Stories about: W3C

Mozilla has released an add-on to Firefox that enables the browser to automatically pinpoint a user's location by communicating with Wi-Fi signals so Web sites can provide customized content to users.

A new generation of mobile Web browsers is finally making the Web a reality on handheld devices.

Score one for the good guys: Last week, Microsoft announced that not only would Office 2007 Service Pack 2 support the ODF (Open Document Format) standard, but the productivity suite would not offer support for the ISO standard version of Microsoft's own OOXML (Office Open XML) format until its next major version, release date unknown.

The European Union's 899-million-euro antitrust fine is the result of a continuous effort by the European Commission dating back to 2000. Carlo Piana, a partner at the Milan law firm Studio Legale Tamos Piana & Partners, represented the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Samba project in the case.

The first major upgrade to the HTML specification since 1997, HTML 5, was published in an early draft form Tuesday by the World Wide Web Consortium, featuring APIs for drawing two-dimensional graphics and control of audio and video content. The final version of the specification is not expected until late-2010, and it will be up to browser vendors to support it, one analyst stressed.

There may be all kinds of technology issues, business plan problems and potential failures to address before the mobile Internet becomes a success. But for Tim Berners-Lee there's really only one issue.

Opera Software's plans to beef up its browser so that Adobe Flash Player-like functionality will be intrinsic to the program are a move in the right direction.

When plans to build and distribute a $US100 (£50) laptop to schoolchildren in emerging economies were first announced two years ago, the people behind the scheme had their fair share of critics.

Jim Gettys has been a software pioneer on open source systems for over 20 years. From his role as a primary developer of the X Window System at MIT in 1984 (which forms the basis of Linux and Unix graphical interfaces), through to editing the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) HTTP/1.1 protocol and founding the handhelds.org project (from which all Linux handheld and mobile phone development stems from), the only thing Gettys hasn't tried his hand at is solving world hunger. But he decided to start with the developing world's education crisis first, and now finds himself as Vice President of Software for the One Laptop per Child project.

There is something about extreme brevity in the use of language that appeals to me. I suspect it comes from decades of fighting with command line interfaces of computer systems. How can I get this infernal machine to do complicated stuff using just a small number of commands? Anyone who keeps that question in their head for enough years becomes attracted to the arts of extreme brevity in language.

A group of professors has formed a research collaboration to train students how to design future versions of the World Wide Web.