standards

E-mail innovator pitches self-deleting e-mails

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Joshua Baer, CEO of the e-mail company OtherInBox, agitated for a new addition to e-mail standards at the Inbox Love e-mail conference today. He's proposing a standard that would let e-mail messages carry with them the date of their own irrelevance.

E-mails could use the the "x-expires" header to tell the receiving in-box that they become outdated after a certain absolute date, or a certain time relative to when they're sent or received. Baer says this idea has been "bouncing around" for 10 years, but he's learned, "the best … Read more

HTML5 spec set for 2014 completion

It's been a work in progress for years, but there are a few more years to go yet before the next version of Hypertext Markup Language is finalized.

Specifically, the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML Working Group is set to announce today that it expects to anoint HTML5 as an officially recommended standard in the second quarter of 2014. That drawn-out schedule contrasts with another effort to make HTML a more fluidly updated "living standard."

"We started working [on HTML5] in 2007," Philippe Le Hegaret, the HTML activity leader for the W3C, told CNET. &… Read more

Open source and the network's role in the cloud

The announcement of the latest release from open-source cloud-management software project OpenStack is remarkable in many ways. The rapidly growing OpenStack community is gaining ground on a mature platform--this release adds image management and support for unlimited object sizes in its object storage service software--and there were a number of new IT vendors added to the list of supporters.

ZDNet UK covered the basics of the announcement, so I won't pick it apart here. Rather, I want to focus on one of the most interesting aspects of many of the vendors announcing their participation with this release.

Namely, several … Read more

Avoiding the cost of entanglement

Modern IT is very focused on economics. We talk endlessly about cost. We debate capital costs vs. operational costs--CAPEX vs. OPEX, in the lingo. We look at Total Cost of Operations (TCO) and we try to calculate our projects' Return On Investment (ROI). But even with all of these economic metrics, we miss an enormous source of costs: Our long-term entanglement with the products, technologies, and approaches we choose.

Long ago, we had a bright idea. "We could represent the year portion of dates with just two digits--that would save space!" We happily did that for a few … Read more

W3C tackles touch-screen Web apps

In the competition between native applications for mobile phones vs. Web applications, hardware support often makes native apps an obvious choice for programmers. But the World Wide Web Consortium is tackling one area, touch-screen support, in an effort that could help Web apps catch up.

The W3C published an editor's draft of a new touch-screen standard for Web apps today. The draft specification is designed also for devices such as drawing tablets that don't have a screen, but today's hot market for smartphones makes touch screens the more important focus.

A standard--if designed well and adopted--would make … Read more

W3C narrows 'HTML5' logo meaning to HTML5

The World Wide Web Consortium, faced with derision that its new HTML5 logo represented a broader set of Web technologies, has pared down the logo's scope.

"Since the main logo was intended to represent HTML5, the cornerstone of modern Web applications, I have updated the FAQ to state this more clearly. I trust that the updated language better aligns with community expectations," W3C spokesman Ian Jacobs said Friday in a blog post.

Indeed, the HTML5 logo FAQ now states in no uncertain terms: "This logo represents HTML5, the cornerstone for modern Web applications." Those who … Read more

Google documents VP8 at standards group IETF

The VP8 encoding technology at the heart of Google's effort to spread royalty-free video across the computing industry now has a home at the Internet Engineering Task Force--but not so Google can standardize it.

VP8 is a Google codec used to convert video into a more compact form for tasks such as streaming across the Internet, broadcast over the airwaves, or storage on a camera. VP8 and the Vorbis audio codec are the basis for WebM, an open-source and royalty-free technology that Google hopes will lower barriers for using video on the Net and elsewhere. Although WebM's open-source, royalty-free nature … Read more

HTML editor dumps 'HTML5' even as W3C touts it

Two days after the World Wide Web Consortium debuted a flashy new HTML5 badge, none other than the editor of the Hypertext Markup Language standard has dumped the hot tech buzzword.

"HTML is the new HTML5," Ian Hickson, who edits the specification, said in a blog post yesterday. The announcement embodies a more continuous development process that he's planned for more than a year, but Hickson told CNET today that the W3C's HTML5 badge--which controversially stands for a number of Web technologies beyond HTML--hastened a change that had been planned for later in 2011.

"Now … Read more

Khronos aims to ease coding for audio, video hardware

The Khronos Group today released updates to two interfaces designed to make it easier for programmers to tap into the power of computing hardware.

First is OpenSL ES 1.1, an interface for C programmers to use sound hardware on mobile devices. The interface abstracts technologies such as graphic equalizer processing, reverberation or 3D spatial Doppler effects, playback and volume controls, and audio data recording.

The purpose of the interface is to liberate programmers from having to recraft their applications each time a new device arrives with a different, often proprietary interface. Khronos released profiles tailored for phones, music players, … Read more