JavaScript

HTML 5 is the upcoming major revision of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the main method of marking up content for sharing on the World Wide Web. HTML's development stopped at HTML 4.01 in 1999, and since then web content has evolved so much that current HTML specifications are inadequate for today's requirements.

A friend of mine just showed this site to me today, which I apparently missed when it first debuted several months ago. It’s a nearly perfect re-creation of the Apple Keynote presentation-making application — or as nearly perfect as can be expected within a Web browser — built with the Cappuccino Web framework, which enables “desktop class applications” through JavaScript.

Aaron Swartz's mewling paean to the Sidekick smartphone is littered with smug, myopic insights and a salty dash of old-fashioned white guilt. I am compelled to shriek and gawp.

His founding asininity? That compared to the iPhone, the Sidekick is a "superior device" that he's been using "for the past five years." (Mouthbreathingly turtlenecked as that assertion is, that's not the part that really gets my goat, but...)

We love useful stuff. For months, we have been bookmarking interesting, useful and creative CSS tools and related resources. We have been contacting developers, encouraging them to improve their tools and release their handy little apps to the public. Last year we prepared and published some of them in a series of smashing posts about CSS. Now again is the time to give these tools the attention they deserve.

I’ve written before about one of my favorite sites on the web for quickly learning web development skills: W3Schools. All of the tutorials housed at the site are free, and they’re designed to equip you with useful skills very quickly, so that you don’t have to become a complete expert on, say, CSS (cascading style sheets) in order to start getting impressive results with it. The site has added quite a lot of good tutorials and is worth a visit even if you’ve been there before.

By Smashing Magazine Editorial and György Fekete

Today Lullabot released an exciting new project into the Drupal community. It's the Form builder module: an AJAX, Drag and Drop interface for constructing forms in Drupal. We hope that it will become the defacto standard in building forms in Drupal, replacing our inconsistent form-building tools that are spread across CCK, Webform, Profile, and other modules.

We recently had the opportunity to meet with two senior executives at Google. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus and I met with Dave Girouard, President of Google Enterprise. Then a few weeks later, I met with Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, via video conference. Both meetings provided some interesting background - but the one question that keeps returning and that was not so well answered is: why is Google not deploying Gears aggressively?

As a web developer, I have the pleasure of working with a lot of different designers. There has been a lot of industry discussion of late about designers and developers, focusing on how different we sometimes are and how the interface between our respective phases of a project (that is to say moving from a design phase into production) can sometimes become a battleground.

You've probably seen lots of services that put pop up windows on top of links in web pages - usually for advertising and often in unhelpful places on the page. Could something like that be done well, though? Serial entrepreneur Craig Barnes believes it can be, and he's been working on it for more than 9 years.