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Chris Walker provides some interactive demonstrations of the powerful webkit-transforms that are placed in CSS. So, what can we do with all this magic? Well, the culmination of the Chris Walker demo is a Mac OSX style Dock menu, using no Javascript...

".....Yes, that's right a bulging docked menu, with no javascript. Just so you remember, there no javascript in the demo. Check out the Javascript free OSX Dock Menu Demo.

This demo actually proves an important point Tom Yager made earlier about Ajax; Will JavaScript inconsistencies break the Web?

Taking AJAX literally makes lousy Web apps: "As little as possible should be the rule for JavaScript, which must play a supporting role to CSS and HTML". Tom concludes that it's best to follow the WebKit model, putting everything possible into first CSS4, then HTML5, and then JavaScript. I would argue that the proliferation of JavaScript libraries is a good hedge against the non interoperable future Yager warns of. But hey, why stop the guy when he's on a roll. CSS4! I guess the webkit-transforms have been officially christened. Thanks Tom.

~ge~

Finally YouTube offers you the option of doing without Adobe Flash.

Still at the experimental stage, but here's a screencast of GTK+ desktop apps and widgets running in a web browser, via HTML5 magic. Lots of collaboration and remote operation potential. The disruption potential here is huge. GTK+ is one of only three major multi-platform desktop widget toolkits that have accessibility baked in (the ATK library). Thousands of desktop apps have been developed with it. Coming to a browser near you?

Google "Rich Snippets" is a new presentation of HTML snippets that applies Google's algorithms to highlight structured data embedded in web pages. Rich Snippets give end-users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance. Google is currently supporting a very limited subset of data about reviews and people. When searching for a product or service, users can easily see reviews and ratings, and when searching for a person, they'll get help distinguishing between people with the same name. It's a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable. For this to work though, both Web-masters and Web-workers have to annotate thier pages with structured data in a standard format. Google snippets supports microformats and RDFa. Existing Web data can be wrapped with some additional tags to accomplish this. Notice that Google avoids mention of RDF and the W3C's vision of a "Semantic Web" where Web objects are fully described in machine readable semantics. Over at the WHATWG group, where work on HTML5 continues, Google's Ian Hickson has been fighting RDFa and the Semantic Web in what looks to be an effort to protect the infamous Google algorithms. RDFa provides a means for Web-workers, knowledge-workers, line-of-business managers and document generating end-users to enrich their HTML+ with machine semantics. The idea being that the document experts creating Web content can best describe to search engine and content management machines the objects-of-information used. The google algorithms provide a proprietary semantics of this same content. The best solution to the tsunami of conten the Web has wrought would be to combine end-user semantic expertise with Google algorithms. Let's hope Google stays the RDFa course and comes around to recognize the full potential of organizing the world's information with the input of content providers. One thing the world desperatel

And the winner is .... [drumroll] ... HTML5

"W3C standards define an Open Web Platform for application development that has the unprecedented potential to enable developers to build rich interactive experiences, powered by vast data stores, that are available on any device. Although the boundaries of the platform continue to evolve, industry leaders speak nearly in unison about how HTML5 will be the cornerstone for this platform."

"The next generation of the Web standard is using a GitHub repo for feedback and suggestions"

Get your HTML 5 bug reports filed *before* October 1.  See http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Sep/0074.html for more details.

A must read. This article was slashdotted.

"Why something as poorly designed as the Web became The Next Big Thing, and what that means for the future." Well designed but "fixed" systems were over taken by the evolvable but poorly designed Web. I'm wonderig if these same "evolving" principles apply to standard organizations? Put WebKit up against the standard orgs in charge of key WebKit components, and you see clearly that WebKit would fail misably if they stuck to the hapless efforts of the W3C, Ecma and ISO. Besides the fact that entrenched players such as Microsoft are sitting on those standards orgs in position to dumb down or put into terminal stall much needed innovations. For instance, WebKit deepneds on HTML5, CSS3, SVG, and JavaScript. All of which are stalled at various standards orgs. As a reaction to this org stall, the WebKit group pushes forward anyway relying instead on OSS Community style innovation and consensus model sharing.

Like someone finding out that the rapture has happened, and they've been left behind, Tim O'Reilly shakes his fists and shouts to the heavens that Amazon must support open standards. He argues that in-spite of incredible market success, the Amazon Kindle will fail because the document format is not Open. He even argues that Apple, with the iPod and iPhone, have figured out how to blend Open Web formats and application development with proprietary hardware initiatives....

"The Amazon Kindle has sparked huge media interest in e-books and has seemingly jump-started the market. Its instant wireless access to hundreds of thousands of e-books and seamless one-click purchasing process would seem to give it an enormous edge over other dedicated e-book platforms. Yet I have a bold prediction: Unless Amazon embraces open e-book standards like epub, which allow readers to read books on a variety of devices, the Kindle will be gone within two or three years."

TO points to ePub as an open format, apparently not realizing the format falls far short of Open Web advances designed to enable a complete publication-typesetter model. The WebKit and Mozilla open source communities are pushing the envelope of Open Web development with an extremely advanced document model based on HTML5, CSS3, SVG/Canvas, and JavaScript4+. ePub on the other hand is stuck in 1998, supporting the aging HTML4 - CSS2.1 specs. Very sad.