Month: December 2005

Unified Display Interface for both PCs and consumer devices

“A group of
leading PC and consumer electronics firms, including Intel, Apple, LG
Electronics and Samsung, have come together to develop a next
generation video display specification to replace VGA.

The
new unified display interface (UDI) will work with both PCs and
consumer electronics devices, said the companies, which created a
special interest group to support UDI. The specification is expected to
be finalized in the second half of 2006, the companies said recently in
a statement.” Link to the article.

Evolution of AJAX

In his blog, A Brief History of AJAX, Aaron Swartz talks about the evolution of AJAX. Various vendors contributed to this effort. The tipping point came when Google used it for Google Maps and Gmail and when Jesse James Garrett coined the term AJAX.AJAX completely changed the browsing experience. Now vendors like Sun and TIBCO are jumping in with tools to build AJAX style applications. I just did a search on Google on AJAX applications, and got about 1.87 million hits. Also stumbled upon a link to the Top-10 AJAX applications posted in Sep, 2005.

The Brain of a Blogger

1. Blogs can promote critical and analytical thinking.
2. Blogging can be a powerful promoter of creative, intuitive, and associational thinking.
3. Blogs promote analogical thinking.
4. Blogging is a powerful medium for increasing access and exposure to quality information.
5. Blogging combines the best of solitary reflection and social interaction.

Here is the originail post. An interesting idea to motivate
more students to blog.

Building the next generation websites with XML

There are several benefits of using XML for content managment instead of HTML. Here is some evidence that this is catching on.

“Although XML commonly supports effective data exchange, using it to manage Web content is less understood, researchers said. But XML, which describes the content and is more flexible than HTML, can dramatically improve workflow and reduce time, effort and costs related to Web site management, they added.”

The first time I heard this idea was in 1999 in a book Building Websites with XML written by Michael Flloyd. It was a great idea but the state of the tools and the performance of XML was nowhere near the desirable level.

Today the story is very different. The tools and technologies are more mature. Techniques like AJAX on the client side and syndication formats like RSS, NewsML, Atom make it really easy to build websites with dynamic content.