Web Development Live

From the forbidding, steely confines of San Quentin Prison’s death row, scores of California’s most notorious convicts have been reaching out to the free world via the Internet.

Scott Peterson’s Web page features smiling photos of himself with his wife Laci, whom he was found guilty of murdering and dumping into San Francisco Bay while she was pregnant with their unborn son. It also links viewers to his family’s support site, where Peterson has a recent blog posting on his “wrongful conviction.”

Mustachioed Randy Kraft, condemned Orange County slayer of 16 young men, is looking for pen pals. So is convicted Northern California serial killer Charles Ng, who describes himself as shy and offers to sell his wildlife drawings.

Tattooed and muscled Richard Allen Davis, whose abduction and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas helped trigger California’s “three strikes” law, is not selling his hobby crafts but wants correspondents.

Texas’ community colleges offer more than just basic classes for students hoping to enter the technical workforce or transfer to a four-year university. The colleges also offer capstone courses that prove a graduate’s expertise in a particular field.

A mandate issued by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board requires students studying workforce-related industries such as business studies, health sciences, advanced technologies and applied technology at Austin Community College and other Texas community colleges to enroll in a capstone class.

The class consolidates two years’ worth of education in a particular field at a community college into a class, group, portofolio or individual project, or a final exam that is completed during the student’s graduating semester, said Mike Midgley, ACC’s vice president of workforce education and business development.

ACC video game development students are required to complete a capstone project in the form of an art portfolio or design project pertaining to the student’s field, Zuzolo said.

He said the gaming program’s capstone courses allow students to show their proficiency and capability in developing video games. The projects produced in the course make up a portfolio and help secure positions in the industry, Zuzolo said.

For his capstone project in Webmaster design, ACC alumnus Bob Million showcased his skill in Web page design by launching two Web sites.

Million received a bachelor’s degree in computer science and management from ACC before entering the school’s Web site design program. Million owns Million Design Group, an Austin-based Web site design company.

“I wanted to learn specific skills from the program,” Million said. “From the courses I took and the projects I completed with ACC, I had the skills to start my own business.”

Capstone courses are also a common requirement for undergraduates and graduates at four-year universities and institutions, which officials and professors say help culminate students’ academic experience.

UT School of Information graduate students must complete a capstone class in their final semester, which integrates the students’ professional education and specific area of study.

Information studies graduate student Adam Knowles said the program is similar to an internship. Graduate students find positions at an institution where they can assimilate into their vocational environment.

Website Pros has released NetObjects Fusion 11, an enhanced version of the Web site design application .

In addition to an intuitive drag-&-drop functionality that the company says makes NetObjects Fusion 11 a fast, easy way to plan, build and manage Web sites, along with its standard e-Commerce capabilities, NetObjects Fusion 11 includes more advanced functionality for those looking for more technical development options.

The code generation engine of NetObjects Fusion 11 has been completely re-engineered to support the generation of Semantic XHTML code, allowing a tighter utilisation of CSS that Webiste Pros says produces leaner code, making it more accessible and search engine friendly.

Users can integrate data into Web pages from any local or remote XML data source, such as an RSS feed. NetObjects Fusion 11 automatically identifies the XML structure allowing drag & drop insertion of data fields directly into the page design.

Featuring a collection of AJAX Widgets, NetObjects Fusion 11 eliminates the complexity of designing Web 2.0 pages with dynamic user interactions by making it easy to quickly add customisable page elements, such as accordions, tabbed panels and toggle panes to make dynamic web pages that provide a richer, more interactive experience for Web site visitors.

Sophisticated animation of any Web site content, such as video, text, images and graphics, can now be easily created from within the drag-&-drop editing environment of NetObjects Fusion without coding or the purchase of additional software.

The database functionality implemented in NetObjects Fusion 11 fully supports the creation of data-driven, highly interactive Web sites turning NetObjects Fusion 11 into a Web Application Development System with broad appeal to enterprise Web developers. NetObjects Fusion 11 now supports all commercially relevant databases, Web servers and server-and-client side technologies and ships with support for PHP.

NetObjects Fusion 11 provides a suite of components that add advanced functionality to any Web site design. Flash Photo Galleries, Flash Calendars, Flash Web Charts, Password Protection, Guestbook, Google Analytics, SiteMaps and many other components are pre-built and easily integrated into any website.

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.

MindTouch is releasing today a new version of its Deki Wiki open-source Wiki tool software which makes it much easier to manage web content in multiple languages.

The MindTouch Deki Wiki v8.05 is a Web Development based Wiki platform that lets web development teams build web pages that are much easier to create and maintain. One of its interesting new features is “polyglot support.” With it, a developer can use the Deki Wiki tool to post updates in multiple languages.

This means a web developer can integrate multiple languages into a single site, rather than create a separate site for each language. In addition, users visiting the site can search across all languages, with the search results prioritized to that user’s language.

The developer can use the tool to design a web page in English. They can then include a button that switches the user to that same page in another language. The user-interface for the page stays the Web Development same, but the words are in a different language.

Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, plans on using Deki Wiki for the Mozilla Development Center, the site where Mozilla manages its community of developers. That’s important for open-source developers such as Mozilla, which has thousands of developers around the world.

“This is particularly good for Wiki-style collaborations,” said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of San Diego, Calif.-based MindTouch, in an interview. It’s also good for platform companies who work with a variety of application developers as well as enterprises that are tapping their customers for development support.

Beyond polyglot support, the software also makes it easy for developers to upload images, videos and other files to a web site. It’s also easy to transform content from one kind of format to Web Development another, as needed to make the content compatible with a web page’s given design.

The 25-employee company started in 2005, released its first version in 2006 and then another version in 2007. Fulkerson said the company has bootstrapped the financing and is likely to delay raising a round of venture capital because the business growth is strong. He said the company gives away the tool for free but sells enterprise subscriptions for those who need support. The Web Development closest competitors are IBM and Oracle’s BEA.

Minutes after attending a seminar titled “Use Social Networking to Your Professional Advantage,” I opened my e-mail and found two invitations to join LinkedIn.com networks.

One came from a person I’d had professional contact with previously. I clicked “accept” and went on to other things. I didn’t recognize the other name, so I closed the e-mail without response. And, thanks to Ellen Levy, I didn’t feel bad about the tacit rejection.

Levy, vice president of corporate development and strategy at LinkedIn.com, just presented an overview of Internet social networking sites at the Central Exchange’s annual Women’s Lyceum, an educational and networking event. Understanding that attendees came to the conference from many different backgrounds and levels of Web familiarity, Levy prefaced her user advice with a primer. First, she explained, there was Web 1.0 — the mostly one-directional flow of information over the Internet. Think of Web pages.

We’re now in the age of Web 2.0 — an era of two-way communication that in three years spawned a host of interactive social networking sites. A show of hands indicated that about half the people used LinkedIn, a professional networking Web site, to build business relationships.

Even if you’ve never been on a social networking site, you understand the concept: It’s a cyberspace handshake. It facilitates connections. It does what Rotary meetings, phone calls, cocktail parties and e-mail have done for years.

Let’s say Joe wants a job at Hallmark Cards. Joe doesn’t know anybody in the human resources department or target department where he wants to work. But he is good friends with Sally, who has a Hallmark Gold Crown store. Sally knows people in Hallmark’s retail division. One, Bill, is the main liaison with Joan in the human resources department. And Joan knows that Fred is exactly the right person for Joe to meet. Fred, meet Joe. Joe, here’s Fred, who has someone vouching for him.

I made up that scenario, but that’s the six-degrees-of-separation concept.

A professional networking Web site might help make the connections that have always been an essential ingredient in job hunting, business development and sales prospecting. (A user also can get a wealth of professional responses quickly when posting a question on the appropriate area of the site.)

Levy emphasized that Web-based networking sites are only as good as the veracity and relevance of the people using them.

A LinkedIn connection may not make sense if you accept an invitation to join one’s professional network if you don’t know the person or don’t have ties to one’s business skills or services. “It should be a tool to leverage relationships you already have,” Levy said.

And a good professional network site should never be confused with a social networking site such as Facebook. The purposes are completely different, she said.

A professional networking site can be a good way to put your business profile — basically your resume and the services you can offer — online, where they can be seen by millions of other site users. It can spread “the message of you” a lot further and faster than passing out business cards and shaking hands at meetings.

But as much as Levy championed the professional development possibilities of Web 2.0, she reminded attendees of something that most knew well: “Time is a scarce resource.” Use networking sites judiciously. Understand that others might not have the time you do to dig deep into the site. And, most of all, she said, don’t get sucked into making a contest out of how many “connections” you can list. It’s not a matter of quantity; it’s the quality that counts.

In December, Dana Neil Oaklund, of Fort Lauderdale, began streaming live video on the Internet from a laptop in his SUV to assure his customers that their cargo was safe. What he didn’t expect was that dozens of people would get a kick out of seeing him stuck in traffic in California or cruising between snow-covered mountains in Colorado.

“It just blows my mind,” said Oaklund, who escorts oversize loads, while parked in San Diego. “Right now there are 33 people who think this is interesting enough to watch. A lot of people tell me, ‘Oh, wow, this is cool because I am getting to see the country without leaving my desk.’ ”

Oaklund is a “lifecaster,” one of a growing number of people creating their own reality shows by broadcasting live for a few minutes or hours at a time from their computers or cell phones. Unlike videos uploaded to YouTube, lifecasters are inviting viewers into their world to see what they see, comment on it and ask questions, all in real time.

Broadcasting live from a webcam is nothing new, but what makes services such as Justin.tv, Ustream.tv and Yahoo Live (live.yahoo.com) different is that technology has evolved to the point where practically anyone can stream live from almost anywhere and interact with people who are watching.

You don’t need to be a technical genius or even have your own Web page. And with the spread of wireless Internet and the fact that webcams have become a standard feature on many new computers, you might not even have to buy anything.

Oaklund, 40, uses a mobile broadband connection to broadcast as the “Master Roadcaster” on Justin.tv. People tune in from all over the world to laugh at his jokes, make comments about other drivers, tell him to slow down or suggest hotels for him. While driving, he glances at the computer screen when it’s safe and speaks into a headset to respond to questions and comments. He usually has 15 to 100 people watching.

“People are already looking at video online, so wouldn’t it be funny if you could watch a funny video clip and you could tell the person doing it, ‘Hey, do that again’?” said Michael Seibel, CEO of Justin.tv.

Seibel started Justin.tv in 2006 with three friends to live-broadcast co-founder Justin Kan 24/7 as he walked around San Francisco with a camera attached to his hat. In October, the site opened to everyone, and it now has more than 430,000 registered users, about 34,000 of whom are broadcasters.

Britta Seisums, 18, typically streams live from her red-polka-dot-covered bedroom for about four hours after school each weekday. She plays games with viewers, dances to pop songs, hangs out with her friends, talks about school and curses out people who come into the chat room and are rude.

Seisums has been creating her own Web sites since she was about 10 and wants to work in Web development. “I keep the camera on as much as possible, but I like to have privacy. If I don’t want to be on camera, then I put the camera on my animals.”

In recent episodes, she has bathed her guinea pigs, painted a video-game console and accidentally spilled soda on her laptop.

Music social networking Web site operator imeem Inc. said Monday it has agreed to acquire Snocap Inc., the digital content tracking company founded by Napster creator Shawn Fanning.
San Francisco-based Imeem did not disclose financial terms of the deal.
Snocap developed a digital fingerprinting technology that checks media files uploaded to a Web site against a registry of copyrighted works to determine if a song has been cleared for playback in its entirety online.
It also tracks payments to record labels and artists whose music is streamed on sites like imeem.
In addition, Snocap powers technology that lets users of News Corp.’s MySpace sell downloads of original music directly through their MySpace Web pages.
Snocap’s technology for buying music downloads on MySpace will continue to be operated by imeem.
Fanning, who created the Napster online file-sharing service as a college student, founded Snocap in 2002.
He was a member of the board of directors but had not been active in the company in recent years.
In October, the San Francisco-based company cut its work force by nearly half so it could focus on selling itself.
___
On the Net:
Snocap Inc.: http://www.snocap.com

Music social networking Web site operator imeem Inc. said Monday it has agreed to acquire Snocap Inc., the digital content tracking company founded by Napster creator Shawn Fanning.
San Francisco-based Imeem did not disclose financial terms of the deal.
Snocap developed a digital fingerprinting technology that checks media files uploaded to a Web site against a registry of copyrighted works to determine if a song has been cleared for playback in its entirety online.
It also tracks payments to record labels and artists whose music is streamed on sites like imeem.
In addition, Snocap powers technology that lets users of News Corp.’s MySpace sell downloads of original music directly through their MySpace Web pages.
Snocap’s technology for buying music downloads on MySpace will continue to be operated by imeem.
Fanning, who created the Napster online file-sharing service as a college student, founded Snocap in 2002.
He was a member of the board of directors but had not been active in the company in recent years.
In October, the San Francisco-based company cut its work force by nearly half so it could focus on selling itself.
___
On the Net:
Snocap Inc.: http://www.snocap.com

DEEP in the bowels of a Las Vegas hotel, a smiley face and the
words “Hello World” display on a web page. Applause breaks out. The
page is called the Acid2 Browser Test, and the web browser is a
preview of Internet Explorer 8, presented by its platform
architect, Chris Wilson.
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” says a member of the
audience to more applause from about 3000 web designers and
developers at the Mix08 conference, where Microsoft showed its
latest internet technology.
The Acid2 page (webstandards.org/action/acid2/) was created by
the Web Standards Project to test whether a browser conforms to the
official standards for describing page layout, mainly focusing on
cascading style sheets (CSS).
The reason for the applause is twofold: first, until now
Microsoft’s web browser, used by an estimated 75 per cent of
net surfers (although Firefox has been eroding that hold), has
never been close to passing the test; second, Internet Explorer’s
poor standards compliance causes significant extra work for web
designers.
When users navigate to a web page, they expect it to look and
work the same whatever the browser or operating system they are
using. Achieving this is difficult. Different browsers display the
same page differently, with IE often the worst offender.
Web developers now hope they do not have to insert conditional
code to account for these differences, but can deliver a standard
page to all browsers. “CSS support in IE8 looks thus far to be
very, very promising,” says Eric Meyer, an independent expert in
the field. “It’s very important, because the level of CSS support
in IE7 and IE6 has served as a brake on advanced CSS adoption by
authors, limiting them to less-advanced techniques and
capabilities.”
Internet Explorer has a curious history. Six versions were
released between 1995 and 2001, the time of the “browser wars” with
Netscape. Microsoft won the war and then did not release another
major version of the browser for five years - long enough for it to
become thoroughly outdated.
IE’s CSS implementation fell far behind that of other popular
browsers. In late 2006 Microsoft released IE7, which fixed some
problems but still lagged behind its rivals. “Differences between
browsers simply waste too much developer time,” says Dean
Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s general manager for IE, without
mentioning the extent to which Microsoft created the problem.
Mr Hachamovitch, who has led the Explorer team since 2003,
explains why Microsoft took so long to address these deficiencies.
“It comes down to what we were doing with our time,” he says.
“Between 2001 and 2003 we were building what you experience now as
Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight.”
These technologies display not HTML, the language of web pages,
but XAML, Microsoft’s proprietary code for creating rich visual
content.
“In 2003 and 2004 we were making IE secure,” he says, referring
to the security-focused Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Security remained the theme in IE7. The dilemma was that fixing
bugs introduced compatibility problems. “You can’t just flick a
switch and have all the browsers in the world change, or have all
the servers and services in the world change,” Mr Hachamovitch
says. The result was that some websites looked worse than before,
because they detected that IE was accessing them and delivering
content that took into account presumed peculiarities.
Microsoft’s answer was to build “compatibility modes” into IE8.
The manner in which this was done remains controversial. The
question was whether to default to the IE7 compatible mode, or
default to the better standards mode, Mr Hachamovitch says. “(We
found in) releasing IE7 that web developers were slow to modify
their sites. We wanted to keep the web working.”
Microsoft initially announced that IE8 would behave by default
like IE7. Page designers would have to include special code to turn
on IE8’s standards support. The decision was greeted with a hail of
protest because it might perpetuate a non-standard web.
Earlier this month, Mr Hachamovitch announced that Microsoft had
changed its mind. “We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default,
interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it
can.”
Apparently the key to that change of heart was a separate
strategic announcement last month, covering what Microsoft calls
interoperability principles and promising “open connections to its
products, support for industry standards and data portability”.
According to Mr Hachamovitch, Microsoft now had “a more
interoperable way; a more compatible way”.
It sounded good, but what about browser scripting. The context
is important. Mr Hachamovitch had already stated that Microsoft
spent three years neglecting IE for the sake of a more proprietary
technology, which is now appearing on the web as a browser plug-in
called Silverlight.
This is similar in some ways to Adobe’s Flash, and supports rich
multimedia effects within web pages as well as the ability to run
applications written in Microsoft’s .NET Framework.
Silverlight and Flash applications in effect bypass the browser.
Web standards advocates are wary of them because they replace the
open web with content that depends on a proprietary plug-in.
The Mozilla Foundation, creator of the cross-platform Firefox
browser, prefers to upgrade the capabilities of the browser itself.
A key component of this is JavaScript, the programming language
that runs in the browser and that is standardised by ECMA, the
European standards body, under the name ECMAScript. Mozilla is keen
to see the current JavaScript upgraded to a far more powerful
version called ECMAScript 4.0.
“Why do we care about ECMAScript 4.0?” asks Mozilla’s
vice-president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer. The answer is that
JavaScript is the language of the net. We want to keep pushing that
technology forward to make it easier for people to build bigger,
faster, more secure websites.”
Asked if Microsoft will implement ECMAScript 4.0, Mr
Hachamovitch prevaricates and talks about competing demands on the
IE development team.
“Right now there isn’t really an ECMAScript 4 offering to
implement, there is an ECMAscript for discussion.” he says.
The Guardian