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Throughout 2007, Apple stripped nearly every vestige of Flash from its corporate site and other products, and began recommending that developers use open standards instead. As noted in Gone in a Flash: More on Apple’s iPhone Web Plans, last summer Apple published a document titled "Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone," which not only listed Flash as the single bullet point item under a listing of "unsupported technologies," but went on to explicitly encourage developers to "stick with standards," and use CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax instead.

Microsoft has already begun leveraging its Windows and Office monopolies to distribute Silverlight as a Flash-killer on both the Windows PC desktop and on the Mac. When Microsoft releases a Mac product, it can only mean one thing: it's working hard to kill a cross platform threat to Windows.

the new Cocoa iPhone/iPod Touch SDK not only offers Adobe insufficient means to develop a Flash plugin, but also clearly forbids the development of runtimes designed to advance competing platforms on top of the native Cocoa environment, whether Flash, Silverlight, or Java.

Two areas where Flash can offer real value is in displaying and packaging video on the web, and in serving as a Java replacement for developing applets. Here's a look at how Adobe is working to defend its strengths in the face of competition, and how its efforts to open the Flash specification in the Open Screen Project play into these efforts.

proprietary FLV video container format

more advanced and open H.264 video codec

The real culprit This may seem like a forgone conclusion to many of you after seeing the W3C’s development timetables, but the real reason Flash and Silverlight exist is because the “open-web” people dropped the ball. HTML simply can handle what Flash and Silverlight can do. It has become increasingly stale for modern web development needs. Here is some perspective, HTML5 has finally added a tag for handling video. Flash 6 came out in 2002 with video support! Where is the HTML version of Line Rider? It is in Flash and Silverlight now. If you want to see something really interesting check out Hard Rock Cafe’s memorabilia page (Silverlight 2 required) and tell me if you’ve ever seen something like that with HTML

I reported this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google seems to have quietly dropped the iPhone version of the iGoogle page. The iPhone iGoogle page used to be at google.com/ig/i, but when iPhone users navigate to google.com/ig/i they are redirected to the standard mobile iGoogle page at google.com/m/ig. Google said the reason they dropped the iPhone version was because they “want to ensure you’ll all see the same version” of the iGoogle mobile page. But Google made no official announcement on this change.

Prior to CSS, nearly all of the presentational attributes of HTML documents were contained within the HTML markup; all font colors, background styles, element alignments, borders and sizes had to be explicitly described, often repeatedly, within the HTML. CSS allows authors to move much of that information to a separate stylesheet resulting in considerably simpler HTML markup. Headings (h1 elements), sub-headings (h2), sub-sub-headings (h3), etc., are defined structurally using HTML. In print and on the screen, choice of font, size, color and emphasis for these elements is presentational. Prior to CSS, document authors who wanted to assign such typographic characteristics to, say, all h2 headings had to use the HTML font and other presentational elements for each occurrence of that heading type. The additional presentational markup in the HTML made documents more complex, and generally more difficult to maintain. In CSS, presentation is separated from structure. In print, CSS can define color, font, text alignment, size, borders, spacing, layout and many other typographic characteristics. It can do so independently for on-screen and printed views. CSS also defines non-visual styles such as the speed and emphasis with which text is read out by aural text readers. The W3C now considers the advantages of CSS for defining all aspects of the presentation of HTML pages to be superior to other methods. It has therefore deprecated the use of all the original presentational HTML markup.

Yahoo's Zimbra, the provider of a communications and collaboration suite that rivals Microsoft's Office and Outlook/Exchange, will make its cloud computing debut on Tuesday.Zimbra has so far relied entirely on third-party hosting partners to offer the SaaS (software-as-a-service) version of its suite.However, it is now taking advantage of Yahoo's data centers to become a hosting provider for customers in the education market that want to access the suite on demand.

As Net heavyweights vie to define the next generation of Web applications, the Web’s main standards body is facing a revolt within its own ranks over electronic forms, a cornerstone of interactive documents.

“The W3C is saying the answer is XForms. Microsoft is saying it’s XAML. Macromedia is saying its Flash MX. And Mozilla is saying it’s XUL.

Though the success of one method or another might not seem to make much difference to the person filling out an order form, the fate of open standards in the process could determine whether that form can relay the data it collects to any standards-compliant database or banking system, or whether it can only operate within certain proprietary systems. The fate of a standard could also determine whether the order form could be accessed in any standards-compliant Web browser, or if it would be available only to users of a particular operating system–an outcome that has browser makers and others worried about the role of Microsoft.

How does this relate to cloud computing? Well, there aren’t few enough standard interfaces… yet. We have at least 5 major operating systems, 4+ database types and 3 or so browsers. We have Flash, and JavaScript, and Silverlight. Incompatibilities between them reduce the working combinations slightly, but what about the different versions, and their incompatibilities? Taking just these simple, core technologies, that’s 5 x 4 x 3 x 3 = 180 different technology combinations! That’s a lot of complexity to mask over if you want to provide the same general kind of service to everyone. Look at the number of variables you have to cater for when all you’re supplying is electrons-per-second! But it is possible.

"Business challenges: (1) Enterprises needed to aggregate/reuse business content trapped in disparate repositories: Different systems deployed in different departments, Systems inherited through business acquisition and merger. (2) Companies needed to get up-to-date information from business partner's repository: E.g. Aircraft maintenance crew needed to access manufacturers' vast manual repository to get the latest spec and procedure to comply with FAA regulation. (3) ISVs wanted a single application code-base that can be deployed in different repository environments: Lower development and maintenance cost, Bigger addressable market... Content Management Interoperability Services is a Web-based, protocol-layer interface to enable application to interoperate with disparate content management systems. It is platform-and language-agnostic, message-based, with loose coupling.

The specification was drafted by EMC, IBM, and Microsoft in a project started October 2006. Additional collaborators include: Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP. Interoperability has been validated by all seven vendors.

You can also keep your Google Gadgets organized in your sidebar, a vertical bar on your desktop which basically functions as a control panel for your gadget. You can drag and drop any of your gadgets into or out of your sidebar, or move them up or down to arrange them in any order. The sidebar can be set to always stay on top of other screens, and we've re-designed it to blend better into your desktop.

With the Add Gadgets interface, finding new gadgets is fast and easy. Simply click on the "+" button at the top of your sidebar or select "Add gadgets" from the option menu to bring up this screen. From here, you can view gadgets by category by clicking on the titles on the left or search for specific gadgets by using the search box in the top right. Once you've found the gadget you want, just mouse over it and click the "Add" button.

The amount of work it takes to "offline enable" a Web application is roughly similar to the amount of work it takes to "online enable" a desktop application.

I suspect this is the bitter truth that answers the questions asked in articles like  The Frustratingly Unfulfilled Promise of Google Gears where the author laments the lack of proliferation of offline Web applications built on Google Gears. When it first shipped I was looking forward to a platform like Google Gears but after I thought about the problem for a while, I realized that such a platform would be just as useful for "online enabling" desktop applications as it would be for "offline enabling" Web applications. Additionally, I came to the conclusion that the former is a lot more enabling to users than the latter. This is when I started becoming interested in Live Mesh as a Platform, this is one area where I think Microsoft's hearts and minds are in the right place. I want to see more applications like Outlook + RPC over HTTP  not "offline enabled" versions of Outlook Web Access.

I don't think the Atom publishing protocol can be considered the universal protocol for talking to remote databases given that cloud storage vendors like Amazon and database vendors like Oracle don't support it yet. That said, this is definitely a positive trend. Back in the RSS vs. Atom days I used to get frustrated that people were spending so much time reinventing the wheel with an RSS clone when the real gaping hole in the infrastructure was a standard editing protocol. It took a little longer than I expected (Sam Ruby started talking about in 2003) but the effort has succeeded way beyond my wildest dreams. All I wanted was a standard editing protocol for blogs and content management systems and we've gotten so much more.

Microsoft is using AtomPub as the interface to a wide breadth of services and products as George Moore points out in his post A Unified Standards-Based Protocols and Tooling Platform for Storage from Microsoft 

And a few weeks after George's post even more was revealed in posts such as this one about  FeedSync and Live Mesh where we find out Congratulations to the Live Mesh team, who announced their Live Mesh Technology Preview release earlier this evening! Amit Mital gives a detailed overview in this post on http://dev.live.com. You can read all about it in the usual places...so why do I mention it here? FeedSync is one of the core parts of the Live Mesh platform. One of the key values of Live Mesh is that your data flows to all of your devices. And rather than being hidden away in a single service, any properly authenticated user has full bidirectional sync capability. As I discussed in the Introduction to FeedSync, this really makes "your stuff yours". Okay, FeedSync isn't really AtomPub but it does use the Atom syndication format so I count that as a win for Atom+APP as well. As time goes on, I hope we'll see even more products and services that support Atom and AtomPub from Microsoft. Standardization at the protocol layer means we can move innovation up the stack.

As innovation in the consumer space spills over into the enterprise, IBM believes its social software suite that includes blogs and social networks for business will give users the collaboration features they want while giving IT the ability to hook it into existing systems.

Lotus Connections represents IBM's response to a Web 2.0 world.

How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen?

Communicating at great haste hones our utterances down to instincts and impulses that until now have been held back or channeled more carefully.

Our cafes, post offices, parks, cinemas, town centers, main streets and commu­nity meeting halls have suffered as a result of this development.

If you take public money to buy art, you should make that art available to the public using the best, most efficient means possible. If you believe the public wants to subsidize the creation of commercial art-books, then get out of the art-gallery business, start a publisher and hit the government up for some free tax-money.

Microsoft has set up a repository in which government agencies may upload and store their public-facing datasets so that they can be reused by other parties. Agency developers can upload their data to this repository, called the Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI), through Microsoft's Azure, the company's cloud-computing offering.

Since taking the role of federal chief information officer, Vivek Kundra has urged agencies to make more of their data open to the public in easy-to-use formats. To this end, the General Services Administration, on behalf of Kundra, is setting up a repository of government feeds, to be called Data.gov. Data.gov will both serve as a repository for data and as an index for government data located elsewhere, Kundra told GCN. OGDI came about as a way to introduce Azure to the federal information technology community, said Susie Adams, Microsoft Federal chief technology officer. "The government wants to store all this data, what with Kundra talking about Data.gov. We asked if you were to use Azure as data source, [what would you need to do]?"

In addition to Microsoft's effort, at least one other company has volunteered to rehost government data for wider use. Amazon is offering to store public-domain datasets for users of its Elastic Compute Cloud service.