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Posts Tagged ‘internet’

History of the Internet in one clip

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Melih Bilgil [http://www.lonja.de/] from Germany developed pictorial language. The aim was to find a common pictorial language for electronic communication and to ease the navigation.

Then he made a clip “History of the Internet”. It is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.

thanks Melih

Understand Web with MAMA

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Preamble

Did you ask you mam in childhood about nature of things? Yeah, who did not..
And now Opera software [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Software] presented MAMA – the Metadata Analysis and Mining Application. It is analytical search engine that returns details of page structure.

How can we use use it?

“We at Opera believe this tool can also be useful to other stakeholders in the standards and browser-making world.
For example:
Browser manufacturers and others can use MAMA data on the popularity of widely used technologies to prioritize bugs and justify adding support for new technology to in-progress releases.
Standards bodies can use the data to measure the success and adoption rates of various technologies.
Web developers can use the same data to justify support of various technologies in their work.
It can provide real-world, practical samples of the Web developer’s “art”, for inspiration and instruction.”
According to MAMA project documentation

Some details

MAMA give us answers on questions like: how many sites use CSS (80,4% by MAMA), how many errors on average page (47), how many symbols on average page (16,400), which country the most use XMLHttpRequest, an important component of AJAX? (Norway, 10.2%).

Or more sophisticated: how many sites adapted for mobile gadgets, how much Web2.0 spread, what version of HTTP protocol more popular and so on..

MAM is active project and so with the lapse of time we will get bigger range of data. That will give us possibility to understand Web tendencies and Web better.
So thanks Mama.

Related links links to get details:
Mama project description: [http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama/]
Mama key findings [http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-key-findings/]

HTML 5: Seeing is believing

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

preamble

We have lived with HTML5 drafts for 4 years, last draft was published on 27 September 2008.
HTML5 has big number of features and probably will be major change of HTML for all history of Web.

Most prominent features are: Scripting API additionally to regular markup, and number of new APIs: Timed media playback, Storage, Offline work support, Drag and drop, Messaging/Networking, Back button management.
You can look at article on wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_5] and at current draft [http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/] for more details about HTML5.

Come along

Many different words about HTML5 were already told, and we know that seeing is believing.
So today we have possibility to watch some of already implemented features of HTML5 thanks to Ian Hickson, Google employee that “heavily involved in Google’s work with the W3C, representing Google on the CSS working group and reviewing specifications of other working groups (SVG, CDF, etc)” according to Ian site [http://ian.hixie.ch/]

Following video include subsequent features:
* <video> (00:35)
* postMessage() (05:40)
* localStorage (15:20)
* sessionStorage (21:00)
* Drag and Drop API (29:05)
* onhashchange (37:30)
* Form Controls (40:50)
* <canvas> (56:55)
* Validation (1:07:20)

You can find detailed notes on: [http://www.whatwg.org/demos/2008-sept/]

Browsing Web with human interface: Mozilla Ubiquity

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

preamble

Mozilla Labs as always makes us happy with new innovative ideas.
Maybe you remember post of Vasiliy Kiryanov about Mozilla Prism: with that platform we can use web-applications like regular desktop applications [http://blogs.helion-prime.com/vasiliykiryanov/2008/06/03/new-web-experience-with-mozilla-prism.html]
And now new fresh idea from Mozilla Labs: Ubiquity as a way “connecting the Web with language”.

Ubiquity way

For a long time people have idea to create a way to store and query data of any application easy.
It can give enormous flexibly like everything is already here and in appropriate format. We know this idea as W3C Semantic Web[http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web], as we are still far from it, software developers on Internet are using mashups [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid)] to get similar effect today.

But what can we do from user side when we want to connect many different applications together, and use them in a same way. Ubiquity propose a way to describe common tasks in the Web using language-based instructions, and then you can create you own mashups with help of existing open Web APIs.

To have a better understanding how it work you can watch following video:

Now if you like the idea you can continue reading about it from Ubiquity tutorial: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_User_Tutorial]

related links:
Ubiquity Commands: [https://labs.toolness.com/ubiquity-herd]
Get Help & give your suggestion: [http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla/products/mozilla_ubiquity]
Report a Bug: [http://labs.toolness.com/trac/report]

Fresh toy from Google: Chrome browser

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

preamble

We have enough browsers today: IE, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Safari.
There is a question: do we need another one?
We have a lot of problems with compatibility, and almost any web-developer spends time on tuning pages for IE/Firefox.

Google Chrome

Chrome developers made a special page describing why they started new browser.

“What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.”

“On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.”

“We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others – and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well.”
A fresh take on the browser [http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/why.html?hl=en#]

And made comics to describe features: [http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/]

As you see we should have browser with improved speed that will be modern platform for web-applications.
Unfortunately I can’t test it now due to we use GNU/Linux in our company and developers presented only version for Windows.

If you are Windows user maybe it worth a look, and make own opinion.
Go on: [http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/features.html]

Chrome screenshot

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