standards

Has a slow Web been getting you down lately?

Just imagine if your multibillion-dollar business depended on it, as Google's does. Then imagine the glee in Google's corridors at a significant new victory in the company's attempt to build a Web-accelerating technology it calls SPDY into the Internet.

Earlier today, Mark Nottingham, chairman of the HTTPbis Working Group, announced support for SPDY in an overhaul of one of the networking foundations of the World Wide Web. That foundation is HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and Google hopes SPDY will open up some of its bottlenecks.

The HTTPbis … Read more

The California agency responsible for protecting air quality says it will appeal a decision by a court that blocks enforcement of rules designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and encourage alternative fuel technologies.

The Air Resources Board, part of the California Environmental Protection Agency, adopted the landmark Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCSF) last year. The regulation gives producers and refiners until 2020 to reduce the carbon footprint of their fuel by 10 percent.

Ethanol producers complained that the rules favor in-state producers and refiners because they take into consideration the carbon footprint impact of the transportation of, as well as … Read more

We like our computer desktop like we like our actual, physical desktop: tidy, well-organized, and nice to look at. As such, we don't have a lot of patience for desktop enhancements that mess with the familiar look and feel of our virtual workspace; as far as we're concerned, things are fine the way they are. These types of programs keep coming, though, and we keep trying them out, hoping against all odds for one that really will enhance our desktop. Unfortunately, Real Desktop Standard is not the one. It's innovative and has some interesting features, but once … Read more

In a move that would have been shocking a decade ago, Microsoft has made it possible for others' instant-messaging software to tap into its Windows Live Messenger.

Instant-messaging networks--the big ones are run by Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL--once were well-defended strongholds, and developers of third-party programs like Trillian had to work hard to reverse-engineer their inner workings. But whatever residual excitement IM possessed has faded as new communication methods such as Facebook and Twitter have seized the spotlight.

I'm inclined to blame the companies involved. Had they banded together on a standard, IM could have become a staple of … Read more

At year's end, it's customary--or at least common--for prognosticators to trumpet the predictions they got right and to ignore the rest.

However, I've decided to break with tradition and review my entire list from last November. There aren't any howlers, but I must admit I was a bit impatient on a few fronts. (I'd like to note that fellow ex-analyst Andi Mann also did so recently.)

Less focus on definitions (and dare we say hype?). Grade: B. There's been incremental advance in user education, but I find I still need to keep a NIST definition (… Read more

Google launched WebP to outdo JPEG. Now a new version is designed to take on another dominant graphics format on the Web, PNG.

WebP is based on the open-source compression technology used in Google's WebM video encoding technology, and with it, Google hopes to reduce Web page file sizes and thereby speed up the Net. There are plenty of challenges for the technology, but Google just made WebP a bit more competitive through the addition of two major features.

First is a "lossless" compression option that can image data without loss of fidelity. Second is support for … Read more

Two browser experts have pared back Acid3, a test that browser standards fans held up to spotlight Internet Explorer's shortcomings, so the test won't hold back development of those standards.

Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML specification, and Håkon Wium Lie, chief technology officer of browser maker Opera, decided to make the change, and Hickson announced it on Google+ on Saturday.

"Håkon Wium Lie and I are announcing that we have updated the Acid3 test by commenting out the parts of the test that might get changed in the specs," Hickson said. &… Read more

IE9 left no doubt that Microsoft understood the importance of supporting modern Web standards. But IE10, updated yesterday with the third platform preview, is the vehicle delivering much of that support.

Microsoft fleshed out IE10's impressive list of new technologies at Microsoft's Build conference for developers. New items on the list such as Web Workers, Web Sockets, 3D Transforms, Application Cache, and IndexedDB are music to the ears of many Web developers who want to make rich, interactive Web sites.

But it's important for a much larger developer group, too: IE10 also is a key foundation for Windows 8 applications. … Read more

Google thinks it's time to look beyond JavaScript, the programming language that gives Web applications their brains. The company's project to do so behind closed doors with a new language called Dart, though, has spurred something of a backlash.

The company piqued Web programmers' interest last weekend with the news that it would offer details about Dart, which it calls "a new programming language for structured Web programming," at a conference in October. But immediately after, a leaked 2010 memo about Dart--at the time called Dash--raised hackles by spotlighting how Google often develops Web technologies … Read more