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I'm happy about this news from Tim Berners-Lee concerning the future path(s) of HTML development:
Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn't complain. Some large communities did shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems, but not all. It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed world, and developing more power in that world.This is smart. If we could have all jumped to XML at the same time maybe that would be better, but it didn't happen and it's not going to suddenly happen, so we need an easier way to go forward. Perhaps the greatest thing about HTML is how dead simple it is to get started with it. Of course that is also the worst thing about it as well (in the sense that it doesn't enforce itself rigorously so while it's easy to get going it's also easy to fly out of control with it and create truly horrible markup.) Still, I think it is better to stay more on the loose HTML side rather than the strict XML side as we go forward. Maybe not in a theoretical sense, but definitely in a practical sense.
Now just get us some more powerful form elements!
Crazy small foldable computer from Samsung: SPH-P9000. Who names these things?
I'm not a big Adobe fan, and I've always been against Flash if there are any other ways to get the job done, but it does seem like there are a lot of interesting things going on. As the web moves towards a more richly interactive design (AJAXified web 2.0 stuff) maybe Flash starts to make more sense?
In any case, Adobe just made a huge contribution to the Mozilla project that is scheduled to pay off sometime in 2008: Tamarin Project. From the blog of one of the engineers:
Today Adobe announced that the EMCAScript 4 compatible virtual machine in the Adobe Flash Player has been contributed to the Mozilla project under the name Tamarin. It is the single largest contribution to the Mozilla foundation since its inception and consist of about 135.000 lines of source code. The engine is fully open source using the standard Mozilla license, with the Mozilla foundation retaining full ownership.Tamarin will allow for Mozilla (and therefore Firefox) to easily move to javascript 2. And while I'm always a little nervous about Flash (and javascript for that matter) I'm also getting impatient for more powerful scripting tools and this is probably the way we are going to get them. So I'm staying hopeful and will watch this.