Tag: standards

.aspx considered harmful

I guess I’m extra-sensitive to the .aspx thing now that I work for Microsoft, because I know that to folks outside the Microsoft ecosystem it screams: We don’t get the web. It’s true there are plenty of .php and other extensions floating around on the web. But non-Microsoft-powered sites are far more likely to suppress them than are Microsoft-powered sites, because you have to go out of your way to get IIS and ASP.NET to do that. I hope that cool URIs will become the default for Microsoft-powered websites and services. Meanwhile, there are a variety of add-on URL rewriters for IIS that can streamline and normalize web namespaces. I wish they were used more extensively.

Jon Udell it only took them 10 years to get clean urls. wtf?

Acid3

Now the top 4 browsers have either released or announced a version of their browser that passes Acid2 work on Acid3 has restarted and Ian Hickson has been adding testcases over the last few weeks. Acid3 is primarily concerned with ECMAScript and the DOM though Selectors Level 3, Media Queries, and data: URIs are also tested. The idea of the test is to run 100 ECMAScript functions that either return true (pass) or false (fail). I believe 16 of those functions are missing at the moment and people are encouraged to contribute. Tests need to be justified by a specification at W3C Candidate Recommendation, W3C Recommendation, or equivalent for non-W3C consortia, and be from 2004 or before. I believe that if browsers once again commit to fixing the bugs found by this test Web authoring will improve tremendously.

Microsoft Sabotage

You may have been misled, but now that everyone can see almost all of the primary sources (the remaining documents are hidden behind Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Ecma firewalls), please stop repeating falsehoods about either my conduct as TG1 Convenor, or the treatment of dissent by the majority favoring ES4 in TG1. If you have any documents to publish that shed light on Microsoft’s actions and intentions in Ecma TC39-TG1, I welcome them.

microsoft is unsurprisingly trying to block EcmaScript 4, a competitor to their Silverlight efforts

National Positioning Architecture

Data communications networks currently support PNT capabilities by carrying PNT aiding and augmentation data, GIS data, etc.; however, opportunities exist to exploit the synergy between RF-based PNT and communications by leveraging communications capabilities to provide PNT capabilities directly. This is consistent with the multiphenomenology vector of employing diverse sources and information paths, and would increase PNT robustness by offering services outside of traditional radionavigation spectrum. Leadership and initiative is needed to avoid stove-piped solutions, and detailed assessments regarding specific solutions are needed, so the US should establish a community of experts to pursue synergies between communications and PNT. Initially, the US should study the lessons learned from existing PNT/Communications fusion efforts, such as cellular and WiFi networks, iGPS, tactical radio networks, E911, the Air Force Satellite Control Network, and NASA‘s SCA to help determine what provides the best options for both systems and their users.

this might a common clock and reference frame encoded on all broadcast signals, and compatibility with indoor systems (such as WiFi)- if you get a signal from anything you get some location info.

libkml

Google will be releasing an open-source KML library in C++ that implements and tracks the standard as it progresses. By providing a reference library it allows developers to more easily keep up to date with KML without having to maintain their own library and track standards changes.

likely apache licensed. i’ll hold off for that to come out to do more gdata experiments.

Our hope is that libkml will reduce the need for everyone to re-invent the wheel with a custom parser or serializer, by providing a single re-usable library that implements KML’s semantics. This first release is focused primarily on the low-level details of the KML DOM itself, but it’s our intent to enhance the library in the future by implementing more sophisticated operations like style resolution and balloon text templating.