Web Development Live

Web hosting is a sort of Internet facility that permits organizations and individuals to have their own website accessibility through the World Wide Web. The companies that offer space on a server with Internet connectivity are known as Web hosts or Web hosting providers.

Among the wide-ranging exploits of web hosting, web page and small-scale file hosting has been rated as the most basic one, wherein files are uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a Web Interface.

Personal web site hosting comes generally free, while the business web site hosting entails comparatively higher expense. For personal web pages, a single page hosting is more than enough. On the contrary, a complex site necessitates a more intense package that offers database support and application development platforms like PHP, Java, and ASP.NET.

The web hosting client can expect to comprise the services, like email for their business domain, databases or multi-media services for streaming media. Besides, a customer might well make up his/ her mind for having Windows for its hosting platform. The customer would have PHP, Perl, and Python, and also go with ASP .Net or Classic ASP for the purpose of facilitating website development. Generally, a Web Content Management System is included in Web hosting packages. This reduces the worry of the end-users about the more technical aspects.

The descriptive line of text is extraneous information for most web shoppers. But for an increasingly vocal group of web users, the text tag means the difference between comprehending what is shown in that image and being left in the dark.

Screen readers, purchased and owned by individual users, transform visual information into audio information. They also assist blind web users, who use keyboard commands instead of a mouse to navigate web pages, to move around a site, by recognizing and reading headings on a web page. The user can then respond with keyboard commands that move the cursor from element to element.

It further charges that because the site requires the use of a mouse to complete a transaction, blind Target customers also are unable to make purchases on Target.com independently.

In October, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted class action status to a lawsuit against Target. The judge also ruled that e-commerce sites are required by California law to be accessible to blind shoppers.

National Federation of the Blind president Marc Maurer called the granting of class action status to the suit a tremendous step forward for blind people throughout the country.

With the outcome of the Target case pending, it remains to be seen just how motivating a ruling in favor of the National Federation of the Blind would be to retailers whose sites are not now accessible.

One retailer not waiting for that outcome to take action is Amazon.com. Though it provides text tags with images on its home page, it has more work to do in achieving full accessibility.

Speaking at the annual Thinking Digital IT conference in Gateshead, representatives from handset manufacturers and mobile operators argued that flat rate tariffs, greater interoperability and new technologies like GPS have accelerated usage and spurred the a new dawn for the mobile web

“This is the second chance for everyone to deliver on the promise of the late 90s,” said mobile strategist and ex-O2 executive, Bradley de Souza.

“Then, it was premature from a technology perspective, the marketing didn’t line up with what was being delivered and although there was collaboration from the developer community, the stars didn’t align.”

Mark Selby, vice president of sales and industry collaboration at Nokia, argued that the operators’ walled garden approach to browsing is also collapsing, leading to greater take-up of the mobile web. Some Nokia figures point to data usage on smart phones nearing 90 percent of total usage, he added.

“Our research shows that the amount of time people are browsing, accessing and uploading content is incredible,” said Selby.

Others commented that good content holds the key to the success of the mobile web. Vikesh Patel, European general manager for products at Motorola, said that uptake will rocket “if you get the content right and people want it”.

“There are a lot of people [in the industry] with different opinions,” he added. “The network operators don’t want to be just bit pipes but it really needs developers to feed the ecosystem to grow it.”

De Souza argued that mobile platform providers and other stakeholders need to be more open in order to facilitate and encourage the developer community.

“On the Symbian platform the developers can’t even get their test apps onto users’ phones to gauge their usability,” he added. “Microsoft has done well to [encourage openness] but it’s not well structured.”

Gerhard Grech, director of strategy and business development at Orange, agreed that content is king on the mobile, but argued that simplifying the presentation and accessibility to that content will be key to its popularity.

“You need to do something completely different in the way you present that content,” he explained. “Widgets are a good hybrid [technology] to catch people’s imagination – it’s where the interface, browser and service all comes together in a very compelling way.”

Motorola’s Patel added that widgets are a “great way to cut through the layers of menu” and open up the mobile web to users.

NY Web Standards May 2008 will focus on Microformats with attendees from the web design and development fields, expected to attend an evening of comprehensive discussions and networking.

Microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and adopted standards. They are intended to solve simple problems and were developed by examining current behaviors and usage patterns demonstrated by web content creators.

NY Web Standards group will introduce microformats and discuss their usage. “During this event, the audience will learn what microformats are, why they were created, and how to use this simple technology to make data on webpages more easily indexed, searched, and cross-referenced,” said Jeffrey Barke, senior developer at theMechanism – New York.

In addition to attendee introductions, web-standards discussions and optional ‘show and tell’ sessions, the event will also highlight keynote speaker, Jeffrey Barke, senior developer at theMechanism.

As a monthly event, the NY Web Standards Meetup is focused on bringing valuable information, trends, insights and best practice development techniques to the web development community.

“theMechanism strives to be a leader in the practice of web standards and accessibility,” said Dave Fletcher, Founding Partner & Creative Director of theMechanism. “Facilitating the New York Web Standards Meetup Group at our Manhattan office is one way for us to lead by example while encouraging an personal and professional sodality among like-minded designers and agencies in the greater New York area.”

Mobile Internet devices and online communities are merging to a new kind of web diary: “micro-blogging,” where people fire off terse missives about what they are doing or thinking at any given moment.
The postings are bare-bones, on-the-go versions of online journals in which people share their lives and dreams — hence the name micro-blogging.
“Blogging has evolved and become more formalized,” said Yahoo Design Pattern Library curator Christian Crumlish, author of social networking book “The Tower of Many.”
“A beautiful blog entry is an art form, and it takes time. So, micro-blogging fits into your life where you take a minute or two to see what’s going on and go back to work.”
Hot website Twitter has attracted a large following since launching slightly more than two years ago as a way to share Haiku-like text message updates with unlimited numbers of friends instantly via mobile telephones.
The service entices users with its signature line, “What are you doing?”
Startup Utterz, publicly unveiled last year, goes a step further by allowing users to post text, video, photos or audio from mobile telephones to the Internet with a simple call.
“What are the four things you can do with a mobile phone? You can talk, you can send text, you can take pictures and send video,” Utterz president Randy Corke told AFP.
“We want to use the technology that you have in your pocket,” he said.
“We want to make blogging as easy as talking … Our users can literally take their mobile telephone out and capture the experience, and the emotion of their voice, and interview people.”
Websites where people post blogs or share pictures or videos have become ubiquitous and firms like Twitter and Utterz are positioning themselves as places to merge and manage the images and words.
The power of these technologies was unexpectedly unleashed at a recent US tech conference, SXSW, when attendees micro-blogged searing critiques of an on-stage interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
“The woman interviewing Zuckerberg is lame,” Utterz user Leora Zellman wrote beneath a live picture she snapped of the interviewer, BusinessWeek magazine’s Sarah Lacey, on stage during the event.
“Never, ever have I seen such a train wreck of an interview,” wrote Twitter user Jason Pontin. “Poor girl, flirtatiously awful though she was.”
Lacey “Twittered” her own response.
“Seriously screw all you guys,” she wrote. “I did my best to ask a range of things.”
Enthusiasm for micro-blogging has prompted numerous blogging and social networking sites to focus attention on ease-of-use and accessibility in a world increasingly fond of mobile net devices.
Top social networking properties Facebook and MySpace offer mobile versions of their sites to increase user accessibility.
Facebook invited Twitter to customize applications for the online community when it opened its platform to outside developers early last year.
Video-sharing superstar YouTube tailors links for mobile telephones, including a special player built into Apple’s iPhones, which combine video, music, Internet and mobile telephone capabilities.
Picture-sharing website Flickr, which added a video feature in April, encourages uploads from camera-equipped mobile telephones.
“New technologies are most accessible when they take something you need to do anyway and make it much easier and much more useful,” Corke said.

PHILADELPHIA A seemingly ho-hum rules dispute between Philadelphia’s public housing agency and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has led to accusations of favoritism and corruption against a member of President Bush’s Cabinet.According to the city housing authority director, HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson has threatened the agency’s funding since it refused to award a vacant lot worth $2 million to Kenny Gamble, a soul-music producer-turned-community developer.Jackson, forgoing protocol, toured the site with Gamble in September 2006 without inviting local officials to join them, and later personally called Philadelphia’s mayor at the time for help, according to an amended federal lawsuit filed against HUD last month by the Philadelphia Housing Authority.”This is extraordinary. He’s the president’s representative, and he’s personally coming out, on his own, to take a firsthand look into a contract dispute?” housing authority Director Carl Greene said Thursday.Over the past 18 months, HUD has cited the Philadelphia agency for a series of alleged shortcomings and is threatening to pull the agency from a pilot program that gives it far greater autonomy over its $350 million budget and various programs. The rebuke would cost the authority millions of dollars a year and would lead to staff layoffs and rent increases for some of its 84,000 low-income clients, Greene said.”It’s this kind of planned, deliberate harassment that adds up to retaliation,” Greene said.HUD spokesman Jerry Brown declined to comment on the accusations this past week, saying the judge presiding in the lawsuit has asked the parties not to speak to the news media. Trial is set for May 20.In earlier news reports, Brown and several HUD officials have denied any link between the Gamble matter and the allegation of rule violations, which include handicap accessibility.Gamble’s office referred The Associated Press to Abdur-Rahim Islam, the president of the developer’s enterprise, Universal Companies. Islam did not return phone messages left over the past week.Gamble and partner Leon Huff wrote and produced “Love Train,” “Me and Mrs. Jones” and other 1970s-era soul hits that embodied the “Philly Sound.” In recent decades, he has devoted his time to community activism and redevelopment in South Philadelphia, where he grew up.According to the Web site of Universal Companies, Gamble has spent more than $7 million of his own money renovating run-down homes in the area.His Universal Community Homes, started in 1983, has twice partnered with the Philadelphia Housing Authority on redevelopment projects - but the authority said it had to take over each time.In one project, Universal Homes and another firm built just 82 of the 236 planned units before the housing authority stepped in to finish the job, an authority spokesman said.Under the contract, Universal was to receive a remaining lot free of charge so it could build 19 market-rate homes. But Greene and his lawyers concluded that Universal had defaulted on the deal.Jackson, after visiting the site with Gamble, called then-Mayor John F. Street, the housing authority’s chairman, the lawsuit charges.In March 2007, three officials called Greene to seek an early response to HUD’s inquiry about the lot. That prompted Greene, on March 19, to ask HUD’s inspector general to investigate the HUD secretary’s conduct. Greene said he presumes that investigation is ongoing.Universal Companies also has government contracts to operate four charter and public schools and provides support services for welfare and public-housing recipients.City Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell, who sits on the housing authority board, said she feels that anyone who wants to develop that vacant parcel should pay for it. And she fears that the conflict will jeopardize the housing authority’s work.”I’m really frightened about it,” Blackwell said. “I’m really hopeful that people that have well-meaning objectives can come together and work it out.”