Technology

From Web TV – Full Circle

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My mother wasn’t an early adopter of computer technology. I tried to talk her into letting me buy her a home computer for a couple of years, just so we could send email and photos back and forth. She was hesitant, claiming she didn’t know how to use one and it would probably either sit there unused, or she’d break it.

But she was office manager for a cable TV company in northern California, and when they started offering WebTV, they had one installed in the front office, as a demo. Slowly, but surely, she began to realize how much information was available online, even then.

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A New Mission for the Bots

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The bot navigated quickly to its intended destination after receiving its orders from the Supreme Commander. There were ample distractions along the way, but it was impervious to them all, as it wove its way single-mindedly along, occasionally using a shortcut here, a bypass there.

Its mission was a special one, but not really from the millions of missions being carried out at this moment by other bots it passed on its way. This bot had simply been modified slightly to enable it to perform this very special task – one which would enable the Supreme Commander to extend its tentacles to much greater boundaries, in a way that would go totally unnoticed. This was the mission assigned to Ping, the first of its kind to be so enabled, but certainly not the last.

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The Evolution of HTML5 as a Doorway to the Open Web

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On Monday, Dec. 17th, the W3C released the complete definition of the suggested HTML5 (along with Canvas2D) specifications, submitting them as candidates for approval down the road. While that doesn’t mean that the proposed specifications might not change or even be rejected, past history would indicate that what we can see today is probably what we’ll eventually get.

A lot of time and effort went into the preparation of HTML5, the fifth major revision to HTML. Major focuses of the upgrade apple to authorship and user agents. This version displays considerable advances since the earliest HTML some of us may remember, and will greatly facilitate development of the Open Web Platform.

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