continue]