All posts tagged ‘standards’

File Under: privacy
Sep
9
2011

W3C’s New ‘Do Not Track’ Group Aims for Better Web Privacy

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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced a new project to standardize the “Do Not Track” opt-out tools already a part of Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. To help move the “Do Not Track” tools from browser novelty to web standard, the W3C has launched the Tracking Protection Working Group. The new group will bring together browser makers, advertisers and developers to standardize a simple way for web browsers to opt-out of online tracking.

Behavioral advertising, as such tracking is known, is becoming increasingly common on the web. Advertisers use cookies to follow you around the web, tracking which sites you visit, what you buy and even, in the case of mobile browsers, where you go. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has already outlined a Do Not Track mechanism (PDF link), which would work much like the FTC’s Do Not Call list, offering a way to opt-out of online tracking.

While the new DNT header is already part of Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari, and a wide range of sites now respect it, it has lacked one key ingredient — standardization. The new Tracking Protection Working Group is the first step on the road to standardization and will hopefully mean Opera and Chrome will both soon adopt the DNT header.

To help web developers get a handle on the new header Mozilla has put together a Developer Guide on DNT. The guide includes a walk through of how to detect a DNT header, and what to do about it when you do, as well as some sample code to help developers build DNT compliant sites and apps.

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Footprints photo by Vinoth Chandar/Flickr/CC

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File Under: Multimedia, Web Standards
Feb
15
2010

Use Web Standards With Flash

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It’s everywhere I turn. The cry is impossible to escape. I hear it shouted from the mountaintops with thunderous urgency: “Web Standards! Adhere to them and everything will be good.”

Web standards are understandably necessary, and I use them all the time in my own work, as should you. But is there still a place for Flash in this new standards compliant world? The answer is yes, of course.


Continue Reading “Use Web Standards With Flash” »

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File Under: Web Basics
Oct
13
2008

Set a Reminder For iCalendar’s Birthday

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November is 10th birthday of iCalendarProminent author John Udell notes that the iCalendar specification turns ten next month. Known to its friends as RFC 2445, the standard for describing events is used by Microsoft Outlook, Apple’s iCal, and many other calendar programs. Udell thinks calendar sharing hasn’t reached its potential. The way RSS has been adopted for sharing and syndicating content, iCalendar could be better used, according to Udell. Where there is support for iCal, it tends to be read-only:
“Services like Eventful and Upcoming produce calendar feeds. But because they do not consume them, they don’t encourage individuals and groups to publish feeds, and to think and act in a syndication-oriented way.”
Calendar aggregators, which work in both directions, are the answer, according to Udell. He created a prototype of how these might look. There are eighteen separate calendars, local to Keene, NH, flowing into one events page. Similarly, there is an open source project, Calagator, based in Portland, OR, working on the issue. There are likely others. Let us know in the comments. A related project, hCalendar, is a microformat based on iCalendar. As with all microformats, the event data is embedded within a standard HTML document, with special tags surrounding the data, which is often styled for the user. For more on microformats in general, see our microformats tutorial. See also:
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File Under: Software & Tools
Sep
26
2008

WebKit Sails Smoothly Through ACID 3 Tests

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ACID 3 testWebKit, the rendering engine that powers browsers Safari and Chrome, among others, says it has passed all three stages of the ACID 3 test. The test checks how well a browser supports JavaScript and the Document Object Model (DOM), as well as a few other treats, like SVG graphics. You can check your browser here. Opera and WebKit passed the first two stages of the ACID 3 test shortly after its release in March. These measure the actual tests themselves (100/100), plus the pixel-perfect appearance of the page. The final stage, “smooth animation,” has been a more difficult task. The passing version of WebKit does render for me without hiccups, but there appears to be no solid definition of “smooth.” On the official release browsers I have access to, the highest score was a 75, for Safari 3.1.2. Firefox 3.0.2 was close with a 71. Shortly after WebKit and Opera passed the test, Mozilla’s Mike Shaver said Firefox would not scramble to pass the tests and that ACID 3 was a missed opportunity:
“Acid 3 could have had a tremendous positive effect on the web, representing the next target for the web platform, and helping developers prioritize work in such a way as to maximize the aggregate capabilities of the web. Instead, it feels like a puzzle game, and I can easily imagine the developers of the web’s proprietary competitors chuckling about the hundreds of developer-hours that have gone into adding another way to iterate over nodes, or twiddling internal APIs to special case a testing font.”
Regardless, some within the Firefox community appear to be working on it, reporting scores in the mid-90s earlier this month. See also:
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File Under: Web Basics
Aug
29
2008

Opera Taunts IE8 Over Standards

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Opera flings arrows at IEHakon Lie’s rant against Internet Explorer 8′s interoperability promise is making a big stink where Microsoft should instead be lauded. Lie, the Chief Technical Officer for rival browser Opera, complains that IE8 defaults to a previous rendering engine for intranet pages. Microsoft had previously promised to always support the highest standards.

Lie goes on to invent statistics to show intranets make up half of the page view on PCs. While the method for determining his numbers may not have been scientific, the point is being made solely to imply that Microsoft is only half-supporting standards. In 2005 Lie wrote a similar attack complaining about, among other things, Microsoft’s site not validating. This is picking nits, and it’s akin to schoolyard bullying. That’s right, Microsoft is getting bullied this time.

I think Microsoft was right to note a differentiation between the web and intranets, and it even chose the defaults correctly. There are many different types of intranets, but one thing most have in common is that they suck. They’re duct-taped together pieces of software. Microsoft is right not to expect most intranets to support standards.

Indeed, much of the web is not 100 percent standards-compliant, partly due to Microsoft’s previous partial support. Internet Explorer 8 comes with a “compatibility view” that reverts to the previous rendering engine whenever a page has no DOCTYPE, or when the developer has chosen to render in the older Quirks mode. Users can also manually implement compatibility view by clicking the icon next to the location bar, or by setting it permanently for a given site.

Here is an animated GIF of the W3C website with and without “compatibility view” enabled:
Regular and Compatibility views animation

Compatibility view makes sense to me. Why make users suffer just because a developer has not kept up with standards? Click a button and, without restarting the browser, IE 8 gives you a glimpse of how the site may have been meant to look.

Compatibility view icon in contextWhere I do agree with Lie is about the icon. Microsoft chose a broken web page to represent compatibility view. While Lie seemed to assume the icon was meant to represent standards, it’s clear to me that the broken page is activated when going back to previous versions. If Microsoft is dissing anybody here, it’s itself.

But using a broken page as an icon is just a bad idea. Users are bound to wonder, “will this break my web page?” Granted, I’ve wondered that often when loading sites in IE, but I’m hoping that IE 8, with its smart selection of when to support standards, will make broken pages a thing of the past.

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File Under: Multimedia, Software & Tools, Web Basics
Jul
31
2008

Firefox Lends IE Hand for Next Gen HTML

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Firefox and IE displaying canvas graphics elements side by side.

Firefox and IE displaying canvas graphics elements side by side.
Picture courtesy Vladimir Vukicevic’s blog

According to Mozilla engineer Vladimir Vukicevic, Internet Explorer isn’t adapting to the next generation of web standards fast enough, so he’s going to have to do it himself.

Vukicevic has been working to introduce HTML 5 graphic canvas elements to Firefox. As we mentioned in our preview of Firefox 3.1, canvas elements introduce the ability to render two dimensional, and soon three dimensional, graphics directly through web pages without a download. The graphics are part of the next-generation HTML 5 standard, and it’s something Opera and Safari have already implemented.

The problem is the leading browser on the internet, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, doesn’t support Canvas elements and have announced no plans to support it in the future. If you were a Mozilla developer behind a cool new feature and you knew people weren’t going to use it until the leading browser on the web implemented it, you might feel tempted to lend the other browser a hand.

Vukicevic did exactly that. His ActiveX component adds the ability to see Canvas elements in Internet Explorer exactly the same way Opera, Safari or Firefox 3.1 users will. According to Vukicevic’s blog post:

“Canvas is just one piece of the full modern web platform, but because it’s so self-contained, it lets us experiment with pushing the web platform forward even for browsers that have fallen behind (or that might not be interested in an open web).”

The code isn’t finished yet. There are still some graphic implementations needed to bring the feature up to standard. Even more daunting, there are installation issues with Vukicevic’s solution:

“Currently, the experience is pretty crappy… In theory, with the right signatures, the right security class implementations, some eye of newt, and a pinch of garlic, it’s possible to get things down to a one-time install which would make the component available everywhere.”

Still, this is great news for Internet Explorer fans. HTML 5 technology aims to bring multimedia elements, such as audio, video and graphics to your browser without depending on third-party media solutions. The standard, if implemented among all browsers, allows web developers the tools needed to ensure the same user experience no matter what browser you choose to use.

For the rest of us, it means a seamless and rich multimedia experiences in our favorite web pages — no more missing plug-ins or add-ons.

However, Internet Explorer hasn’t been very open to adapting to developing standards as Opera, Safari and Firefox has. In part, this is because it is pushing its own .NET based technology, including its Silverlight multimedia browser plug-in, to achieve the same goal. Pushing adoption of its technology instead of web standards such as HTML 5 (using the weight of Internet Explorer’s leading market share) means the company has more power to influence the future of emerging internet technology.

This is where Vukicevic’s add-on is so unique. In a way, it forces Internet Explorer to play along with the web standards community without its direct involvement. In turn, web developers will be more apt to use the technology. And if all browsers use the same standards, it means rich internet multimedia for all.

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File Under: Web Basics
Jul
3
2008

Adobe’s PDF Format Adopted as Standard

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Adobe PDF icon Adobe’s PDF format was officially adopted as an open standard this week. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) announced that PDF is now accessible as ISO 32000-1. The announcement follows Adobe’s decision to relinquish control of the proprietary format first introduced in 1993. “By releasing the full PDF specification for ISO standardization, we are reinforcing our commitment to openness,” Adobe chief technology officer Kevin Lynch said in a press release. As we noted in January when ISO approved PDF, some see this move from Adobe as a defensive move to stop Microsoft’s XML Paper Specification. Adobe denies the decision has anything to do with Redmond and instead is intended to answer a call from their users for open formats. If you’re a PHP programmer, check out our tutorial on generating PDFs dynamically. See also:
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File Under: Web Basics
May
5
2008

992 Days Projected Until IPv4 Exhaustion

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Ipv6Here on the Internet, we’ve been using the IPv4 network protocol for quite a while. Its successor, IPv6, is waiting patiently in the wings, but it’s a hard leap to make. IPv4 addresses look like 192.168.50.66. IPv6 addresses are longer: 2001:0f68:0000:0000:0000:0000:1986:69af. IPv4 only provides 232 possible addresses, which we’re plowing through rapidly; IPv6 provides 2128, which should last us rather an astronomical while. IPv6 offers further advantages too, like built-in authentication. Nobody wants to be the first to make the leap, but the long-awaited transition seems to be happening slowly but surely. In February, IPv6 DNS records were added to the root servers. In March, Google launched ipv6.google.com. Does that site work for you? Then your Internet provider is an unusually forward-thinking one. like Hurricane Electric. Hurricane Electric, a hosting company I like a lot, is pushing hard for the transition. They already offer dual-stack IPv6 for their users. Here‘s a PDF copy of the letter we users just got. For everyone else, they offer a free IPv6 tunnel service at Tunnelbroker.net. Try it out!
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File Under: Web Basics
Apr
23
2008

Inching Toward a Semantic Web

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MahalositelogoFirefox 3 introduces support for microformats. Microformats are an approach to making extant human-created data machine-readable. Content like recipes, events, resumes are marked up so that they can be parsed automatically. As you’d expect, adoption is the sticking point. So it was nice to see that Mahalo.com, a web directory against whom Wired.com bears no grudge, is now using microformats for their data. Your turn. See Also:
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File Under: Web Basics
Apr
15
2008

What’s a Good Way to Programmatically Create RTFs?

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RtfDear, wise readers: I’m looking for a Linux command-line tool that can convert ASCII plain text files to Rich Text Format. Sure, it’s a Microsoft-owned standard, but it’s pretty interoperable, and a good lightweight alternative to .doc. Unlike, say, .odt, old-school tech illiterates won’t freak out if you send them one. I’ve tried text2rtf, which seems to render much of its output in unwanted italics; and the command-line version of Docfrac, which stumbles over accented characters and inserts extra blank lines. Is this a task that’s harder than it seems? I’m not about to spend $59 on a single-user license for AscToRtf. OS X’s textutil is very nice, but not portable to non-Cocoa systems. There must be a script out there for me. See Also:
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