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Released on Tuesday,thefirst workingdraft for HTML 5is a result of work carried out bythe World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)HTML Working Group, which brings developers, browser vendors and content providers together.

In its final form by 2010, HTML 5 is intended to bring the markup language forward into today’s richer internet environments, with new APIs to control audio and 2D video content.

“HTML is of course a very important standard,” said Tim Berners-Lee, author of the first version of HTML, and W3C director. “I am glad to see that the community of developers, including browser vendors, is working together to create the best possible path for the web. To integrate the input of so many people is hard work, as is the challenge of balancing stability with innovation; pragmatism with idealism.”

The W3C HTML Working Group studied the web’s evolution and was driven by developments, such as the Ajax development process, to draw up the new standard for a web that is now far beyond a collection of static pages. New features in HTML 5 will mean that elements of today’s most popular websites can be standardised to promote interoperability. Ultimately, these elements will then proliferate as they begin to show up in authoring tools, experts have claimed.

HTML 5 will focus on client-side data storage to enable users to edit documents interactively. It will also address costs by providing concise rules on handling HTML documents correctly, alongside instructions for how to recover from errors. In line with these augmentations, new features are also planned to help bring familiar page sections and navigation elements to the screen. Written in either “classic” HTML syntax or an XML syntax, HTML 5is also intended to extend web-application interoperability outwards to the mobile platform.

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Sparql, pronounced “sparkle”, expresses data queries in high-level terms so it is easier to extend them to new data sources or port them to new applications. “Trying to use the Semantic Web without Sparql is like trying to use a relational database without SQL,” said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C director and creator of the world wide web.

According to Berneers-Lee: “Sparql makes it possible to query information from databases and other diverse sources in the wild, across the web.”

“Sparql is a key element for integrated information access across information silos and across business boundaries,” said Jean-Luc Chatelain, chief technology officer for HP’s Software Information Management business, announcing the release of SDB, a Sparql database system for HP’s Jena open-source Semantic Web framework.

“HP customers can benefit from better information utilisation by employing Semantic Web technologies,” he added.

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“Gov 2.0 will replace e-gov as governments seek to gain additional value from citizen interaction and business transactions,” Teresa Bozzelli, chief operating officer and managing director of Government Insights, which produced the report, said in a statement.

Governments are expected to increasingly use social networking and other Web 2.0 innovations as a means of fostering greater participation and dialogue with their citizens, as well as encouraging more effective intra-government communication.

Research vice president at analyst firm Gartner, Richard Harris, told ZDNet Australia: “A lot of Web 2.0 applications will allow government to change the nature of what they can do in terms of interaction, but apart from the technical side of things there will be a greater focus on improving the business of government.”

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The Malaysian government may appear to favour the use of the ODF (OpenDocument Format), with plans to adopt the standard in its ICT deployment, but Microsoft has been able to convince a growing number of Malaysian IT companies and independent software vendors (ISVs) to incorporate OOXML (Office Open XML) into their offerings.

Developed by Microsoft, OOXML is a close rival to the ODF, which is championed by open-source vendors and major IT houses such as IBM and Sun.

ODF has a first-mover advantage, having gained certification from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) while OOXML is still seeking approval from the global standards organisation.

Microsoft’s document format, however, had received a much-needed boost when European standards body Ecma International ratified it in December 2006.

Microsoft’s latest success story in Malaysia comes from Tradenex.com, the IT arm of the Federal of Malaysian Manufacturers which represents over 2,000 manufacturing and industrial service companies.

Familiarity breeds adoptionTradenex.com last month launched nexCONNECT, an electronic business collaboration platform that links suppliers, distributors, logistics and financial institutions via the web. The Microsoft .Net-based system will incorporate OOXML as one of its standards.

The platform is targeted at small to medium-sized enterprises with limited budget and IT capabilities to invest in leading-edge technology to support their business.

“This will allow users to interact with nexCONNECT in the familiar Microsoft office environment [encompassing products such as] Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office 2007, that they are so used to, with the aim to simplify its usage and adoption,” said Soon Koi Voon, chief executive of Tradenex.com, at the recent launch of nexCONNECT.

Asked why OOXML was preferred over the ODF, Soon said the decision was based on commercial realities. He estimated that over 90 percent of companies ran their operations using Microsoft Office and the Windows platform.

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Bazaar 1.0, released on Friday, differs from other version control systems (VCS) in that it’s distributed rather than centralised, meaning that it can be used by teams of widely dispersed programmers without the need for a central code repository.

The software, whose name recalls Eric Raymond’s open-sourcemanifesto The Cathedral and the Bazaar, is well suited for open-source projects ?which are typically distributed ?as well as for private projects where teams are dispersed, Canonical said.

“Distributed software engineering is not limited to the open-source world: corporate and proprietary software development is increasingly done by teams that span companies, continents and time zones and need the ability to manage their work in an efficient distributed fashion,” said Canonical’s chief executive Mark Shuttleworth in a statement.

The trick of such a system is the complex task of co-ordinating contributions and modifications from a large number of sources without any central point of reference.

Canonical promised that Bazaar can easily handle certain tricky processes, such as text or naming conflicts and renaming of files and directories. Viewing the status in a tree of 5,000 files takesjust half asecond, Canonical said.

The program has been used in large projects for several years in pre-release versions. More than 50 open-source projects as well as several large private projects are currently using it. Bazaar’s pre-release versions over the past two years haven’t had any data-loss bugs, Canonical said.

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