Future of the Web

The software will be incorporated into future versions of the companies' products--likely in 2006, Ballmer said. For now, it's the most concrete example of cooperation between the companies whose fierce competition was blunted somewhat by a 2004 agreement to settle legal issues, share patents and make their software interoperable.

Next up will be cooperation in a number of other domains: storage software and hardware; unified systems management; Web services standards for messaging and event-tracking; and Windows terminal services that let PCs act like thin clients by leaving the heavy lifting of computing to central servers.

15 years of workgroup oriented business process automation based on the MSOffice productivity environment has had an impact. Microsoft pretty much owns the "client" in "client/server" because so many of these day-to-day business processes are bound to the MSOffice productivity environment in some way.

The good news is that there is a great transition underway. The world is slowly but inexorably moving from "client/server" systems to an emerging architecture one might describe as "client/ WebStack-Cloud-Ria /server. The reason for the great transition is simple; the productivity advantages of putting the Web in the center of information systems and workflows are extraordinary.

Now the bad news. Microsoft fully understands this and has spent years preparing for a very controlled transition. They are ready. The pieces are finally falling into place for a controlled transition connecting legacy MSOffice bound business processes to the Microsoft WebStack-Cloud-RiA model (Exchange-SharePoint-SQL Server-Mesh-Silverlight).

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.

AbstractXForms for HTML provides a set of attributes and script methods that can be used by the tags or elements of an HTML or XHTML web page to simplify the integration of data-intensive interactive processing capabilities from XForms. The semantics of the attributes are mapped to the rich XForms model-view-controller-connector architecture, thereby allowing web application authors a smoother, selective migration path to the higher-order behaviors available from the full element markup available in modules of XForms.

This document describes XForms for HTML, which provides a set of attributes and script methods encompassing a useful subset of XForms functionality and mapping that functionality to syntactic constructs that are familiar to authors of HTML and XHTML web pages. The intent of this module is to simplify the means by which web page authors gain access to the rich functionality available from the hybrid execution model of XForms, which combines declarative constructs with event-driven imperative processing. These attributes and script methods increase the initial consumability of XForms by allowing injection of rich semantics directly into the host language markup. In turn, the behaviors of the attributes and script methods are mapped to the XForms model-view-controller-connector architecture so that applications manifest behaviors consistent with having used XForms markup elements. This allows authors to gradually address greater application complexity as it arises in the software lifecycle by opportunistically, i.e. as the need arises, switching from the attributes and script methods of this specification to the corresponding XForms markup elements. This gradual adoption strategy is being further supported by the modularization of XForms into components that can be consumed incrementally by authors and implementers.

President-elect Barack Obama recently announced an ambitious plan to build up the nation’s Internet infrastructure as part of his proposed economic stimulus package.

The United States has long been the world leader in technology, but when it comes to the Internet, it is fast falling behind. America now ranks 15th in the world in access to high-speed Internet connections. A cornerstone of Mr. Obama’s agenda is promoting universal, affordable high-speed Internet.

In a speech this month about his economic stimulus plan, he said that he intends to ensure that every child has a chance to get online and that he would use some of the stimulus money to connect libraries and schools.

The €200 billion economic rescue plan being considered this week by European Union leaders includes a proposal to spend €1 billion on bringing high-speed Internet access to rural areas. The proposal is likely to pit the Continent's telecommunications operators against satellite companies, which say they are uniquely suited to expand the broadband, or high-speed, network to underserved parts of Eastern Europe and the Alps by the end of 2010.

But support for the plan by EU government leaders, who begin a two-day meeting to consider the rescue plan Thursday is not assured. The money would come from unspent funds in the current EU budget, which under EU rules normally revert back to member countries. Germany, which contributes the most to the EU budget and stands to get the largest refund if the project is rejected, opposes the expenditure.

Across the EU, 21.7 percent of residents had broadband Internet access in July, according to the commission; 107.6 million received service from a telephone DSL line or a cable television connection and 130,592 via satellite. Only 6 percent of EU residents on average received broadband via mobile phones.

The "VoIP-4D Primer" is a free guide available in four major languages. The work is an effort to disseminate the use of telephony over the Internet in developing regions. The 40-page guide targets both technical and non-technical readers. The first part presents the essentials of telephony over the Internet. For those interested in the more technical details, hands-on guidelines and configuration files are included in the second part. The examples provide essential background to build your own low-cost telephony system.

http://www.w3.org/ -- 8 December 2008 -- Today, W3C has made it easier to create content designed to improve people's mobile experience using a broad range of devices. W3C invites the community to try the W3C mobileOK checker, which is based on the newly published standard, the mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 Recommendation. "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. "Clean content offers a number of benefits to authors and users alike. The mobileOK checker does a nice job helping you improve your content one step at a time. Your mobile audience will thank you each time you improve your score."

The mobileOK Basic tests are based on the part of the Mobile Web Best Practices that can be verified automatically with software. The checker makes use of the popular W3C validator to help improve content quality. In addition to the mobile-friendliness score, the checker offers tips for meeting the needs of people on the go.

Alfresco Software and Joomlatools today announced the first integration based on Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). The Alfresco:Joomla! integration module was built using the draft CMIS REST API to allow organizations running Joomla-based web sites to access Alfresco's robust open source content management repository.

The integration, built using the CMIS REST API, will enable millions of Joomla web sites to access the powerful back-end content repository services of Alfresco, ensuring security, compliance, and auditability. Users will be able to more effectively manage, preview and track increasing volumes of content and digital assets on collaborative Joomla web sites using Alfresco's content library. Similarly Alfresco users will be able to search, publish, share, download, and edit content directly on Joomla sites.

The proposed CMIS standard is currently being advanced by an OASIS technical committee and will enable anyone to develop content applications on open source Alfresco and deploy them on SharePoint, EMC, IBM, or OpenText. In September 2008, Alfresco released the industry's first draft implementation of the CMIS specification. The company has also recently made available the CMIS Developer Toolbox, which includes a working implementation and contains resources to assist developers in the CMIS community to start creating portable content applications, based on the draft specification.

WordPress has more competition to be. Microsoft’s Codeplex team has developed an open source blogging engine that can support simple blogs and large web sites such as its own MIX Online.

“Oxite was developed carefully and painstakingly to be a great blogging platform, or a starting point for your own web site project with CMS needs,” according to Microsoft.com.

Oxite offers support for multiple blogs per site.  ”Oxite includes the ability to create and edit an arbitrary set of pages on your site. Want an ‘about’ page? You got it. Need a special page about your dogs, with sub-pages for each of those special animals? Yep, no worries,” Microsoft continues. “The ability to add pages as a child of another page is all built in. The web-based editing and creation interface lets you put whatever HTML you want onto your pages, and the built-in authentication system means that only you will be able to edit them.

In other words, revising the Open XML Format converter interfaces by adding new functionality does not require any recompilation of existing clients. This guarantees backward compatibility as these converter interfaces are upgraded.

In addition to allowing converters to override external file formats, the applications allow converters to override OpenDocument Format-related formats (such as .odt). For example, if you specify a converter to be the default converter for .odt, Word 2007 SP2 invokes the specified converter whenever a user tries to open an .odt file from the Windows Shell instead of going through the native load path for Word 2007 SP2.

Open XML Format converters for Word 2007 SP2, Excel 2007 SP2, or PowerPoint 2007 SP2 are implemented as out-of-process COM servers. Out-of-process converters have the benefit of running in their own process space, which means issues or crashes within converters do not affect the application process space. In addition, out-of-process 32-bit converters can function on 64-bit operating systems in Microsoft Windows on Windows 64-bit (WoW64) mode without the need for converters to be compiled in 64-bit.

If you've been at one of the recent DII workshops, you may recall that some of us from Microsoft have been talking about an upcoming converter interface that will allow you to add support for other formats to Office. I'm pleased to report that we've now published the documentation on MSDN for the External File Converter for SP2. The basic concept is that you convert incoming files to the Open XML format, and on save you convert Open XML to your format. Using this API, you can extend Office to support any format you'd like. The details are not for the faint of heart, but there is sample C++ source code available to help you get started.

Sun and Microsoft have agreed on a search distribution deal that will offer the MSN Toolbar, powered by Microsoft Live Search, to U.S.-based Internet Explorer users who download the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

Sun and Microsoft have agreed on a search distribution deal that will offer the MSN Toolbar, powered by Microsoft Live Search, to U.S.-based Internet Explorer users who download the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). This agreement gives Internet Explorer users downloading Sun’s JRE the option to download the MSN Toolbar for one-click access to Live Search features, as well as news, entertainment, sports and more from the MSN network and direct access to Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger.

“This agreement with Sun Microsystems is another important milestone in our strategy to secure broad-scale distribution for our search offering, enabling millions more people to experience the benefits of Live Search,” said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the Online Audience Business at Microsoft. “With the vast array of Java software-based Web applications that are downloaded every month, this deal will expose Live Search to millions more Internet users and drive increased volume for our search advertisers.”