Battle Ensues Over Open Standards in EU Rules
A row has broken out over the long-awaited European Interoperability Framework (EIF).

Read more on PC World

Over at Duck Duck Moose, they have made the foray into math apps with Park Math. And true to form they have continued to maintain the high standards we have come to expect from this developer.

I wasn’t sure how the Duck Duck Moose aesthetic would translate into a math app, but they have developed not just a visual style, but an animation style that helps preschool children develop early numeracy concepts in a way that maintains the colorful and friendly environments we have seen in apps like Wheels on the Bus and Fish HD.

The app has seven different mathematical activities including sorting, patterns and addition. And, at only $1.99 for iPhone and iPad, it is the type of price we really like here at GeekDad.

Note: GeekDad received a preview copy of Park Math

Related articles

• Duck Duck Moose: Quality Apps for Kids
• Review: Mobad Games are Good for Kids

View full post on GeekDad

The Open Geospatial Consortium and the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing have agreed to develop and use open geospatial standards.

Under the agreement the two organizations will work cooperatively to raise the awareness, acceptance, and implementation of open standards and to promote educational programs and best practices. This will involve Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS) demonstrations and workshops, sensor network standardization events, and events on topics such as multi-source data fusion and multi-spectral image processing.

The ISPRS is a non-governmental organization devoted to the development of international cooperation for the advancement of photogrammetry, remote sensing and their applications. The Open Geospatial Consortium is an international consortium of more than 395 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities developing publicly available geospatial standards.

Community sponsors of the OpenStack Cloud include 25 companies like Dell and Intel.

NASA contributed a hardware approach that powers its Nebula Cloud Platform. Nebula uses containerized data centers, lowering cost by centralizing hardware. Nebula is used for Mars images, seen in Microsoft’s WorldWide telescope. Microsoft recently unveiled the largest and clearest image of the night sky ever assembled. The “TeraPixel” sky map was generated with Microsoft’s latest HPC and parallel software assets.

OpenStack’s mission is to “produce the ubiquitous OpenSource Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable.”

The $400 million Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), funded by the National Science Foundation and now being built along the West Coast of the United States, will use Amazon Web Services with two 10 Gbps connections to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Underwater sensors, powered by 10 KiloVolt cables carrying 10 Gbps data from a Shore Station on the coast of Oregon. OOI will “bug” the ocean, forming an undersea network stretching from Canada to California.

Meanwhile, DARPA will develop an exascale supercomputer, using Intel and Nvidia processors. One exaflop is a thousand times faster than a petaflop, the speed of today’s fastest supercomputers, including the IBM Roadrunner, the Chinese Nebulae and the Cray Jaguar.

It would support massive streaming sensor data (pdf). Prototype UHPC systems are expected to be complete by 2018.

View full post on dailywireless.org

Want to find out how magically terrible your web code is? Just ask the Unicorn.

The web’s governing body has launched a new validation tool called Unicorn that checks the quality of your website’s code against multiple web standards at the same time.

You can find the new Unicorn “all-in-one validator” on the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) website at validator.w3.org/unicorn/.

The W3C maintains a number of free web-based tools for checking whether your web code is valid, and Unicorn makes several of these tools available under a single interface. Just plug in a URL and you can see your results for all of these tests on a single page:

• HTML/XHTML markup validator
• CSS validator
• Atom or RSS feed validator
• mobileOK, which tells you how friendly your site is to mobile visitors

When you visit the Unicorn page, you’ll see a dropdown menu where you can choose what to check. The default is a “General Conformance Check,” which runs all the validators at once and is particularly unforgiving. Your site may validate as strict XHTML, but your syndication feeds and mobile accessibility might be a mess. It’s almost impossible to rack up a perfect score, so be prepared for a lot of red ink.

You can also select one of the individual validation services in the dropdown. Each of the individual validators also continues to run on its own service, and the W3C confirms they aren’t going anywhere.

Unicorn will continue to roll in more validation options over time. There’s already a wiki where you can learn how to write additional modules.

The wiki is also where you’ll find links to the Unicorn code. You can run your own instance of the validator to test your own pages, or you can set up a public Unicorn server for others to use.

Every time we post about one of these validation tools, we get a small flood of comments pointing out that our own web pages don’t validate properly. We know, and we’re working on it. So, just to save you the trouble, here’s Webmonkey and Wired. You’ll notice that our RSS feeds are perfect — Unicorn’s only quibble is that we put Flash-video-object embeds in our syndicated posts. Big whoop.

See Also:

• VP8 Could Become a Standard in HTML5
• Where on the Web Is HTML5?
• Tim Berners-Lee Sees Promise, Challenges in HTML5
• A Brave New Web Will Be Here Soon, But Browsers Must Improve

View full post on Webmonkey

Apple posted a showcase of “HTML5 and web standards” on its website Thursday that highlights the level of support for the emerging standard in the company’s Safari and Mobile Safari browsers.

It’s nice to see Apple (or anyone for that matter) talking about HTML5 and mentioning more than just video. The site showcases HTML5 audio and canvas elements, as well as CSS 3 transitions and typography tools. It also has a nice photo gallery that looks and behaves just like former Apple designer Mike Matas’ amazing photo-gallery site.

Unfortunately, the way Apple presents the showcase, you would think Safari is the only web browser that supports these new web standards.

In fact, visit the site with any other browser and you’ll get a message telling you to download Safari. Surely your browser must be inadequate? Actually, your browser is probably capable of handling the showcase just fine, but ultimately the showcase isn’t about web standards: It’s about Apple’s version of web standards.

Apple is detecting the user-agent string (the bit of identifying data your browser passes to a web server when it requests a page) and only allowing Safari users to see the galleries. Other browsers are effectively cut off, regardless of the fact that many can render them just fine.

Worse, Apple’s CSS code uses only WebKit-specific selectors — for example, -webkit-border-radius instead of the actual CSS 3 selector border-radius. WebKit is the open source engine that powers Safari and Google Chrome. Firefox, IE and Opera can’t understand this code as clearly.

So much for web standards. Not only is user-agent sniffing absolutely the wrong way to determine the HTML5 capabilities of the current user, the implicit suggestion is that HTML5 is something only Apple supports.

Microsoft recently published its own HTML5 showcase to hype the coming release of Internet Explorer 9, and its demo pages are viewable (and work) in any non-IE browser with the proper support. Mozilla’s HTML5 demo pages are geared to work with experimental builds of Firefox, but at least other browsers aren’t blocked, and most of the demos actually work in Chrome.

To test Apple’s demos in other browsers, we spoofed the user agent in Firefox and Chromium and found that, while several examples do indeed fail in Firefox, most worked just fine. Naturally, everything works without issue in Chromium, because it uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari. Apple is being disingenuous by making its browser seem more compelling than others. That’s not surprising, but we’d be disappointed to see independent developers follow suit.

So how should you detect whether the current browser can display whatever bit of HTML5 or CSS 3 you’re using? The long-established best practice is to detect for features, not browsers. To find out which features are available in the current browser isn’t hard — there are even several free, open source libraries out there that do just that.

Modernizr is one of our favorites. This handy little JavaScript library can detect which HTML5 features are available. Then, armed with that information, you can then create conditional JavaScript statements to offer HTML5 to those browsers that support it, but still fall back on other content for those that don’t.

There are however, some cases where Modernizr might be overkill. For example, if you just want to embed some HTML5 video, you only need to detect one element. If Modernizr isn’t right for your project, check out Mark Pilgrim’s list of ways to detect HTML5 elements. The list of elements and how to detect them is an appendix to Pilgrim’s book in progress, Dive Into HTML5.

The list isn’t just elements, though it does cover those as well. But it also shows you how to detect API support for things like offline storage or geolocation, as well as SVG, SVG-in-HTML and even which video codec the current browser supports.

One thing Pilgrim doesn’t cover is CSS 3 features (CSS 3 != HTML5). To detect which CSS 3 features are available in the current browser you can use Modernizer or you can roll your own code using a library like jQuery, which includes a support() method to check a wide range of browser features before executing code.

See Also:

• Handy Guide to Detecting Support for HTML5
• Where on the Web Is HTML5?
• Beautiful Websites: Former Apple Designer’s Amazing Photo Gallery
• Beautiful Websites: Slippy for Presentations

View full post on Webmonkey

Microsoft has released the first update to its Internet Explorer 9 preview. The latest release brings some speed improvements, more standards support, and more hardware acceleration for the browser’s HTML5 features.

To take the new IE9 for a spin, head over to Microsoft’s IETestDrive site and download a copy today. We’ve been testing it for a few hours, and here’s what we’ve noticed.

The best news in this release is that IE9 has already made some significant speed improvements since the first developer preview earlier this year. For example, IE 9 is now on par with Safari, Google Chrome and Opera on the Sunspider JavaScript test, which attempts to measure how a browser will perform on JavaScript-heavy sites like Gmail and Facebook.

Although IE9 is still not the fastest browser when it comes to rendering JavaScript, the difference between it and the competition is small enough that you’re unlikely to notice any difference on real world sites.

Complex diagrams laid out in CSS — and they actually render the same in several browsers. Part of the Microsoft’s IE9 demo site at ietestdrive.com.

What might be even more encouraging about this release for web developers is Microsoft’s emphasis on ensuring that markup works the same across browsers. Microsoft’s general manager of Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch, writes on the IE Blog: “web browsers should render the same markup — the same HTML, same CSS, and same script — the same way… that’s simply not the case today.”

And yes, Hachamovitch does note that IE6 is the main reason that’s true (to which we would also add IE7). But he’s also correct in noting that because HTML5 and CSS 3 support varies by browser, it’s tough to use HTML5 elements or style them with CSS 3 and have your markup behave the same across all platforms and browser.

What works in WebKit browser sometimes fails in Firefox, and vice versa. For CSS 3, developers often need to resort to -webkit or -moz prefixes for newer features.

But while those are annoyances to be sure, they pale next to the real difficulty of cross browser support for new features — legacy IE browsers.

IE9 will improve the situation with support for the HTML5 video tag (though not yet, support for video is slated for the next developer preview), but it will still fall short of matching the HTML5 features in its competitors. Take the Canvas tag, for instance. While IE9 has made strides with SVG support (partly related to Canvas), it still doesn’t support the actual HTML5 Canvas tag. Gecko and WebKit have had support for Canvas for over three years now.

Hachamovitch touts IE9’s JavaScript improvements, which are welcome — for example IE9 will now support DOMContentLoaded, getElementsByClassName, createDocument, and more — but again, for the most part these are things other browsers can already do.

If you want to see IE9 blazing a trail instead of catching up to the pack you’ll need to look at the hardware acceleration features, which rely on DirectX for faster rendering. Mozilla is planning to add hardware acceleration to Firefox, but so far this is one area where IE9 bests the competition.

While the latest developer preview of IE9 leaves much to be desired, it is still a work in progress. IE 9 is already undeniably a much better browser than its predecessors — it’s faster, renders pages according to standards, supports (some) HTML5 and, given the number of people that rely on IE, will help move the web forward.

See Also:

• Microsoft Says Web Video in IE9 Is All About H.264
• Microsoft to Double Down on HTML5 With Internet Explorer 9
• Internet Explorer 9 Shows Up Faster, But Still Lacking
• Microsoft Still Chasing the Competition With IE9

View full post on Webmonkey

Apple issued a statement responding to claims by Adobe that it’s a closed platform.

View full post on Macworld