Web Anatomy by Lana Kovacevic
The Web 2.0 era has dawned upon us and is transforming the way we interact with the Web as we continue to expand the boundaries and strive for a more embellished user experience. Lana Kovacevic explores the world of the Web and brings you the latest tips, trends and tricks.
Dec 11
W3C releases mobileOK
W3C has released mobileOK checker, an open source tool for checking the suitability of websites for mobile devices. "The new checker builds on the suite of quality assurance tools offered by W3C to help authors and authoring tool developers create clean content," said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C director, in a statement. "Clean content offers a number of benefits to authors and users alike. The mobileOK [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 0 comments
Tags: mobile devices, w3c, standards
Dec 02
Tools for the Semantic Web
In my recent blog post I covered David Peterson presentation "Semantic Web for Distributed Social Networks" at Web Directions South in Sydney. Peterson, also mentioned a number a useful tools that support the Semantic Web, described below. Semantic MediaWikiMediaWiki is the backbone of some of the popular web-based wikis, such as Wikipedia. Conventional wikis are collections of texts with no [...] Read more »
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Nov 27
The Geolocation API
The W3C's has proposed a Geolocation API -- an interface that can work out the location of the hosting device. In addition to determining and updating the location, based on latitudes and longitudes the API would attempt to also query cached positions. Privacy The ability of the technology to reveal the user's location raises privacy concerns, so it has been proposed that location information [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 0 comments
Tags: latitude, longitude, location, web browser, firefox
Nov 11
Down to Semantics
At this year's Web Directions South conference in Sydney, David Peterson presented "Semantic Web for Distributed Social Networks". Semantic Web Although many of the semantic web technologies are already here, according to Peterson we're still far from what Tim Berners-Lee had envisioned. In the semantic web the information is supposed to be collection and object-based. The current generation [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 0 comments
Tags: social network, sparql, rdf, semantic web, microformats
Oct 28
Microsoft's new identity tools
One of the topics at this year's PDC in Los Angeles was identity management. Microsoft has taken steps to ensure easier user authentication by announcing new tools for managing identities and the support for OpenID. Two new technologies were introduced -- Microsoft Federation Gateway and Microsoft Services Connector (MSC). Their purpose is to enable a more seamless integration between the organisation [...] Read more »
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Oct 16
Opera's MAMA offers search to web developers
Opera has created a new search engine letting web developers discover how web pages are structured. Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA) search engine will allow web developers to find where certain features and functions have been used and collect data to analyse and discover trends. In a press release, Opera said MAMA will help answer general questions such as "how many sites [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 0 comments
Tags: web page, opera, web browser, web development, standards, search
Oct 09
AJAX applications and security
Douglas Crockford, the creator of JSON, gave a talk entitled "AJAX Security" at the recent Web Directions South conference. In this talk, Crockford discussed some of the security concerns with AJAX applications and what can be done to address them. Crockford emphasised that the main security concern with Ajax is the browser itself. The browser's security model is inappropriate for the Ajax applications [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 0 comments
Tags: javascript, conference, ajax, security, mashup
Sep 29
What's new in CSS 3?
At the Web Directions South conference in Sydney on Friday, Jina Bolton presented "Creating Sexy Style Sheets", which gave an insight into some of the new features in CSS 3. The modules discussed are outlined below. Backgrounds and Borders This module will allow you to play with backgrounds and borders of any box in new ways. Below are some of the techniques: border-radius -- allows for [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 0 comments
Tags: css3, stylesheet, css, web, conference
Sep 19
Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 developer features
The latest Firefox alpha release -- 3.1 alpha 2 is more significant for developers than end-users. Below are some of the new interesting features that have been implemented: HTML 5 video tag The video tag -- a part of HTML 5 standard has been introduced. Developers can now embed a video into a Web page directly, without needing to use Flash, control the video playback with JavaScript and [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 0 comments
Tags: html5, firefox, css, web development
Sep 11
Microsoft's vision of meshing
The main topic at this year's Microsoft Tech.Ed keynote was the combination of Live Mesh platform and Software plus Services -- Microsoft's version of SaaS. S+S is different from SaaS in that it also involves the rich-client. "Take all the benefits of software running locally, all the benefits of service and bring them together," said Amit Mital, the general manager of Live Mesh. Mital [...] Read more »
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Sep 01
What's new in Dreamweaver CS4?
A new and improved version of Dreamweaver is coming out soon that is set to simplify Web development even further. The user interface has been enhanced to provide better integration with other Creative Suite 4 components such as Photoshop, Fireworks and Flash. I particularly liked the new vertical split Code View. But in addition to the interface enhancements, there are a bunch of other interesting [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 3 comments
Tags: web design, website, html, dreamweaver, css, adobe
Aug 21
The 2008 Trends and Threats to Internet security
I recently came across the IBM Internet Security Systems X-Force 2008 Mid-Year Trend Statistics report, which outlines issues affecting internet security, including Web application vulnerabilities, phishing, malware and spam. Two areas of particular interest to me were security concerns regarding Web applications, browsers and other client-side applications. Web application vulnerabilities [...] Read more »
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Aug 14
Design websites with Dreamweaver CS3 layouts
Dreamweaver CS3 allows you to accelerate your Web design process by providing 32 sample CSS layouts. You can even add your own to the list. To start using the layouts, click File and then New. Select Blank Page, HTML as page type and one of the layouts. For example, 2 column elastic, left side bar. On the right-hand side a preview of the layout along with a description will be displayed. The CSS [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 0 comments
Tags: web design, website, html, layout, dreamweaver, css, adobe
Jul 11
Google opens up the code for Browser Sync
After deciding to discontinue its Browser Sync, Google has decided to make the code open source to let developers continue hacking. Browser Sync is an extension for Firefox that regularly synchronises your settings like bookmarks, browsing history, cookies, saved passwords, tabs and open windows across your different computers and sessions. A Google account is required to store this information. [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 1 comment
Tags: browser sync, firefox, google, extension, browser, open source
Jul 07
Spry Game
At this year's Adobe WebDU conference in Sydney, Greg Rewis gave a presentation on Spry 1.6, the AJAX framework. Spry is another JavaScript library designed to make AJAX development easier. As Rewis puts it, it is ideal for "folks who don't dream of the DOM". Fundamentally, it lets you write AJAX with less code. If you are a fan of Dreamweaver this framework might come in handy, as it is [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 0 comments
Tags: webdu, spry, dreamweaver, ajax, web development, adobe, conference
Jul 03
What's new in GWT 1.5?
I recently wrote an introduction to the Google Web Toolkit based on Lars Rasmussen's session at the Google Developer Day 2008 in Sydney. Following the introductory session Lars gave us a deeper insight into GWT, particularly what's new in version 1.5. The features that are worth mentioning are the new DOM API and JavaScript overlay types. DOM Programming GWT DOM programming allows you [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 1 comment
Tags: javascript, json, java, google, web development, conference
Jul 02
The Portal of the Future
At this year’s Gartner Application Development, Integration and Web Services Summit, I attended Gene Phifer’s talk: "Portal of the Future: What's Beyond Web 2.0?". According to Gene, the main difference between a regular website and a portal is personalisation, which goes beyond the typical "Hello Gene". There are two JSRs that define the behaviour of portals -- 168 and 286. He says people [...] Read more »
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Jun 24
Lets Shindig!
Following the introductory presentation on OpenSocial at the Google Developer Day conference in Sydney, Dan Peterson and John Hjelmstad delved into the workings of Shindig with their presentation "Apache Shindig: Make your social site an OpenSocial container". What is Shindig? Shindig, a project in Apache Software Foundation Incubation is an open source implementation of OpenSocial and gadgets. [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 0 comments
Tags: apache, opensocial, google, gadget, conference
Jun 19
Social Skills
With Facebook usage on the decline (as shown by a recent Ovum survey), could OpenSocial be the next big thing? At the Google Developer Day 2008, I attended Dan Peterson’s talk on OpenSocial, “OpenSocial: A standard for the social Web”. Dan kicked off the presentation by describing the notion of the Social Web. The Web is about sharing information and people are the providers of that information. [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 1 comment
Tags: google developer day, opensocial, google, web
Jun 12
Firefox 3 out on June 17th
After five betas and three release candidates, Firefox 3 is finally coming out. The popular browser is due to be released on the 17th of June. Both developers and users will benefit from this new offering from Mozilla. It'll be good to see the extensions working properly without having to hack them. I've been using Firefox for ages and apart from slowness (if you don't believe me compare [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 2 comments
Jun 12
One ID to rule them all
These days, with so many services on offer, chances are you'll have to remember more than one ID-password combination, assuming you are security-aware and are not using the same login details on all websites. How many times have you forgotten your password and had to reset it? It's annoying and a waste of time. You probably know you're going to forget it again anyhow, especially if you don't [...] Read more »
-- posted by Lana Kovacevic | 1 comment
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Space pr0n, patent karma and Yang out -- Club Builder
On Club Builder this week: how NASA plans to get the Internet into space, Jerry Yang is out the door at Yahoo and Brendan Eich discusses javascript engine competition.