standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today took two significant steps down its double-track path toward standardizing HTML, the core language of the Web.

First, it released a "candidate recommendation" of Hypertext Markup Language 5, which means HTML5 is settling down in the eyes of the standards group. Second, it released a first draft of HTML5.1, a smaller set of changes it's developing simultaneously.

"CR [candidate recommendation] is the stable branch into which only bug fixes go, [and] 5.1 is the new line for improvements," said Robin Berjon, one of the five newly appointed HTML5 editors. … Read more

Peter Swire, an Ohio State law professor and privacy expert who has worked with the Obama administration, is stepping into a contentious process to create a standard way to let people stop Web sites from tracking their online behavior.

Aleecia M. McDonald announced today she's stepping down as co-chair of the Do Not Track standardization effort at the World Wide Web Consortium. She previously worked for Firefox maker Mozilla, which launched the current DNT technology after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sought a mechanism to block online tracking, but she currently works for a program within Stanford University'… Read more

You might think developing technology standards is plodding, bureaucratic tedium compared to something like the frenzy of smartphone innovation.

But you'd be wrong, at least in the case of Paul Cotton, who leads Microsoft's involvement in the important and often fractious world of Web standards. Web standards are hot -- and hotly contested.

Cotton, an even-keeled Canadian, discovered a passion for standards more than 20 years ago when figuring out how to digitize airplane maintenance manuals. He's comfortable with the contradictory motives of standards groups: fierce competition one moment and gentlemanly cooperation the next.

It's a … Read more

Enough with having separate Web programming tutorials from Google, Apple, Opera, Mozilla, and Microsoft.

These five major browser makers, along with Facebook, Adobe Systems, Nokia, and Hewlett Packard, have become stewards of a new effort to centralize developer resources at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This Web Platform Docs project will include not just help on to use a bewildering array of new Web technologies, but also will detail which ones are accepted standards, how well the various tools work across multiple browsers, and how stable the standards are.

"A key part of this project is that it … Read more

A Web security protocol designed to protect Internet users from Internet hijackings due to unencrypted Web sites has won approval as a proposed standard.

A steering group for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) gave its blessing to a draft of HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), an opt-in security enhancement in which Web sites prompt browsers to always interact over a secure connection.

Web browsers complying with the policy will automatically switch insecure links to a secure version of the site, using "https," without the Web surfer having to remember to type that in the URL bar.

HSTS … Read more

COLOGNE, Germany -- There's room for a higher-end flash card format that's faster and more capacious than SD Card, and for years, CompactFlash has occupied that market niche.

But CompactFlash is running out of steam, and finding a successor to CompactFlash just got a lot messier courtesy of a new standard that arrived this week at the Photokina trade show here.

Last year, Nikon and Sony carried the XQD format to market as the would-be CompactFlash successor, with Nikon's flagship D4 camera accepting the cards and Sony making the cards. But Canon and professional camera maker Phase … Read more

HTML5 fans got a very large splash of very cold water in their faces yesterday.

Facebook has been a big fan of building mobile apps using HTML5 and related Web standards, but no less than founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg called Facebook's HTML5 app "one of the biggest mistakes if not the biggest strategic mistake that we made."

Those are powerfully damning words, and many developers will likely take them to heart given Facebook's cred in the programming world.

But there are subtleties here -- not an easy thing for those who see the world … Read more

The Internet Engineering Task Force has standardized the Opus audio compression technology as RFC 6716.

The move paves the way for much broader use of Opus for anything from playing music to online voice chats. Opus is what's called a codec because it defines how to encode and decode a stream of data for more efficient storage or transmission.

"Opus is the first state-of-the-art, free audio codec to be standardized. We think this will help us achieve wider adoption than prior royalty-free codecs," Jean-Marc Valin, a Mozilla employee and author of Opus, said in a blog post today. … Read more

Apache, the most commonly used software to house Web sites, will ignore Microsoft's decision to disable ad-tracking technology by default in Internet Explorer 10.

Microsoft set IE10 and Windows 8 so that, by default, Web sites that observe the Do Not Track (DNT) standard won't track people's behavior. The move was made to "better protect user privacy," the company said.

But protecting user privacy turns out to be a thorny matter in practice -- at least when a standard has to be palatable to advertisers as well as browser makers and people surfing the Web. … Read more