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Gary Edwards

Does It Matter Who Wins the Browser Wars? Only if you care about the Future of the Open... - 1 views

www.bnet.com/...4-16236

ge OpenWeb OpenWeb-Productivity-Platform Browser-Wars

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Aug 10
     
    The Future of the Open Web You're right that the browser wars do not matter - except for this point of demarcation; browsers that support HTML+ and browser that support 1998 HTML. extensive comment by ~ge~ Not all Web services and applications support HTML+, the rapidly advancing set of technologies that includes HTML5, CSS3, SVG/Canvas, and JavaScript (including the libraries and JSON). Microsoft has chosen to draw the Open Web line at what amounts to 1998-2001 level of HTML/CSS. Above that line, they provision a rich-client / rich-server Web model bound to the .NET-WPF platform where C#, Silverlight, and XAML are very prominent. Noticeably, Open Web standards are for the most part replaced at this richer MSWeb level by proprietary technologies. Through limited support for HTML/CSS, IE8 itself acts to dumb down the Open Web. The effect of this is that business systems and day-to-day workflow processes bound to the ubiquitous and very "rich" MSOffice Productivity Environment have little choice when it comes to transitioning to the Web but to stay on the Microsoft 2010 treadmill. Sure, at some point legacy business processes and systems will be rewritten to the Web. The question is, will it be the Open Web or the MS-Web? The Open Web standards are the dividing line between owning your information and content, or, having that content bound to a Web platform comprised of proprietary Microsoft services, systems and applications. Web designers and developers are still caught up in the browser wars. They worry incessantly as to how to dumb down Web content and services to meet the limited functionality of IE. This sucks. So everyone continues to watch "the browser wars" stats. What they are really watching for though is that magic moment where "combined" HTML+ browser uptake in marketshare signals that they can start to implement highly graphical and collaboratively interactive HTML+ specific content. Meanwhile, the greater Web is a
Gary Edwards

XML Production Workflows? Start with the Web and XHTML - 1 views

quod.lib.umich.edu/...n-workflows-start-with-the-web

OpenWeb XML XHTML-CSS HTML5-CSS3-JavaScript IDML

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Challenges: Some Ugly Truths The challenges of building—and living with—an XML workflow are clear enough. The return on investment is a long-term proposition. Regardless of the benefits XML may provide, the starting reality is that it represents a very different way of doing things than the one we are familiar with. The Word Processing and Desktop Publishing paradigm, based on the promise of onscreen, WYSIWYG layout, is so dominant as to be practically inescapable. It has proven really hard to get from here to there, no matter how attractive XML might be on paper. A considerable amount of organizational effort and labour must be expended up front in order to realize the benefits. This is why XML is often referred to as an “investment”: you sink a bunch of time and money up front, and realize the benefits—greater flexibility, multiple output options, searching and indexing, and general futureproofing—later, over the long haul. It is not a short-term return proposition. And, of course, the returns you are able to realize from your XML investment are commensurate with what you put in up front: fine-grained, semantically rich tagging is going to give you more potential for searchability and recombination than a looser, more general-purpose approach, but it sure costs more. For instance, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is the grand example of pouring enormous amounts of energy into the up-front tagging, with a very open-ended set of possibilities down the line. TEI helpfully defines a level to which most of us do not have to aspire.[5] But understanding this on a theoretical level is only part of the challenge. There are many practical issues that must be addressed. Software and labour are two of the most critical. How do you get the content into XML in the first place? Unfortunately, despite two decades of people doing SGML and XML, this remains an ugly question.
  • Practical Challenges In 2009, there is still no truly likeable—let alone standard—editing and authoring software for XML. For many (myself included), the high-water mark here was Adobe’s FrameMaker, substantially developed by the late 1990s. With no substantial market for it, it is relegated today mostly to the tech writing industry, unavailable for the Mac, and just far enough afield from the kinds of tools we use today that its adoption represents a significant hurdle. And FrameMaker was the best of the breed; most of the other software in decent circulation are programmers’ tools—the sort of things that, as Michael Tamblyn pointed out, encourage editors to drink at their desks. The labour question represents a stumbling block as well. The skill-sets and mind-sets that effective XML editors need have limited overlap with those needed by literary and more traditional production editors. The need to think of documents as machine-readable databases is not something that comes naturally to folks steeped in literary culture. In combination with the sheer time and effort that rich tagging requires, many publishers simply outsource the tagging to India, drawing a division of labour that spans oceans, to put it mildly. Once you have XML content, then what do you do with it? How do you produce books from it? Presumably, you need to be able to produce print output as well as digital formats. But while the latter are new enough to be generally XML-friendly (e-book formats being largely XML based, for instance), there aren’t any straightforward, standard ways of moving XML content into the kind of print production environments we are used to seeing. This isn’t to say that there aren’t ways of getting print—even very high-quality print—output from XML, just that most of them involve replacing your prepress staff with Java programmers.
  • Why does this have to be so hard? It’s not that XML is new, or immature, or untested. Remember that the basics have been around, and in production, since the early 1980s at least. But we have to take account of a substantial and long-running cultural disconnect between traditional editorial and production processes (the ones most of us know intimately) and the ways computing people have approached things. Interestingly, this cultural divide looked rather different in the 1970s, when publishers were looking at how to move to digital typesetting. Back then, printers and software developers could speak the same language. But that was before the ascendancy of the Desktop Publishing paradigm, which computerized the publishing industry while at the same time isolating it culturally. Those of us who learned how to do things the Quark way or the Adobe way had little in common with people who programmed databases or document-management systems. Desktop publishing technology isolated us in a smooth, self-contained universe of toolbars, grid lines, and laser proofs. So, now that the reasons to get with this program, XML, loom large, how can we bridge this long-standing divide?
  • ...44 more annotations...
  • Using the Web as a Production Platform The answer, I think, is right in front of you. The bridge is the Web, a technology and platform that is fundamentally based on XML, and which many publishers are by now comfortably familiar with. Perhaps not entirely comfortably, but at least most publishers are already working with the Web; they already either know or have on staff people who understand it and can work with it. The foundation of our argument is this: rather than looking at jumping to XML in its full, industrial complexity, which seems to be what the O'Reilly-backed StartWithXML initiative[6] is suggesting, publishers instead leverage existing tools and technologies—starting with the Web—as a means of getting XML workflows in place. This means making small investments and working with known tools rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars on XML software and rarefied consultants. It means re-thinking how the existing pieces of the production toolchain fit together; re-thinking the existing roles of software components already in use. It means, fundamentally, taking the Web seriously as a content platform, rather than thinking of it as something you need to get content out to, somehow. If nothing else, the Web represents an opportunity to think about editorial and production from outside the shrink-wrapped Desktop Publishing paradigm.
  • Is the Web made of Real XML? At this point some predictable objections can be heard: wait a moment, the Web isn’t really made out of XML; the HTML that makes up most of the Web is at best the bastard child of SGML, and it is far too flaky/unstructured/underpowered to be taken seriously. We counter by arguing that although HTML on the Web exists in a staggering array of different incarnations, and that the majority of it is indeed an unstructured mess, this does not undermine the general principle that basic, ubiquitous Web technologies can make a solid platform for content management, editorial process, and production workflow.
  • With the advent of a published XML standard in the late 1990s came the W3C’s adoption of XHTML: the realization of the Web’s native content markup as a proper XML document type. Today, its acceptance is almost ubiquitous, even while the majority of actual content out there may not be strictly conforming. The more important point is that most contemporary Web software, from browsers to authoring tools to content management systems (from blogs to enterprise systems), are capable of working with clean, valid XHTML. Or, to put the argument the other way around, clean, valid XHTML content plays absolutely seamlessly with everything else on the Web.[7]
  • The objection which follows, then, will be that even if we grant that XHTML is a real XML document type, that it is underpowered for “serious” content because it is almost entirely presentation (formatting) oriented; it lacks any semantic depth. In XHTML, a paragraph is a paragraph is a paragraph, as opposed to a section or an epigraph or a summary.
  • n contrast, more “serious” XML document types like DocBook[8] or DITA-derived schemas[9] are capable of making semantic distinctions about content chunks at a fine level of granularity and with a high degree of specificity.
  • So there is an argument for recalling the 80:20 rule here. If XHTML can provide 80% of the value with just 20% of the investment, then what exactly is the business case for spending the other 80% to achieve that last 20% of value? We suspect the ratio is actually quite a bit steeper than 80:20 for most publishers.
  • Furthermore, just to get technical for a moment, XHTML is extensible in a fairly straightforward way, through the common “class” attribute on each element. Web developers have long leveraged this kind of extensibility in the elaboration of “microformats” for semantic-web applications.[10] There is no reason why publishers shouldn’t think to use XHTML’s simple extensibility in a similar way for their own ends.
  • XHTML, on the other hand, is supported by a vast array of quotidian software, starting with the ubiquitous Web browser. For this very reason, XHTML is in fact employed as a component part of several more specialized document types (ONIX and ePub among them).
  • Why re-invent a general-purpose prose representation when XHTML already does the job?
  • It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the role of XHTML in the ePub standard for ebook content. An ePub file is, anatomically, a simply disguised zip archive. Inside the zip archive are a few standard component parts: there are specialized files that declare metadata about the book, and about the format of the book. And then there is the book’s content, represented in XHTML. An ePub book is a Web page in a wrapper.
  • To sum up the general argument: the Web as it already exists presents incredible value to publishers, as a platform for doing XML content management with existing (and often free) tools, and without having to go blindly into the unknown. At this point, we can offer a few design guidelines: prefer existing and/or ubiquitous tools over specialized ones wherever possible; prefer free software over proprietary systems where possible; prefer simple tools controlled and coordinated by human beings over fully automated (and therefore complex) systems; play to our strengths: use Web software for storing and managing content, use layout software for layout, and keep editors and production people in charge of their own domains.
  • Putting the Pieces Together: A Prototype
  • At the SFU Master of Publishing Program, we have been chipping away at this general line of thinking for a few years. Over that time, Web content management systems have been getting more and more sophisticated, all the while getting more streamlined and easier to use. (NB: if you have a blog, you have a Web content management system.) The Web is beginning to be recognized as a writing and editing environment used by millions of people. And the ways in which content is represented, stored, and exchanged online have become increasingly robust and standardized.
  • The missing piece of the puzzle has been print production: how can we move content from its malleable, fluid form on line into the kind of high-quality print production environments we’ve come to expect after two decades of Desktop Publishing?
  • Anyone who has tried to print Web content knows that the existing methods leave much to be desired (hyphenation and justification, for starters). In the absence of decent tools for this, most publishers quite naturally think of producing the print content first, and then think about how to get material onto the Web for various purposes. So we tend to export from Word, or from Adobe, as something of an afterthought.
  • While this sort of works, it isn’t elegant, and it completely ignores the considerable advantages of Web-based content management.
  • Content managed online is stored in one central location, accessible simultaneously to everyone in your firm, available anywhere you have an Internet connection, and usually exists in a much more fluid format than Word files. If only we could manage the editorial flow online, and then go to print formats at the end, instead of the other way around. At SFU, we made several attempts to make this work by way of the supposed “XML import” capabilities of various Desktop Publishing tools, without much success.[12]
  • In the winter of 2009, Adobe solved this part of the problem for us with the introduction of its Creative Suite 4. What CS4 offers is the option of a complete XML representation of an InDesign document: what Adobe calls IDML (InDesign Markup Language).
  • The IDML file format is—like ePub—a simply disguised zip archive that, when unpacked, reveals a cluster of XML files that represent all the different facets of an InDesign document: layout spreads, master pages, defined styles, colours, and of course, the content.
  • IDML is a well thought-out XML standard that achieves two very different goals simultaneously: it preserves all of the information that InDesign needs to do what it does; and it is broken up in a way that makes it possible for mere mortals (or at least our Master of Publishing students) to work with it.
  • What this represented to us in concrete terms was the ability to take Web-based content and move it into InDesign in a straightforward way, thus bridging Web and print production environments using existing tools and skillsets, with a little added help from free software.
  • We would take clean XHTML content, transform it to IDML-marked content, and merge that with nicely designed templates in InDesign.
  • The result is an almost push-button publication workflow, which results in a nice, familiar InDesign document that fits straight into the way publishers actually do production.
  • Tracing the steps To begin with, we worked backwards, moving the book content back to clean XHTML.
  • The simplest method for this conversion—and if you want to create Web content, this is an excellent route—was to use Adobe’s “Export to Digital Editions” option, which creates an ePub file.
  • Recall that ePub is just XHTML in a wrapper, so within the ePub file was a relatively clean XHTML document. It was somewhat cleaner (that is, the XHTML tagging was simpler and less cluttered) than InDesign’s other Web-oriented exports, possibly because Digital Editions is a well understood target, compared with somebody’s website.
  • In order to achieve our target of clean XHTML, we needed to do some editing; the XHTML produced by InDesign’s “Digital Editions” export was presentation-oriented. For instance, bulleted list items were tagged as paragraphs, with a class attribute identifying them as list items. Using the search-and-replace function, we converted such structures to proper XHTML list and list-item elements. Our guiding principle was to make the XHTML as straightforward as possible, not dependent on any particular software to interpret it.
  • We broke the book’s content into individual chapter files; each chapter could then carry its own basic metadata, and the pages conveniently fit our Web content management system (which is actually just a wiki). We assembled a dynamically generated table of contents for the 12 chapters, and created a cover page. Essentially, the book was entirely Web-based at this point.
  • When the book chapters are viewed online, they are formatted via a CSS2 stylesheet that defines a main column for content as well as dedicating screen real estate for navigational elements. We then created a second template to render the content for exporting; this was essentially a bare-bones version of the book with no navigation and minimal styling. Pages (or even the entire book) can be exported (via the “Save As...” function in a Web browser) for use in either print production or ebook conversion. At this point, we required no skills beyond those of any decent Web designer.
  • Integrating with CS4 for Print Adobe’s IDML language defines elements specific to InDesign; there is nothing in the language that looks remotely like XHTML. So a mechanical transformation step is needed to convert the XHTML content into something InDesign can use. This is not as hard as it might seem.
  • Both XHTML and IDML are composed of straightforward, well-documented structures, and so transformation from one to the other is, as they say, “trivial.” We chose to use XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transforms) to do the work. XSLT is part of the overall XML specification, and thus is very well supported in a wide variety of tools. Our prototype used a scripting engine called xsltproc, a nearly ubiquitous piece of software that we found already installed as part of Mac OS X (contemporary Linux distributions also have this as a standard tool), though any XSLT processor would work.
  • In other words, we don’t need to buy InCopy, because we just replaced it with the Web. Our wiki is now plugged directly into our InDesign layout. It even automatically updates the InDesign document when the content changes. Credit is due at this point to Adobe: this integration is possible because of the open file format in the Creative Suite 4.
  • We wrote an XSLT transformation script[18] that converted the XHTML content from the Web into an InCopy ICML file. The script itself is less than 500 lines long, and was written and debugged over a period of about a week by amateurs (again, the people named at the start of this article). The script runs in a couple of seconds, and the resulting .icml file can then be “placed” directly into an InDesign template. The ICML file references an InDesign stylesheet, so the template file can be set up with a house-styled layout, master pages, and stylesheet definitions for paragraphs and character ranges.
  • Rather than a public-facing website, our system relies on the Web as a content management platform—of course a public face could easily be added.
  • It should be noted that the Book Publishing 1 proof-of-concept was artificially complex; we began with a book laid out in InDesign and ended up with a look-alike book laid out in InDesign. But next time—for instance, when we publish Book Publishing 2—we can begin the process with the content on the Web, and keep it there throughout the editorial process. The book’s content could potentially be written and edited entirely online, as Web content, and then automatically poured into an InDesign template at proof time. “Just in time,” as they say. This represents an entirely new way of thinking of book production. With a Web-first orientation, it makes little sense to think of the book as “in print” or “out of print”—the book is simply available, in the first place online; in the second place in derivative digital formats; and third, but really not much more difficult, in print-ready format, via the usual InDesign CS print production system publishers are already familiar with.
  • Creating Ebook Files Creating electronic versions from XHTML source is vastly simpler than trying to generate these out of the existing print process. The ePub version is extremely easy to generate; so is online marketing copy or excerpts for the Web, since the content begins life Web-native.
  • Since an ePub file is essentially XHTML content in a special wrapper, all that is required is that we properly “wrap” our XHTML content. Ideally, the content in an ePub file is broken into chapters (as ours was) and a table of contents file is generated in order to allow easy navigation within an ebook reader. We used Julian Smart’s free tool eCub[19] to simply and automatically generate the ePub wrapper and the table of contents. The only custom development we did was to create a CSS stylesheet for the ebook so that headings and paragraph indents looked the way we wanted. Starting with XHTML content, creating ePub is almost too easy.
  • today, we are able to put the process together using nothing but standard, relatively ubiquitous Web tools: the Web itself as an editing and content management environment, standard Web scripting tools for the conversion process, and the well-documented IDML file format to integrate the layout tool.
  • Our project demonstrates that Web technologies are indeed good enough to use in an XML-oriented workflow; more specialized and expensive options are not necessarily required. For massive-scale enterprise publishing, this approach may not offer enough flexibility, and the challenge of adding and extracting extra semantic richness may prove more trouble than it's worth.
  • But for smaller firms who are looking at the straightforward benefits of XML-based processes—single source publishing, online content and workflow management, open and accessible archive formats, greater online discoverability—here is a way forward.
  • The result is very simple and easy to use. Our demonstration requires that a production editor run the XSLT transformation script manually, but there is no reason why this couldn’t be built directly into the Web content management system so that exporting the content to print ran the transformation automatically. The resulting file would then be “placed” in InDesign and proofed.
  • The final piece of our puzzle, the ability to integrate print production, was made possible by Adobe's release of InDesign with an open XML file format. Since the Web's XHTML is also XML, is can be easily and confidently transformed to the InDesign format.
  • Such a workflow—beginning with the Web and exporting to print—is surely more in line with the way we will do business in the 21st century, where the Web is the default platform for reaching audiences, developing content, and putting the pieces together. It is time, we suggest, for publishers to re-orient their operations and start with the Web.
  • Using the Web as a Production Platform
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Nov 13
     
    I was looking for an answer to a problem Marbux had presented, and found this interesting article.  The issue was that of the upcoming conversion of the Note Case Pro (NCP) layout engine to the WebKit layout engine, and what to do about the NCP document format. My initial reaction was to encode the legacy NCP document format in XML, and run an XSLT to a universal pivot format like TEI-XML.  From there, the TEI-XML community would provide all the XSLT transformation routines for conversion to ODF, OOXML, XHTML, ePUB and HTML/CSS. Researching the problems one might encounter with this approach, I found this article.  Fascinating stuff. My take away is that TEI-XML would not be as effective a "universal pivot point" as XHTML.  Or perhaps, if NCP really wants to get aggressive; IDML - InDesign Markup Language. As an after thought, i was thinking that an alternative title to this article might have been, "Working with Web as the Center of Everything".
Gary Edwards

The Fast Closing Web - Interview With Wired's Chris Anderson - SVW - 0 views

www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/...the_closing_web.php

chris-anderson Open-Web Closed-Web

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Sep 11
     
    Is the Open Web Dead?  In this very interesting interview with Wired's Chris Anderson, there is that possibility that Web Apps of the future will be like today's mobility apps; based on carefully controlled and closed platforms that use the Web's reach as transport. excerpt:  I love the web, I hope the web isn't dead, but there is a demonstrable shift in user behavior towards mobile. And mobile brings with it two things: First of all there is a shift towards apps. Mobiles tend to be optimized for apps because of smaller screens ... The other aspect of the web, which was implicit in your question, is the notion of "openness" which is built into the web. And increasingly we see closed platforms that happen to use the web as their transport and display -- sites like Facebook -- which are not open. In the definition we chose, Facebook does not count as the "open web". Your iPad does not count as the "open web," Xbox Live does not count as the "open web". They use the internet as transport and sometimes they use HTML as the display technology and sometimes they render in a browser. By and large, they are not open ecosystems and therefore don't fall into Tim Berners-Lee's original definition of "the web". So I would say there is very much a shift away from the wide-open web to closed platforms. Some of those closed platforms are on mobile, some of them are closed platforms within browsers, but we're definitely seeing a shift -- and frankly it worries me as a consumer but it's a huge opportunity as a producer. So I am conflicted in that respect. I love closed platforms as a way to build a business, but as a consumer I prefer open platforms. That's not hypocrisy, it's wave particle duality if you will, but that's where we are.
Gary Edwards

Office to finally fully support ODF, Open XML, and PDF formats | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/xml-and-pdf-formats-7000002696

ODF ODF-interop MSOffice-productivity Cloud-Compound-Document

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Aug 12
     
    The king of clicks returns!  No doubt there was a time when the mere mention of ODF and the now legendary XML "document" format wars with Microsoft could drive click counts into the statisphere.  Sorry to say though, those times are long gone. It's still a good story though.  Even if the fate of mankind and the future of the Internet no longer hinges on the outcome.  There is that question that continues defy answer; "Did Microsoft win or lose?"  So the mere announcement of supported formats in MSOffice XX is guaranteed to rev the clicks somewhat. Veteran ODF clickmeister SVN does make an interesting observation though: "The ironic thing is that, while this was as hotly debated am issue in the mid-2000s as are mobile patents and cloud implementation is today, this news was barely noticed. That's a mistake. Updegrove points out, "document interoperability and vendor neutrality matter more now than ever before as paper archives disappear and literally all of human knowledge is entrusted to electronic storage." He concluded, "Only if documents can be easily exchanged and reliably accessed on an ongoing basis will competition in the present be preserved, and the availability of knowledge down through the ages be assured. Without robust, universally adopted document formats, both of those goals will be impossible to attain." Updegrove's right of course. Don't believe me? Go into your office's archives and try to bring up documents your wrote in the 90s in WordPerfect or papers your staff created in the 80s with WordStar. If you don't want to lose your institutional memory, open document standards support is more important than ever. "....................................... Sorry but Updegrove is wrong.  Woefully wrong. The Web is the future.  Sure interoperability matters, but only as far as the Web and the future of Cloud Computing is concerned.  Sadly neither ODF or Open XML are Web ready.  The language of the Web is famously HTML, now HTML5+
Gary Edwards

WhiteHat Aviator - The most secure browser online - 1 views

www.whitehatsec.com/aviator

Google-Chrome WhiteHat-Aviator Security Browser-Wars

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Oct 13
     
    "FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS What is WhiteHat Aviator? WhiteHat Aviator; is the most secure , most private Web browser available anywhere. By default, it provides an easy way to bank, shop, and use social networks while stopping viruses from infecting computers, preventing accounts from being hacked, and blocking advertisers from invisibly spying on every click. Why do I need a secure Web browser? According to CA Technologies, 84 percent of hacker attacks in 2009 took advantage of vulnerabilities in Web browsers. Similarly, Symantec found that four of the top five vulnerabilities being exploited were client-side vulnerabilities that were frequently targeted by Web-based attacks. The fact is, that when you visit any website you run the risk of having your surfing history, passwords, real name, workplace, home address, phone number, email, gender, political affiliation, sexual preferences, income bracket, education level, and medical history stolen - and your computer infected with viruses. Sadly, this happens on millions of websites every day. Before you have any chance at protecting yourself, other browsers force you to follow complicated how-to guides, modify settings that only serve advertising empires and install obscure third-party software. What makes WhiteHat Aviator so secure? WhiteHat Aviator; is built on Chromium, the same open-source foundation used by Google Chrome. Chromium has several unique, powerful security features. One is a "sandbox" that prevents websites from stealing files off your computer or infecting it with viruses. As good as Chromium is, we went much further to create the safest online experience possible. WhiteHat Aviator comes ready-to-go with hardened security and privacy settings, giving hackers less to work with. And our browser downloads to you - without any hidden user-tracking functionality. Our default search engine is DuckDuckGo - not Google, which logs your activity. For good measure, Aviator integrates Disconnect
Gary Edwards

The future of enterprise data in a radically open and Web-based world | Hinchcliffe - 0 views

blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe

woa openweb opendata enterprise soa dion-hinchcliffe semantic-web

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Aug 09
     
    Dion Hinchcliffe has posted a lengthy discussion on the future of Open Data and the Open Web.  He identifies three Open Web methods for accessing and working with Open Data; WOA, API's and Linked Data.  These methods are discussed in the context of SOA and the re-engineering of enterprise business systems.  Great stuff.  Dion also provides an excellent chart describing his vision of how these things fit together. Excerpt: "Open data holds up the promise of instant connectivity between arbitrary numbers of ad hoc partners while at the same time reducing integration costs, improving transparency, harnessing external innovation, and even (perhaps especially) creating entirely new and significant business models. I sometimes refer to these as "open supply chains", and the term is highly descriptive when it comes to the potential for open data models to make cloud computing safe and interoperable, help journalists to do their jobs better, or create multi-million dollar new lines of business, such as Amazon's well-known Web Services division."
Gary Edwards

A Humbled Microsoft Opens Windows to Rivals - TIME - 1 views

www.time.com/...0,8599,1948381-1,00.html

ge Open-Web Open-Web-Ecosystem BPOS browsers microsoft-monopoly

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Dec 09
     
    excerpt: "Once upon a time, Microsoft bestrode the software world like a ruthless cartoon villain, gobbling up rivals and defying pleas for restraint from regulators. But the once-impregnable giant has now been humbled: following an acrimonious 10-year anti-trust battle with European regulators, Microsoft on Wednesday finally agreed to open its Windows operating system to rival web browsers in Europe." Great opening line!  But they get the story wrong.  Woefully wrong!  Just the opposite is happening.  Microsoft has moved from the browser Web application to the Web itself.  It's the platform stupid!!! No one understands platform better than Microsoft.  Control the platform's base formats, protocols, interfaces and internal messaging system, and you control all applications, services and devices using that platform.   The problem for Microsoft has been that the Web is a platform used by all, but owned by none.  It's based on open standards that no one owns or controls.  So as the Web evolves into a universal platform for converged communications, content and collaborative computing, Microsoft was facing the one fate every monopolist fears - having to compete on a level playing field! While it took them well over ten years to come up with a counter strategy and effective implementation, Microsoft has finally achieved the impossible.   They have carved out a huge section of the Open Web for their proprietary and exclusive use.  
Gary Edwards

How Google's Ecosystem Changes Everything | BNET Technology Blog | BNET - 0 views

industry.bnet.com/...s-ecosystem-changes-everything

Web-Productivity-Environment Open-Web MS-Web MSOffice-ecosystem Open-Web-Ecosystem Open-Web-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Oct 09
     
    Michael Hickins separates the platform forest from the application trees, putting the focus of the future where it belongs - the movement of the legacy MSOffice Productivity Environment to the Web.  The only question will be which Web?  The Open Web?  Or the MS-Web? excerpt:  Microsoft and Apple have leveraged a particular dominant proprietary platform (Windows/Office in one case, the iPhone/iTunes duopoly in the other) to turn every other vendor into a bit player; and by allowing other vendors to sell products or services that integrate with theirs, they offer just enough incentives for the others to play along. Google is also leveraging a dominant platform (in this case, the Web, the largest platform there is) just as relentlessly as Microsoft and Apple have done, but with an open source philosophy that encourages others to compete. The ecosystem includes everything from a development platform to application suites, but its strength emanates from a basic understanding of what it takes to dominate technology: you have to control what former Open Document Foundation director Gary Edwards calls the "point of assembly" - that crucial spot where end users have to come in order to save, share and retrieve their documents - the final work product that all this technology is meant to help create. What Google is in the process of doing is moving that point of assembly from the desktop, where Microsoft and Apple rule, to the Web, where Google is king.
Paul Merrell

WebKit and why open standards matter | Open Source - InfoWorld - 0 views

www.infoworld.com/...-why-open-standards-matter-032

Webkit comparisons

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Last week I wrote about the benefits of open standards versus open source. I argued that open standards provide greater protection against vendor lock-in than open source alone. I was reminded of this conclusion when reading Peter-Paul Koch's analysis of WebKit implementations. Thanks to Palm's Dion Almaer for pointing out the analysis. Readers know WebKit as the open source Web browser engine used by several mobile and PC Web browsers, including Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, Palm's WebOS, and the Android Web browser. In fact, Wikipedia lists 19 browsers based on the open source WebKit browser engine. As you read on, keep in mind there is no standard that vendors using WebKit must adhere to or claim certification against. A WebKit-based browser is, well, whatever the vendor wants it to be.
  • Imagine if there were a WebKit standard and a compliance test suite that vendors had to certify against to use the WebKit brand. Customers and developers would gain protection against vendor lock-in that open standards deliver to a much higher degree than open source alone. I'm not naive enough to think that open standards equal "write once, run anywhere." But even if a WebKit open standard could drive a 50 percent improvement in compatibility across WebKit-based browsers, that would be something to write home about.
Gary Edwards

Yahoo Sees Standards as Key to Open Web - 0 views

www.eweek.com/...ards-as-Key-to-Open-Web-522594

yahoo open-web ms-web crawford

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Oct 09
     
    Well well well.  Doug Crawford is concerned about "breakign the Web".  He even mentions "avalon", otherwise known as the Windows Presentation Foundation layer of proprietary MS-Web technologies designed as rich-Web alternatives to Open Web Standards like AJAX, HTML, CSS, SVG/Canvas, and JavaScript. excerpt:  Among the key issues in the Internet space today is the ongoing struggle between openness and stability in terms of standard Web technology, said a Yahoo Web technology expert. Doug Crockford, a JavaScript expert at Yahoo, calls on his company and others to not "break the Web" as they each vie for developer hearts and minds.
Paul Merrell

Can Dweb Save The Internet? 06/03/2019 - 0 views

www.mediapost.com/...an-dweb-save-the-internet.html

DWeb Tim Berners-Lee Kahle Solid Mastadon Peertube

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • On a mysterious farm just above the Pacific Ocean, the group who built the internet is inviting a small number of friends to a semi-secret gathering. They describe it as a camp "where diverse people can freely exchange ideas about the technologies, laws, markets, and agreements we need to move forward.” Forward indeed.It wasn’t that long ago that the internet was an open network of computers, blogs, sites, and posts.But then something happened -- and the open web was taken over by private, for-profit, closed networks. Facebook isn’t the web. YouTube isn’t the web. Google isn’t the web. They’re for-profit businesses that are looking to sell audiences to advertisers.Brewster Kahle is one of the early web innovators who built the Internet Archive as a public storehouse to protect the web’s history. Along with web luminaries such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf, he is working to protect and rebuild the open nature of the web.advertisementadvertisement“We demonstrated that the web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done,” Berners-Lee told Vanity Fair. The web has “ended up producing -- [through] no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform -- a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.”
  • o, they’re out to fix it, working on what they call the Dweb. The “d” in Dweb stands for distributed. In distributed systems, no one entity has control over the participation of any other entity.Berners-Lee is building a platform called Solid, designed to give people control over their own data. Other global projects also have the goal of taking take back the public web. Mastodon is decentralized Twitter. Peertube is a decentralized alternative to YouTube.This July 18 - 21, web activists plan to convene at the Decentralized Web Summit in San Francisco. Back in 2016, Kahle convened an early group of builders, archivists, policymaker, and journalists. He issued a challenge to  use decentralized technologies to “Lock the Web Open.” It’s hard to imagine he knew then how quickly the web would become a closed network.Last year's Dweb gathering convened more than 900 developers, activists, artists, researchers, lawyers, and students. Kahle opened the gathering by reminding attendees that the web used to be a place where everyone could play. "Today, I no longer feel like a player, I feel like I’m being played. Let’s build a decentralized web, let’s build a system we can depend on, a system that doesn’t feel creepy” he said, according to IEEE Spectrum.With the rising tide of concerns about how social networks have hacked our democracy, Kahle and his Dweb community will gather with increasing urgency around their mission.The internet began with an idealist mission to connect people and information for good. Today's web has yet to achieve that goal, but just maybe Dweb will build an internet more robust and open than the current infrastructure allows. That’s a mission worth fighting for.
Gary Edwards

In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It. - washingtonpost.com - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010030402374.html

webkit-html5 OpenWeb-Standards Web-apps OpenWeb-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Mar 10
     
    I disagree with the authors conclusions here.  He misses some very significant developments.  Particularly around Google, WebKit, and WebKit-HTML5. For instance, there is this article out today; "Google Really is Giving Away Free Nexus One and Droid Handsets to Developers".  Also, Palm is working on a WiMAX/WiFi version of their WebOS (WebKit) smartphone for Sprint.  Sprint and ClearWire are pushing forward with a very aggressive WiMAX rollout in the USA.  San Francisco should go on line this year!   One of the more interesting things about the Sprint WiMAX plan is that they have a set fee of $69.00 per month that covers EVERYTHING; cellphone, WiMAX Web browsing, video, and data connectivity, texting (SMS) and VOIP.  Major Sprint competitors, Verizon, AT&T and TMobile charge $69 per month, but it only covers cellphone access.  Everything else is extra adn also at low speed/ low bandwidth.  3G at best.  WiMAX however is a 4G screamer.  It's also an open standard.  (Verizon FIOS and LTE are comparable and said to be coming soon, but they are proprietary technologies).   The Cable guys are itneresting in that they are major backers of WiMAX, but also have a bandwidth explosive technology called Docsis. There is an interesting article at TechCrunch, "In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It."  I disagree entirely with the authors conclusion.  WebKit is capable of providing a universal HTML5 application developers layer for mobile and desktop browser computing.  It's supported by Apple, Google, Palm (WebOS), Nokia, RiMM (Blackberry) and others to such an extent that 85% of all smartphones shipped this year will either ship with WebKit or, an Opera browser compatible with the WebKit HTML5 document layout/rendering model.   I would even go as far as to say that WebKit-HTML5 owns the Web's document model and application layer for the future.  Excepting for Silverlight, which features the OOXML document model with over 500 million desktop develop
Gary Edwards

Windows 8: Microsoft's browser-based OS | ExtremeTech - 1 views

www.extremetech.com/...s-8-the-first-browser-based-os

Windows-8 Win8 HTML+ Native-HTML-Apps Open-Web-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Microsoft’s browser-based operating systemGet this: The entire Metro interface — the complete Windows 8 front-end — is powered by Internet Explorer 10. Not the browser with a back button and an address bar, but the IE10 rendering engine Trident. To drive this point home, Metro-style apps in Windows 8 can be written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and they will be just as “low-level” as their C++ and C# cousins. In other words, Windows 8 runs web apps natively.
  • To put this into contrast, think about the current state-of-the-art in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 9. Chrome has glorified extensions and bookmarks, Firefox is working on an Open Web App Store, and IE9 has pinned sites. Windows 8 will have web apps that are first-class citizens, capable of using all of the same hardware resources as any other compiled program — and it will all be powered by Internet Explorer 10.
  • It’s the great Web App Dream: write once, run anywhere.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • All three versions are fundamentally identical.
  • What if Windows 8 is actually a success on the tablet? If Windows 8 becomes ubiquitous, so does Internet Explorer 10 — and if IE10 can be found on hundreds of millions of devices, what platform do you think developers will choose?
  • This poses a tricky question, though. You see, not only does IE10 power Windows 8′s primary interface, but Internet Explorer 10 — the browser — is also available as a Metro-style app, and as a full-interface browser in the Explorer Desktop.
  • Do you write an app for tens of millions of iPhones and iPads, or do you write a single piece of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that can run perfectly on every Windows 8, IE10-powered tablet, laptop, and desktop?
  • Those same web apps, with a little tweaking, will probably even work with Chrome and Firefox and Safari — but here’s an uncomfortable truth: if Windows 8 reaches 90% penetration of the computing market, why bother targeting a web browser at all? Just write a native, Metro-style web app instead.
  • Finally, add in the fact that IE10 will almost certainly come to Windows Phone 8 next year, and you will have a single app container — AppX — that runs across every damn computer form factor.
  • Microsoft, threatened by the idea of OS-agnostic web apps and browser-based operating systems from Google and Mozilla, has just taken the game to a whole new level — and, rather shockingly, given that Windows 8 started its development in mid-2009, it would seem that the lumbering behemoth might have actually out-maneuvered Google
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Sep 11
     
    Excellent review of Windows 8, including some prescient thinking about what it means to have HTML+ Web Apps running natively on the Win8 OS platform.  The author/reviewer Sebastion Anthony suggest why this breakthrough is a problem for Google, Apple and Mozilla.  I'm wondering though; is this a problem for the Open Web future?  Or is this a positive step towards an Open Web communications and collaborative computation platform that  is used by all and owned by none?   After nearly thirty years of a love-hate-hate more than ever relationship with Microsoft, for sure Win8 and native HTML+ is something to carefully watch.
Gary Edwards

Your Open Web, documented · WebPlatform.org - 0 views

www.webplatform.org

HTML5

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Apr 13
     
    "Your Open Web, documented. Opening the Web Platform We are an open community of developers building resources for a better web, regardless of brand, browser or platform. Anyone can contribute and each person who does makes us stronger. Together we can continue to drive innovation on the Web to serve the greater good. It starts here, with you. Hot topics HTML5CSSCANVASWEBGLSVGTRANSFORMSVIDEOAUDIOANIMATIONSMEDIA QUERIESINDEXEDDBFILE API Web Platform Stewards WebPlatform.org is convened by W3C and is made possible by the support of the Web Platform stewards. "
Paul Merrell

New open-source router firmware opens your Wi-Fi network to strangers | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...our-wi-fi-network-to-strangers

open-wireless routers EFF

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • We’ve often heard security folks explain their belief that one of the best ways to protect Web privacy and security on one's home turf is to lock down one's private Wi-Fi network with a strong password. But a coalition of advocacy organizations is calling such conventional wisdom into question. Members of the “Open Wireless Movement,” including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Free Press, Mozilla, and Fight for the Future are advocating that we open up our Wi-Fi private networks (or at least a small slice of our available bandwidth) to strangers. They claim that such a random act of kindness can actually make us safer online while simultaneously facilitating a better allocation of finite broadband resources. The OpenWireless.org website explains the group’s initiative. “We are aiming to build technologies that would make it easy for Internet subscribers to portion off their wireless networks for guests and the public while maintaining security, protecting privacy, and preserving quality of access," its mission statement reads. "And we are working to debunk myths (and confront truths) about open wireless while creating technologies and legal precedent to ensure it is safe, private, and legal to open your network.”
  • One such technology, which EFF plans to unveil at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE X) conference next month, is open-sourced router firmware called Open Wireless Router. This firmware would enable individuals to share a portion of their Wi-Fi networks with anyone nearby, password-free, as Adi Kamdar, an EFF activist, told Ars on Friday. Home network sharing tools are not new, and the EFF has been touting the benefits of open-sourcing Web connections for years, but Kamdar believes this new tool marks the second phase in the open wireless initiative. Unlike previous tools, he claims, EFF’s software will be free for all, will not require any sort of registration, and will actually make surfing the Web safer and more efficient.
  • Kamdar said that the new firmware utilizes smart technologies that prioritize the network owner's traffic over others', so good samaritans won't have to wait for Netflix to load because of strangers using their home networks. What's more, he said, "every connection is walled off from all other connections," so as to decrease the risk of unwanted snooping. Additionally, EFF hopes that opening one’s Wi-Fi network will, in the long run, make it more difficult to tie an IP address to an individual. “From a legal perspective, we have been trying to tackle this idea that law enforcement and certain bad plaintiffs have been pushing, that your IP address is tied to your identity. Your identity is not your IP address. You shouldn't be targeted by a copyright troll just because they know your IP address," said Kamdar.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • While the EFF firmware will initially be compatible with only one specific router, the organization would like to eventually make it compatible with other routers and even, perhaps, develop its own router. “We noticed that router software, in general, is pretty insecure and inefficient," Kamdar said. “There are a few major players in the router space. Even though various flaws have been exposed, there have not been many fixes.”
Gary Edwards

The Web Fights Back Against Flipboard - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/back-against-flipboard-2010-12

TreeSaver FlipBoard visually-immersive Filipe-Fortes Scobelizer HTML+

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jun 11
     
    This is the Dec 2010 interview that totally changed my view of the future of Documents.  Separating content and layout, and then reconstituting is the essence of preparing a publication.  Are documents Web pages?  Are Web sights magazines?   Visually-immersive apps like TreeSaver and Flipboard change everything, as this video demonstrates.  TreeSaver is OpenWeb HTML+.  FlipBoard is iOS platform specific.  Filipe argues why Open Web will win.  Great interview.  Life changing stuff. excerpt: The problem with Flipboard is that it's an app, not the Web, and I keep hoping someone will show me a really well-designed Web app that shows me that the Web can still win. Yesterday Treesaver's Filipe Fortes took me up on my "can the Web be saved" challenge and visited my house to show me what he's been working on for publishers. An open-source JavaScript/HTML5/CSS library of design templates that will help developers at content companies compete with the design aesthetic that Flipboard showed us.
Gary Edwards

Microsoft's Answer to the Web Platform Threat? CHEAT!!!! - Microsoft Web Apps are actu... - 0 views

www.informationweek.com/...JSORXIUMXLBQE1GHOSKH4ATMY32JVN

web-apps microsoft msoffice silverlight Openweb

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Aug 09
     
    For most of this decade, web developers have been suffering the shortcomings of Internet Explorer. Like 1998 limited HTML-CSS support.  And nothing for the language of the Web - HTML+ :: HTML5, CSS3, SVG/Canvas and advanced JavaScript.  That hasn't bothered Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) too much, because the company has historically focused on developing "real" applications that run only on Windows and don't use the browser as a platform. With the new Office web apps, many thought that Microsoft might actually have to experience the living nightmare that web app development can be. Yet the company has figured out a way to make things easier: cheat.   MIcrosof thas figured out how to provide MSOffice as Web Apps, without having to use the language of the Web: HTML+.  Instead, they use protpietary formats, protocols and interfaces to create an interesting dichotomy - a rich MS-Web, and a poor, 1998 Open-Web.
Gary Edwards

Google Chrome OS: Web Platform To Rule Them All -- InformationWeek - 0 views

www.informationweek.com/...showArticle.jhtml

chromeOS OpenWeb Google HTML W3C

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Jul 09
     
    Some good commentary on chrome OS from InformationWeek's Thomas Claburn. Excerpt: With Chrome OS, Google aims to make the Web the primary platform for software development....... The fact that Chrome OS applications will be written using open Web standards like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS might seem like a liability because Web applications still aren't as capable as applications written for specific devices and operating systems. But Google is betting that will change and is working to effect the change on which its bet depends. Within a year or two, Web browsers will gain access to peripherals, through an infrastructure layer above the level of device drivers. Google's work with standards bodies is making that happen..... ..... According to Matt Womer, the "ubiquitous Web activity lead" for W3C, the Web standards consortium, Web protocol groups are working to codify ways to access peripherals like digital cameras, the messaging stack, calendar data, and contact data. There's now a JavaScript API that Web developers can use to get GPS information from mobile phones using the phone's browser, he points out. What that means is that device drivers for Chrome OS will emerge as HTML 5 and related standards mature. Without these, consumers would never use Chrome OS because devices like digital cameras wouldn't be able to transfer data. Womer said the standardization work could move quite quickly, but won't be done until there's an actual implementation. That would be Chrome OS...... ..... Chrome OS will sell itself to developers because, as Google puts it, writing applications for the Web gives "developers the largest user base of any platform."
Gary Edwards

The enterprise implications of Google Wave | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com - 0 views

blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe

wave dion-hinchcliffe enterprise

shared by Gary Edwards on 03 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Jun 09
     
    Dion Hinchcliffe has an excellent article casting Google Wave as an Enterprise game-changer. He walks through Wave first, and then through some important enterprise features: ".....to fully understand Google Wave, one should appreciate the separation of concerns between the product Google is offering and the protocols and technologies behind it, which are open to the Web community: Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol: The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It's an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave). Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves. The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the "live" concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.
Gary Edwards

Google's uProxy could help fight Internet censorship - 0 views

www.gizmag.com/...29491

uProxy P2P Security Google

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Oct 13
     
    "At its Ideas Summit in New York, Google has announced that it is working on developing a browser extension that will act as an easy-to-use way to bypass country-specific Internet censorship and make connections safer and more private. Safer connections The tool, which was developed by the University of Washington and seeded by Google, is at its core a peer-to-peer personalized virtual private network (VPN) that redirects Internet traffic coming from an initial, less secure connection through a second, trusted connection, and then encrypts the pathway between the two terminals. Whenever you access the Internet, the connection is routed through a number of terminals. At each step of the way the connection may be blocked, surveilled, or even tampered with (especially if the data is not encrypted). On the whole, the safety and privacy of your data is only as good as the weakest link in the chain. Google's solution with uProxy was to develop a tool that makes it much easier to make an unsafe connection more secure, with the help of a trusted friend. The software, which will be available as a Chrome and Firefox extension to begin with, can use existing social networks like Facebook or Google Hangouts to help find users who already have uProxy installed on their system. If two users agree to use the service in tandem, the software can begin to make data connections safer. How it works Let's assume that Alice, who lives in a country with an Internet censorship problem such as China or Iran, contacts Bob, who has much safer, or uncensored, or unmonitored access to the Internet. Bob agrees to act as a proxy for Alice, and as long as his browser is open, Alice's outgoing web traffic will now be routed through Bob's connection, and so she'll now be able to access websites that she wouldn't otherwise be able to reach on her own. The connection between Alice and Bob is also encrypted. To an external observer looking at Bob's connection, it would appear that he is simply s
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