html

A new feature in Apple's forthcoming iOS 5 update, Find My Friends, will help users see where their contacts are. Think GPS tracking for your social life, included in iOS.

According to sources reporting to 9to5Mac a few months ago, Apple had been working on the Find My Friends feature for quite some time, though the project was on and off several times.

Now, after new HTML code in the MobileMe/iCloud Web site has been found, it appears that Find My Friends is back. And it could signal one of the most significant entries into the social networking … Read more

Captchas are those squiggly, random words or numbers you type in a box to prove to a Web site that you're a human being and not another computer. The word isn't a variation of "capture," it's an acronym: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Internet Captcha is a free tool that creates colorful animated Captchas you can embed in your Web site to limit traffic to people and exclude other computers. The Captchas it creates use number codes with distortion, animated effects, and background objects that make them impossible for … Read more

Mozilla upgraded its developer's edition of Firefox today to version 8, including changing how forced third-party add-ons are handled and debuting a series of under-the-hood tweaks that continue a renewed assault on performance gains made in Firefox 7 Beta. Firefox 8 Aurora can be downloaded for Windows, Mac and Linux, and it marks the first release of Aurora for Android.

Two add-on changes were revealed last week that represent, for the first time in possibly years, that Mozilla has forced changes on how third-party programs and Firefox interact. Basically, Mozilla is disabling the ability of a third-party program, like … Read more

What if, when you fired up your mobile phone's browser, it showed a list of the same basic apps your phone does today? And what if a developer who wanted an app to span iPhones, Android phones, and Windows phones only had to write one Web application to do that?

That's the vision that Mozilla, developer of the Firefox Web browser, wants to enable through a project called WebAPI that's designed to make Web-based applications compete better with native apps. And Mozilla has begun hiring programmers for it as part of a plan to build the necessary … Read more

Maybe everyone really is shifting to building mobile sites in HTML5. Adobe Systems recently debuted its Edge tool set in public preview mode for developers interested in creating motion and interactive graphics written natively in the language.

Although this isn't quite the same as Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and others being relatively forced into HTML5 by Flash-resistant Apple for selling products on mobile sites, LinkedIn is getting on board with HTML5 with a new "experience" that can be viewed in nearly any mobile Web browser.

The HTML5-optimized version, along with updated iPhone and Android apps, are … Read more

The World Wide Web Consortium has begun its effort to speed its processes for standardizing Web technology.

Those wishing a less cumbersome way to evaluate and create new standards now can use what the W3C calls Community Groups, an idea that's been under development for months. The W3C also announced the formation of eight such groups, including ones focusing on the Web payments, Web education, and semantic news.

"Innovation and standardization build on each other," said W3C Chief Executive Jeff Jaffe in a statement. "As the pace of innovation accelerates and more industries embrace W3C's … Read more

When designing Web pages you can either directly edit the site's code, or you can use a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") editor like Dreamweaver or Publisher that provides a graphical approach to developing a Web site. Despite the graphical approach, even these can be relatively complex programs to use and require some editing of code.

Apple tackled this complexity with its iWeb program, which is purely graphical and is built to be intuitive like Apple's Pages and Keynote programs, and has become quite popular as a result; however, with the transition from … Read more

Facebook releases a Messenger app for iPhone and Android, Anonymous threatens to shut down the social network, Amazon launches the Kindle Cloud Reader web app for e-books, and Wal-Mart shuts down its MP3 store.

Links from Wednesday's episode of Loaded:

They say revenge is a dish best served cold. But when it comes to circumventing Apple's new in-app subscription rules, it may be best served as an HTML5 Web app.

This morning Amazon launched its Kindle Cloud Reader, a Web-based app that allows you to read your Kindle e-books from the Safari or Chrome browser on your PC or tablet, including the iPad (Amazon says more browsers will be supported in the future).

The Kindle Cloud Reader has a link to the Kindle Store, something that's now missing from the Kindle apps for iPad and iPhone after Apple … Read more