What is HTML 5? I hear you ask. Well apparently it’s mostly HTML 4 with some extra tags and attributes.

For the structural elements of HTML 5, we have the following:

* section: A part or chapter in a book, a section in a chapter, or essentially anything that has its own heading in HTML 4
* header: The page header shown on the page; not the same as the head element
* footer: The page footer where the fine print goes; the signature in an e-mail message
* nav: A collection of links to other pages
* article: An independent entry in a blog, magazine, compendium, and so forth

Which is lifted straight from this IBM Developerworks page. There is a great deal more on that page that I am not going to detail here including examples, so I suggest everyone read though it.

HTML 5 isn’t hard, it is compatible with HTML 4 and degrades nicely. Near as I can tell it seems designed to bring web design more in line with the conventions used in GUI application design (Progress bars for example) in addition to adding different methods of embedding video and audio. It would be a surprise if the changes didn’t find their way into the next generation of xHTML as well.

Links:
UserFriendly
W3C HTML 5 Editors draft.
Scriptol

What a great couple of months for Linux it has been. First Dell jump on the desktop Linux bandwagon, then Lenovo
follow, then Google buys into the Open Invention Network which among other things will help protect Linux from Patent claims, and now Novel has won their copyright case against SCO which mostly invalidates SCO’s other outstanding cases against both IBM and Linux users. The case was more about Unix than it was about Linux, but it would have affected Linux in a significant way had the ruling gone otherwise. As it stands now, Unix ownership has been cleared up and a great many people heard about Linux because of the case, so other than the money wasted on lawyers, the result for Linux has been positive.

So SCO will now owe big time money to Novell for Microsoft and Sun Unix licenses, the end result of which is that they will probably become insolvent and Darl Mcbride and co can be remembered only for their greed and dishonorable and possibly dishonest behavior. It will also be interesting to hear Maureen O’Gara’s take on things since many have the impression that she was in SCO’s pocket from the start and her articles certainly gave the impression that her sympathies lay with SCO. I guess she will either claim the ruling was wrong, or that the judge was bought or some other such nonsense. Hopefully she will just disappear now that people must realize that she has nothing relevant to add and a good deal of what she has said was utter dishonorable rubbish.

Incidentally, as you might imagine, Novell seem pretty happy with the result also.

I am a big fan of the Tour de France. I watch it religiously each summer and someday hope to go watch it in person. Are these men, or machines, or doped up combinations? It doesn’t matter I guess as the cheaters eventually get caught if they get to cavalier. I liked Victor, but he is gone and probably forever shamed. What really happened with Floyd Landis (notice that he was never mentioned in this years coverage?). How do you test negative one day, positive the following, and negative the next?

Well my point is that if you watch the tour, you know T-Mobile and their loud pink colors. So what has this to do with the web? Well I happened to their site today, www.t-online.de and oddly enough you get re-directed over to here: http://www.t-online.de/c/00/00/04/46.html. Why?

What I liked (I think) or found unusual is the division mouseovers employed at the top. There are six buttons and when you hover, you get a feature. It was smooth, fast and worked well. I am not a big fan of animation and I hate flash immensely! But this seemed smooth and well done, so they are my doped up (or not) featured site of the day.

Today I was having a chat with my neighbor. He is 80 or so and we were talking about his like of an SUV, but he now drives a sedan in light of gas prices. He had a lot of reasons to drive the SUV that wouldn’t be what you might think, like he had trouble bending to get things in and out of his trunk. Today I happened to be there so I put his cooler in his trunk for him, but he likes to be self sufficient and he is unlikely to call me over just to help. When he gets to his destination, he will have to remove it himself. We discussed alternative fuels (actually you can already get an electric hybrid like a Prius) and whether the big automakers already have technology like this at hand that they are sitting on (a theory I have heard for years).

His take:
1. They don’t have such a technology available and affordable yet or they would be seeking to capitalize on it.
2. They will come up with such a technology, but probably not in his lifetime.
3. Current means of saving (like a Prius) involve very small vehicles which are not desirable to many because of perceived safety issues and small container size that can be uncomfortable or unsuitable if you have cargo or passengers.

I pushed him on his lifetime assessment and pointed out revolutionary things like the Segway (ibot wheelchair and Segway personal transport). He discussed the advance of the cordless (now often cellular) phone in his son’s lifetime and said perhaps progress could come still in his lifetime (perhaps 20 or so years I expect given his health and energy). It will be fun to watch.

How long has it been since you just surfed? A long time for me. I seldom do the web without a purpose. When I first started in late 1994 on the web, I always surfed. I had no idea where I would wind up or why … I just did. Perhaps Google had a bit to do with my downfall on surfing? Now I tend to figure out what I want and well … just go there. I don’t know why or how I got there, but I somehow enjoyed this video of a lady named Heidi who maybe will be a tv star some day?? The thing is I don’t know her, I have no interest really in her subject matter, and yet I sat and watched her whole video. It entertained and drew me in. I don’t know, does it do that for you, or was I just tired?

Sort of on a related note: Last weekend I wake surfed behind a Mastercraft X-15 (looked something like this but black and white). Ugliest boat I ever saw, but boy did it drive nice and girl did it have a nice interior. I cannot wake surf by the way … just stand on the board and then fall, usually in a spectacular way.

Dell is apparently expanding the number of machines they offer with the Linux Operating System. For people who want to use a computer for all the usual stuff like email, web browsing, office documents etc, these machines are the perfect tool. Better still they make excellent web development tools also since they come with Apache/PHP/Perl/MySQL and about a hundred development tools (editors and such). As an added bonus you get to avoid the Microsoft tax and get a machine that is faster and more responsive than it would be running Vista (depending on who you ask, but I doubt even Microsoft would argue since some of the machines are mid range laptops.)
You have to give credit to Dell, these Linux offerings may not initially amount to much financially for Dell, but they will now go down on record as the first of the top 5 PC manufactures to market and sell Linux pre-installed on their standard desktop hardware. The way Linux usage is going everywhere else, (from smart phones to supercomputers) they are unlikely to be the last huge company to support Linux on desktops, but nobody can argue they were the first to go mainstream with it.

Do we need or want an Open Source search engine? This is one I am not sure about myself. The way Widia are talking about using human intervention to increase relevancy is great, I only worry that the results will be slued toward personal preference or buddies rather then the relevance of the content itself. Time will tell because things seem to be moving along nicely for Wikia who just purchased a distributed spider called Grub to further their cause.

Apple usage is growing, Microsoft’s is apparently growing more, So says Microsoft anyway. My own belief is that there is room for all, I just would love to see the playing field more even between Windows, OSX and Linux so that none of them can ignore supporting each other. That would be the perfect world of choice.

Apparently Sophos has discovered that 29% of all web pages host some sort of malware. I’m not sure if I am surprised by that or not. It’s almost like the Internet has become a virtual slum with over 80% of email classed as spam and 30% of websites trying to infect your PC with something.

Something else interesting in the article linked above is that they claim that Microsoft ISS and Apache web servers are equally vulnerable to cracking. They appear to say that half the attacks were to Apache and half were to IIS therefore they are equally targeted. That doesn’t make any sense because Apache installations outnumber IIS by 2 to 1 at last count IIS was 28% and Apache over 60%, so if the attacks were 50/50% then logically that means that IIS was significantly more vulnerable despite being much less popular. Still, it’s interesting reading right?

UPDATE: We’ve received a comment from Graham Cluley of Sophos and he was nice enough to direct us to the original report and explain that the story carried by Tgdaily and other sites is not entirely correct. The 1 million sites Sophos looked at for this report were sites that were blocked as being unfriendly in some way. In other words, the 1 million sites surveyed were already marked as seriously questionable and are therefore not in any way an even cross section of the normal web.

The end result is that the figures mean nothing to the web overall, other than that malware is a growing problem. Thankyou for letting us know Graham.