2009-04-30: The Web Applications Working Group has published the Last Call Working Draft of Widgets 1.0: Digital Signatures. This document defines a profile of the XML Signature Syntax and Processing 1.1 specification to allow a widget package to be digitally signed. Widget authors and distributors can digitally sign widgets as a mechanism to ensure continuity of authorship and distributorship. A user agent can use the digital signature to verify the integrity of the widget package and to confirm the signing key(s). Comments are welcome through 01 June. The Working Group also published an updated Working Draft of Widgets 1.0: Requirements. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity. (Permalink)
2009-04-30: The Media Fragments Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Use cases and requirements for Media Fragments. The aim of this specification is to enhance the Web infrastructure for supporting the addressing and retrieval of subparts of time-based Web resources. Example uses are the sharing of such fragment URIs with friends via email, the automated creation of such fragment URIs in a search engine interface, or the annotation of media fragments with RDF. This specification will help make video a first-class citizen of the World Wide Web. In addition to describing use cases for the Media Fragments 1.0 specification, this document discusses syntax and processing of media fragment URIs, and offers survey of technologies that address multimedia fragments. Learn more about the Video in the Web Activity. (Permalink)
2009-04-30: The XML Security Working Group has published a Working Draft of XML Signature Properties. This document outlines proposed standard XML Signature Properties syntax and processing rules and an associated namespace for these properties. The intent is these can be composed with any version of XML Signature using the XML SignatureProperties element. Learn more about the Security Activity. (Permalink)
Thursday, April 30, 2009 - Matt
Happy to announce that BuddyPress is now available to the world. BuddyPress is a package built on top of WordPress which transforms WP into a social network complete with profiles, friends, messaging, groups, and even activity streams. Of course it’s 100% GPL and Open Source. It’s built on top of MU (which can be tricky to install) so still not for everybody yet, but this is a major milestone in the WordPress world. Check it out. Congrats to Andy and the whole BuddyPress team. 
Here’s Andy’s official announcement post.
2009-04-30: The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Working Group published three first public drafts today. SVG is a language for describing vector graphics, but it is typically rendered to a display or some form of print medium. The first new publication, SVG Compositing, adds support for raster and vector objects to be combined to produce eye catching effects via advanced alpha compositing, masks, and clipping paths. The other specifications are for SVG Referenced Parameter Variables: Part 1: Primer and Part 2: Language. The Referenced Parameter Variables specification provides a declarative way to incorporate parameter values into SVG content. Often, users may wish to create a single resource, and reuse it several times with specified variations, and this specification provides a means to do so without the use of script. Learn more about the Graphics Activity. (Permalink)
2009-04-28: The Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group (ERT WG) today published an updated Working Draft of Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Schema. This document provides the formal schema of EARL 1.0, a vocabulary to express test results. EARL is a format to exchange, combine, and analyze results from different evaluation tools. Read the invitation to review EARL 1.0 Schema and learn more about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). (Permalink)
Tuesday, April 28, 2009 - Matt
Monday, April 27, 2009 - Matt
I wanted to take a moment to welcome Wired.com’s 12 blogs to the WordPress family! (They just completed their switch from Typepad.) I thought this completes my prediction from January that WP would reach over 40% of this list of top blogs, but when I went to the Technorati 100 today everything has changed! First, they only show ten blogs at a time now (lame!) and second there appears to have been huge churn on the list,so we’ll have to wait until next January to do an apples-to-apples comparison.
Friday, April 24, 2009 - Matt
Thursday, April 23, 2009 - Matt
WordPress CodeSniffer Standard. Helps you format your code in wp-style.
Thursday, April 23, 2009 - Matt
2009-04-23: The HTML Working Group has published a Working Draft of HTML 5. HTML 5 adds to the language of the Web: features to help Web application authors, new elements based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability. This particular draft specifies how authors can embed SVG in non-XML text/html content, and how browsers and other UAs should handle such embedded SVG content. See also the news about moving some parts of HTML 5 to individual drafts. The full list of changes since the previous draft are listed in the updated companion document HTML 5 differences from HTML 4. Learn more about the HTML Activity. (Permalink)
2009-04-23: The Web Applications Working Group has published four First Public Working Drafts of specifications for APIs that enhance the open Web platform as a runtime environment for full-featured applications:
2009-04-23: The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Media Queries. HTML4 and CSS2 currently support media-dependent style sheets tailored for different media types. For example, a document may use sans-serif fonts when displayed on a screen and serif fonts when printed. ‘screen’ and ‘print’ are two media types that have been defined. Media Queries extend the functionality of media types by allowing presentations to be tailored more precisely to device characteristics. Learn more about the Style Activity. (Permalink)
2009-04-23: The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group updated the Candidate Recommendation of Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) Specification. CSS 2.1 is a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach style (e.g., fonts and spacing) to structured documents (e.g., HTML documents and XML applications). CSS 2.1 corrects a few errors in CSS2 (the most important being a new definition of the height/width of absolutely positioned elements, more influence for HTML's "style" attribute and a new calculation of the 'clip' property), and adds a few highly requested features which have already been widely implemented. But most of all CSS 2.1 represents a "snapshot" of CSS usage: it consists of all CSS features that are implemented interoperably. This draft incorporates errata resulting from implementation experience since the previous publication. Learn more about the Style Activity. (Permalink)
2009-04-23: The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Widgets 1.0: APIs and Events. Widgets are full-fledged client-side applications that are authored using Web standards. Examples range from simple clocks, stock tickers, news streamers, games and weather forecasters, to complex applications that pull data from multiple sources to be "mashed-up" and presented to a user in some interesting and useful way The APIs and Events specification defines a set of APIs and events for the Widgets 1.0 family of specifications. The specification allows application writers to access widget configuration information, monitor changes in the widget display, determine locale information, monitor updates to the widget, and more. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity. (Permalink)
2009-04-22: Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the Web, delivered the opening keynote address at the WWW2009 Conference earlier today in Madrid, Spain; keynote slides are available. During his talk, titled "Twenty Years," he touched on the future as well, including topics such as Web applications, open social networking and open linked data. Shortly before his keynote, Berners-Lee joined Dame Wendy Hall, Robert Caillau, Vint Cerf, Dale Dougherty and Mike Shaver on a panel to share thoughts on the twentieth anniversary of the Web. During the remainder of the week, W3C encourages people to participate in the W3C track, which this year features two "camps": the Mobile Widgets camps on 23 April and the Social Web Camp on 24 April. Follow discussion on the #w3ctrack twitter feed. (Photo credit: Thomas Tikwinski. Permalink)
Monday, April 20, 2009 - Matt
Do you guys remember Blo.gs? In addition to being a cool domain, it’s a ping-update service like Ping-O-Matic that was started by Jim Winstead and acquired by Yahoo in June of 2005.
Some exciting news today: Yahoo! is transferring blo.gs to Automattic for safekeeping and further development. I’ve been a long-time fan of the service, and it even inspired the early WordPress feature which reordered your blogroll based on update times.
We’re looking forward to beefing up the service and giving it a refresh, while continuing its reputation for reliability. It makes me nostalgic to hear the name “blo.gs” again, I even still have the t-shirt they made for a Feedmesh meetup years ago. (For a big blast from the past, check out the discussion around feedmesh and real-time, distributed updates. Everything old is new again.) Major kudos to Yahoo! for giving us the chance to do so — I think most companies would have just shuttered it.
Toni has a few more thoughts.
Monday, April 20, 2009 - Matt
Blogs are dead; long live the blog by Andrew Keen after our dinner in Amsterdam last week.
2009-04-21: The OWL Working Group has published new Working Drafts for OWL 2, a language for building Semantic Web ontologies. An ontology is a set of terms that a particular community finds useful for organizing data (e.g., for data about a book, useful terms include "title" and "author"). OWL 2 (a compatible extension of OWL 1) consists of 13 documents (7 technical, 4 instructional, and 2 group Notes). For descriptions and links to all the documents, see the OWL 2 Documentation Roadmap. This is a "Last Call" for the technical materials and is an opportunity for the community to confirm that these documents satisfy requirements for an ontology language. This is a second Last Call for six of the documents, but because the changes since the first Last Call are limited in scope, the review period lasts only 21 days. For an introduction to OWL 2, see the four instructional documents: an overview, primer, list of new features, and quick reference. Learn more about the Semantic Web. (Permalink)
2009-04-21: The OWL Working Group and the Rule Interchance Format (RIF) Working Group have jointly published a Last Call Working Draft of rdf:text: A Datatype for Internationalized Text. This datatype, compatible with XML Schema 1.1 Datatypes, is used within RIF and OWL 2 to provide support for text in various languages and scripts (identified by a BCP 47 tag such as "fr" for French). The document defines the datatype, discusses its relationship to RDF Plain Literals and the XML Schema string datatype, and specifies functions (compatible with XPath) for operating on rdf:text data values. It also discusses how to use this feature within RDF serializations. Learn more about the Semantic Web. (Permalink)
2009-04-21: The XSL and XML Query Working Groups have published eight Proposed Edited Recommendations for Second Editions of XSL Transformations (XSLT), XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language, XML Syntax for XQuery 1.0 (XQueryX) and XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0, together with their supporting documents, XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model (XDM), XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Formal Semantics, XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 Serialization and XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators. The second editions, if approved, will add the generate-id function from XSLT to XPath and XQuery, and will also incorporate the outstanding errata, including a number of clarifications that may affect implementations. Enhanced test suites are being augmented and will be published shortly. Review welcome by 31 May 2009. Learn more about XML. (Permalink)
Monday, April 20, 2009 - Matt
It’s magically beautiful outside in San Francisco today, but instead everyone is talking about the $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. (More on Techmeme.) A number of people have contacted me with questions to the effect of “Oracle is evil, they now own MySQL, WordPress runs on MySQL, OMG! What’s next?” In addition to the millions of WordPress blogs all using MySQL, all of the projects Automattic contributes to are MySQL-based and we run more than 250 servers dedicated to MySQL.
Last Thursday at The Next Web I talked about how we need an Internet Bill of Rights to protect our data and the countless hours we pour into complex online services, such as Facebook and Last.fm, and that the foundations for this were laid down 20 years ago by Richard Stallman and the GPL.
Today our servers are running various versions of MySQL, tomorrow they’ll be running the same thing, and if need be ten years from now they can run the exact some software. Because of the GPL every WordPress user in the world is protected — we’re not beholden to any one company, only to what works best for us. Today that’s MySQL, tomorrow that’s MySQL, a year from now we’ll see.
Most importantly whatever happens will happen on our timeline. That’s the definition of Freedom.
Here are few other reasons not to be worried, and a bonus at the end.
- Oracle bought Innobase, makers of the InnoDB engine that most large users deploy as their main storage engine, in October 2005. The sky has not yet fallen.
- As a company Automattic has never really needed the support services that MySQL provides and even if we did there are plenty of third parties also providing support.
- Most of the useful updates for MySQL have been coming from outside, to quote Jeremy Zawodny:
The single most interesting and surprising thing to me is both the number and necessity of third-party patches for enhancing various aspects of MySQL and InnoDB. Companies like Percona, Google, Proven Scaling, Prime Base Technologies, and Open Query are all doing so in one way or another.
On the one hand, it’s excellent validation of the Open Source model. Thanks to reasonable licensing, companies other than Sun/MySQL are able to enhance and fix the software and give their changes back to the world.
- In terms of innovation, the most interesting developments have been from outside as well, in projects like Drizzle. (I would not be surprised if this moment is for Drizzle what Movable Type changing their licensing was for WordPress, even though in this case they’re both Open Source.)
- I’ve met a number of people at Sun who are incredibly smart, and if they stick around I expect cool things to continue to come out.
- There are some new developments in the WordPress world, namely that I think it would be possible to add support for databases other than MySQL without changing every $wpdb call or breaking any plugins or themes. It won’t be easy, but the coolest stuff seldom is.
Anyway, I now really wish I had agreed to keynote at the MySQL User Conference starting today.
Friday, April 17, 2009 - Matt
Thursday, April 16, 2009 - Matt
Wednesday, April 15, 2009 - Ryan
2009-04-16: The Technical Architecture Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Usage Patterns For Client-Side URI parameters. The goal of this draft TAG finding is to initially collect the various usage scenarios that are leading to innovative uses of client-side URI parameters, along with the solutions that have been developed by the Web community. As highly interactive applications get built using Web parts (HTML, CSS and JavaScript component resources) that are themselves Web addressable, there is an increasing need for encoding interaction state as part of the URI. The Web is beginning to discover and codify design patterns based on fragment identifiers for many of these use cases. Learn more about the Technical Architecture Group. (Permalink)
Monday, April 13, 2009 - Matt
Friday, April 10, 2009 - Matt
Wiley is looking for savvy WordPress folks to author new books they want to publish. If you love writing and are a WordPress wizard than contact Carol Long.
Friday, April 10, 2009 - Matt
40% still use old Google Analytics script. Don’t forget to update to the newest Google Analytics script call. (And drop in WordPress.com Stats while you’re in there to get something quick and author-centric.)
2009-04-09: The Ubiquitous Web Applications Working Group has published the Group Note of W3C Personalization Roadmap: Ubiquitous Web Integration of AccessForAll 1.0. This document describes an activity of integrating personalization with device context for the delivery of content materials and interface components that are customized to meet both individual personal needs and preferences and delivery context. It brings together the work of separate standards and specifications organizations and working groups, notably W3C Ubiquitous Web Applications working group, IMS Global Learning Consortium Accessibility Special Interest group, ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 Information Technology for Learning, Education and Training: Human Diversity and Access For All working group and associated working groups in SC36. The document should be viewed as a roadmap for the work to be undertaken and includes description of the basis for the work, the organizational context, the likely technologies and a partially complete description of how the technologies fit together. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity. (Permalink)
Thursday, April 9, 2009 - Matt
The new site for WordCamp San Francisco is online, go check it out. Got some more speakers and announcements when I get back from Japan.
2009-04-09: After 12 years of successful work at Fraunhofer (or former GMD) the W3C Germany and Austria Office moves from Sankt Augustin (near Bonn) to Potsdam (near Berlin). The University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam (FHP) is the new host of the Office. A ceremonial launch is planned for September 2009. Felix Sasaki will be the new Office Manager at FHP.
Thursday, April 9, 2009 - Matt
Wednesday, April 8, 2009 - Matt
Wednesday, April 8, 2009 - Matt
YCombinator and Techstars spawning similar startups. I’ve noticed this too, though it’s most likely just good ideas occuring to several folks at once and the seed folks lowering the barrier to entry of starting a company and execution, so we notice more of the confluences.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009 - Matt
The End of a Bryght Era. One of the earliest hosted CMS ventures (based on Drupal) is closing.
2009-04-07: W3C invites people to attend the W3C Track at WWW2009, in Madrid, Spain on 23-24 April 2009. Part of WWW2009, the first day of the track is a Mobile Widgets Camp and the second a Social Web Camp. Conference participants and the local developer community are invited to submit topics of discussion in advance, via the W3C Track wikis. In addition to the W3C Track, Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the Web, will deliver the WWW2009 opening keynote titled "Twenty Years: Looking Forward, Looking Back". Read the press release. (Permalink)
2009-04-07: The Efficient XML Interchange Working Group has published a Working Draft of Efficient XML Interchange Evaluation. This document presents the anticipated benefits of the EXI format 1.0 compared to XML and gzipped XML. Additionally, tests for compactness include comparison to ASN.1 PER. The points of comparison are the requirements set by the EXI Working Group charter, based on the results of the XML Binary Characterization Working Group. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity. (Permalink)
2009-04-06: W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the Social Web Incubator Group. The group's mission is to understand the systems and technologies that permit the description and identification of people, groups, organizations, and user-generated content in extensible and privacy-respecting ways. The group will be co-chaired by Dan Applequist (Vodafone), Dan Brickley (Vrije Universiteit), Harry Halpin (W3C Fellow from the University of Edinburgh with support from Eduserv). The following W3C Members have sponsored the charter for this group: ASemantics, Boeing, Cisco, DERI Galway at the National University of Ireland, Garlik, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications (IIT-NCSR), NICTA, Rochester Institute of Technology, SUN Microsystems, Talis, Telecom Italia, University of Bristol, University of Edinburgh, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, University of Versailles, Vrije Universiteit, and Vodafone. Read more about the Incubator Activity, an initiative to foster development of emerging Web-related technologies. Incubator Activity work is not on the W3C standards track. (Permalink)
Sunday, April 5, 2009 - Matt
2009-04-04: The Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group published five Working Drafts today. The purpose of the Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) is to provide a means for individuals or organizations to describe a group of resources through the publication of machine-readable metadata. The primary change in these publications relates to the IRI canonicalization sections of the Grouping of Resources document (sections 2.1.3 - 2.1.5). The group published these documents:
Saturday, April 4, 2009 - Matt
Friday, April 3, 2009 - Matt
Thursday, April 2, 2009 - Howard Mann
The smart guys at Language In Common just launched an equally smart tool to track brands on Twitter. Check the top 100 “Tweeted” brands and enter your own to add it to the database. Fun interface design as well. Tweetbuzzer
2009-04-02: The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published the Working Draft of CSS Template Layout Module. This specification is part of level 3 of CSS (“CSS3”) and contains features to describe layouts at a high level, meant for tasks such as the positioning and alignment of “widgets” in a graphical user interface or the layout grid for a page or a window, in particular when the desired visual order is different from the order of the elements in the source document. Learn more about the Style Activity. (Permalink)
2009-04-02: Browse W3C presentations and events also available as an RSS channel. (Permalink)
2009-04-01: Today is the first day of the W3C Workshop on the Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social and Economic Development, in Maputo, Mozambique. The agenda of the Workshop focuses on the challenges of using mobile phones and Web technologies to deliver services to underprivileged populations of developing countries. International experts, local actors, researchers, and NGOs are participating in the meeting, hosted by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Government of Mozambique and organized as part of the Digital World Forum project (European Union's FP7). The W3C Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) thanks the Workshop sponsors for their support. (Permalink)
2009-04-01: The W3C's eGovernment Interest Group has published a Meeting Summary from its 12-13 March eGovernment stakeholder meeting in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the meeting was to obtain feedback on the First Public Working Draft of the group's Improving Access to Government through Better Use of the Web, published on 1 March 2009. Featured speakers at the meeting included Beth Noveck, US Office of Science and Technology Policy, Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation, and Steve Ressler, GovLoop, as well as meeting co-chairs Kevin Novak, American Institute of Architects, John Sheridan, UK National Archives, and W3C Team contact Jose Alonso. Key subject areas addressed by participants were: Openness and Transparency in Government; Social Networking; Data Interoperability and Semantic Web in Government; and Multi-Channel Deliver and Information Access via Mobile Platforms. The term "eGovernment" refers to the use of the Web or other information technologies by governing bodies (local, state, federal, multi-national) to interact with their citizenry, between departments and divisions, and between governments themselves. Learn more about the W3C's eGovernment Activity. (Permalink)
