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/]

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/]

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]