Tech Center Current

Web applications have been all the buzz lately. Traditional desktop applications for e-mail, calendars, and basic word processing have begun losing favor to the online versions you can use in a web browser. Google has so far lead the pack in web application development, and they have recently released a tool which will help take web applications to the next level.

Wisdump has has article called The Ebb and Flow of Social Networking which discusses the common life cycle of a social networking website, from the early days to the initial hype, rise, and eventual decline, with examples of sites currently at each stage. It’s an interesting read.

Read the article: The Ebb and Flow of Social Networking

Secunia, a major software security tracking company, recently released a report which found that 28% of popular software installations miss important security updates. This means that the users of that software have neglected to apply the critical security updates provided by the vendors. The data was gathered through Secunia’s free “Software Inspector” tool, which is currently only available for Windows users. The statistics covered 4.9 million popular software installations, 1.4 million of which were missing vendor-supplied fixes for security vulnerabilities capable of compromising the system.

Google recently conducted a large-scale study which showed that about 1 in 10 websites attempted to install malicious software like viruses, spyware, adware, or other malware without the user’s knowledge or consent. About 1 in 4 websites had links or other content leading to malicious software.

Has Linux, the free alternative to Microsoft Windows, finally hit mainstream? Dell seems to think so, as they have recently announced plans to offer Ubuntu, a popular Linux setup, preinstalled on select home desktop and laptop computers.

If you’ve been using Mozilla Firefox as your web browser for a while, you should make sure that you are using the latest version. By mid-May, Mozilla will have officially ended support for Firefox 1.5, which was released in late 2005, and they are encouraging everyone to upgrade to version 2.0.

Microsoft has begun sending out e-mails urging people to oppose an upcoming California state bill that would promote open interoperability with digital documents. The bill, named “California A.B. 1668 : Open Document Format, Open Source“, would require all state agencies to standardize on XML-based open document standards so that they may be accessible to a wider range of applications and operating systems. The bill also establishes a “procurement preference” for the OpenDocument format (ODF). Microsoft objects to this stated preference and asserts that Microsoft’s own Office Open XML format would be a better candidate.

Net Applications, a web metrics company, has released a newsletter featuring its March 2007 web browser usage statistics. These attempt to measure what percentages of the Web’s users are using which web browsers.

The second annual CSS Naked Day is coming April 5. This is the day that many sites will intentionally remove their webpage’s stylesheets in an effort to draw attention to something called “semantic markup”.

It seems like every web development tool is trying to generate XHTML these days. Web design teachers tell their students that HTML is “out” and XHTML is “in”. But is XHTML really the best thing to use? You may be surprised to learn that there isn’t a single major web browser vendor who thinks it is a good idea to use XHTML on a public website, and a growing number of web standards experts agree.