Stories about: W3C

In this interview we chat to Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and Chief Technology Officer of Mozilla Corporation. Eich details the development of JS from its inception at Netscape in 1995, and comments on its continued popularity, as well as what he believes will be the future of client-side scripting languages on the Web.

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

The Eclipse Foundation is set to make available tomorrow its annual coordinated release of open source projects, which this year includes some 18 million lines of code and updates to 23 different projects.

Imagine how different the computing world would be if IBM had used proprietary chips in the original PC, rather than off-the-shelf components. The PC clone market would never have happened, and IBM, rather than Microsoft, might have emerged as the leading company of the computer revolution.

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.

While universities don't tend to shout as loudly about their latest tech innovations as do Google, Cisco and other big vendors, their results are no less impressive in what they could mean for faster, more secure and more useful networking. Here's a roundup, in no particular order, of some of the most amazing and colorful projects in the works.

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.

Yesterday, at the MIX08 conference, Microsoft released the first beta of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), which is available for immediate download. It promises several technical enhancements-as well as several philosophical improvements. After a session demonstrating the technical underpinnings of the beta release, the initial community response was, in the words of one developer, "Sweet!"

Scripting language technology, which has been the domain of rich Internet application development, will be applied to the concept of the semantic Web by TopQuadrant.

An international think-tank established to develop information sharing for the emergency services community has appointed an Australian researcher to co-chair the group.

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.