Posts matching tags 'html'
2005/12/9
A group of browser vendors has published a preview of HTML 5.0, also known as Web Applications 1.0. Users of browsers in the future can expect a lot of nifty enhancements, including new web form controls (drag and drop, flexible grids, progress meters), more DOM events to facilitate AJAX programming, more intelligent web forms (including support for minimum/maximum values and automatic validation) and a canvas element which can be drawn on using JavaScript (and for which the demos include a pure-JavaScript SVG viewer and a Wolfenstein-style 3D maze game). The HTML 5 features should make AJAX applications more efficient and powerful.
Web Applications 1.0 is a proposal by a group named WHATWG (the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group), which consists of people from various browser developers, from projects such as Opera, Mozilla and Safari. It appears that the elephant in the centre of the room is the conspicuous absence of Microsoft, who own most of the browser market share. Which is hardly surprising, as if AJAX becomes a reality, it could cannibalise Microsoft's OS lock. Perhaps we can expect MS to specify their own, incompatible AJAX-esque technologies that are locked to their browser and technologies?
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2004/2/20
Airport arrival display malfunctions, displaying HTML source. It looks like those things run on an embedded UNIX system of some sort, with a HTML-based rendering engine (though presumably not a web browser in kiosk mode). Curious... (via 1.0)
(Malfunctioning information displays can be interesting, because the nature of the malfunction often reveals something about how the system works. Witness things like news/advertising billboards displaying Windows error dialogs, or in-flight entertainment consoles showing Linux kernel messages as they reboot or whatever.)
2003/6/27
Charlie Stross has a rant up titled "Ten reasons why I do not read HTML email".
While I don't take as hard a line on it as Mr. Stross, I pretty much agree with the sentiment; HTML email is wasteful, a nonstandard kludge mandated by the Microsoft/Netscape marketing departments and rarely if ever does it do anything text can't do. I also use Mutt as my mail client; reading my mail involves logging into a UNIX machine I have a shell account on and running mutt; this means I'm not tied to reading my mail where I keep my (hypothetical) copy of Outlook/Eudora/Apple Mail and don't have to depend on webmail systems (which are, at best, a compromise; they're good if you're backpacking through Outer Mongolia or something but not something you'd want to use from day to day).
The problem, however, is that a lot of non-spam email is HTML-only these days; especially with Hotmail (which is surprisingly popular with people who aren't UNIX geeks; and I'm not going to be so haughty as to only correspond with fellow techies and penguinheads) now sending HTML only by default. So after spending some time trying to ask non-technical users to switch to plain text because I'm one of the last few remaining mortals to not use a web browser to read their mail, I configured my mutt client to automatically convert HTML to plain text, by piping it through lynx -dump. Since lynx doesn't do images or Javascript, this avoids "web bugs" and various spammers' tricks.
I still don't read mail with JPEGs/Microsoft Word documents/&c. though. And when Microsoft Trusted DRM-Mail or whatever comes in, I won't read that.