ReadWriteWeb

You got to love a service that starts off their blog with "Typing HTML sucks" when talking about setting up HTML forms. A new service called Ngotha.com is here to help. They provide on-the-fly conversion of any SQL query into a validated Javascript HTML form that looks great. The company estimates that their own UI designers were spending at least half of their time designing user input forms and their service can cut this time down considerably.

HTML5 Boiler Plate, a template for building HTML5 sites, has been updated to version 2.0. You can find it in GitHub here.

One particularly slick feature: it will prompt users of Internet Explorer 6 to install Google Chrome Frame, which no longer requires admin privileges to run.

HTML5 is popular for building rich Web sites as well as cross-platform mobile applications. And it looks like with Windows 8 Microsoft is embracing using HTML5 and JavaScript as a paradigm for building desktop applications as well. With everyone from Apple to Microsoft embracing HTML5 as "the future," if you don't know it yet, you should probably get started.

If you want to take full advantage of HTML5, you will need to know JavaScript, so you might want to start with our round-up of free JavaScript books.

The latest pre-release of Firefox 6, Aurora 6, brings back support for WebSockets. WebSockets is a protocol for providing two-way communications between the browser and the server. Mozilla dropped support for WebSockets last year due to security issues.

Other notable features in Aurora 6 include the progress element, window.matchMedia API, better APIs for binary data and Server-Sent Events. You can download it here.

"People don't remember this, particularly web developers, but there was a time when Microsoft made the best web browser in the world," JavaScript guru Douglas Cockford said in an interview at InfoQ late last year. "IE 6 was by far the best and continued to be the best browser in the world for many years after, but the other browser makers have all gotten ahead of them. And there is a chance that with IE 9 Microsoft might get that back."

IE6 may have been the best browser of its time when it was released, but it was never the most standards compliant. And the damage it did to web development as a whole is immeasurable. Microsoft is trying to make amends with Internet Explorer 9, its most standards compliant browser yet.

Joliprint is a Web service that lets users convert pages into PDFs with a simple bookmarklet. It also has a RESTful API that third party developers can use to convert HTML into PDF. No API key is required, and it can be used in both commercial and non-commercial projects.

Last week a website dedicated to criticizing the popular tutorial site W3Schools, called W3Fools, launched. Reaction from the development community to W3Fools has been mixed. Today, W3Schools responded to our request for comment: "The W3Fools.com website/project is different compared to single user comments, but we always appreciate suggestions on how we can improve W3Schools."

W3Schools is one of the oldest and most popular web development tutorial sites on the Web. But it has its share of critics. Today, 46 of those critics launched W3Fools, a site dedicated to criticizing W3Schools. W3Fools lists a number of mistakes, inaccuracies and pieces of outdated information in W3Schools' tutorials, especially the HTML and JavaScript tutorials. The site points out W3Schools' own disclaimer as evidence that the site is badly flawed. The disclaimer reads: "We do not warrant the correctness of [W3Schools] content. The risk from using it lies entirely with the user."

The site's authors note that although there are resources they believe are better, "W3Schools has put a lot of effort into positioning itself at the top of search results and, despite our efforts (such as the PromoteJS initiative), appears to be there to stay." Since the site went up, several issues have already been fixed and W3Fools notes those with strikethrough.

Last month, real-time feed service Superfeedr introduced the option to subscribe to any type of arbitrary content - such as static HTML pages, V Cards, JSON and more. This week the company announced the ability to subscribe to only fragments of HTML pages. As an example, Superfeedr explained how to subscribe to just the "current conditions" on The New York Times Weather page.

You've seen the calls for open identity standards and data portability. Well, Social Beans aims to create standardized "skeleton portability" across social media publishing platforms. What is "skeleton portability"? According to co-founder Emre Sokullu, "Comments, forums, wikis, blogs, rating systems, tagging, sharing and bookmarking are all common social features of today's networking sites". Despite the fact that these are all common denominators of the web, developers continue to hack together their own proprietary implementations. Says Sokullu, "Social Beans aims to standardize a syntax around common social features including users, profiles, avatars, roles and news feeds." For developers, it's a pact for "development portability" or the agreement to follow the same rules for compilers.