From the point of view of 3 am, everything seems equalized. The pressure subsides, a new rhythm enters your head, and only tomorrow exists. For the students cranking away at the MLB.com University Challenge, there's no question any more about which way to go. That decision was already made, the booster stage has already blasted off, and from here until the rest of the project, they'll be feeling more and more like passengers.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Team "Winston" is now committed to a Flash-based interactive mockup of its "game within a game." They've moved from one of the conference rooms to one of the open iLabs, where each terminal has dual monitors, the air circulates a little more, and there's the sound of other students in the hallways to keep you from feeling you're in a cavern.

Ross is driving "Winston's" vision with his trademark laser-like precision and intensity. You get the feeling that, if he were your younger brother, he'd still be badgering you like your older one.

Elsewhere in the iLabs, the "Web Gems" have hit upon an HTML5 motif. They've seen some impressive demos of layering, where separate elements can scroll at different speeds, creating a Disney-like rotoscoping effect.

Right now, they're scrolling everything they can find, and they're raiding the Web for photos. What they don't have in mind quite yet is an application for their vision, but they know they have a technology and they're storing up the energy to drive it. Which makes "Web Gems" like a great many Silicon Valley startups.

"The Walkoffs" have the most experienced talent in the game: two of them graduate students, one of them a senior majoring in aerospace engineering, one a senior majoring in architecture. And Reynaldo, the only sophomore, is the expert on the Android SDK. Chris, a library science major, is a JavaScript expert. His vision is to create a fully working mockup, not using Flash, but real events captured by the browser, processed, then rendered using jQuery.

Like a battle cry for the ages, Chris has emblazoned along the top of the whiteboard in his cramped lab room, "Flash is dead!" You can see the remnants of impromptu lectures he's been giving on JavaScript events architecture. He's teaching Deven, a computer science major but not yet the jQuery expert, how the jQuery syntax simplifies itself by chaining new methods onto the end of the results of earlier ones. The trick they're working on at the moment, apparently, is knowing the variable type of the returned value before passing it to the next method.

It's not the type of subject matter that keeps Deven's eyes from glazing over at 3:30. He's starting to switch to autopilot mode, as they engage the help of Reynaldo's Droid phone, which is hooked up via USB cable. They're trying to find which events fire at what times, so they can chain the events to one another in jQuery in the right order. This way, if they're successful, they might be the only team to show their real-world mockup not on an SDK, but with an actual, live smartphone demo.

They're not seeing the results they're looking for, and they're starting to blame the Android operating system. There's too many simultaneous versions, Chris notes, so some phones may fire events that are recognized by jQuery 1.7, and some won't. That's a problem in the end, because Chris wants believability. He doesn't want to say his team's demo can do something, if it can't work on a Droid.

"Rubin's Army" is spinning out. They've abandoned their previous ideas, and now they're scanning through the history page of the existing MLB.com in search of clues for where to go now. Their palms are telling them the only place they'd really like to go contains pillows.

"SRFA" is made up of management and entrepreneurship majors, who also happen to be dedicated console gamers. They know the Asian games market as well as, if not better than, the U.S. market. And German (pronounced "H-herr-mann," he tells me, with Ricardo Montalban's accent) has hit upon a market need he'd like to fill: There's no franchise game for smartphones in the U.S. based on Major League Baseball. Ironically, there is one in South Korea, and it's a huge hit.

From German's perspective, it's a no-brainer: Obviously the MLB franchise needs a smartphone game. So instead of writing one, think like a businessman, he proposes. Buy the two existing games that are already written and already supported. Merge the best parts of both into a single unit, and market it as "MLB: Challenge." Launch it online with a downloadable component at a low $5 price point.

It would solve the problem of having to create a mockup, German reasons, as he begins listing the reasons for doing it on the whiteboard he is now the unchallenged master of. Why mock up something that's already a huge hit? There is the problem of tying it in with the MLB.com Web site, the others point out. Don't focus on it as a problem, German posits like a marketing specialist, but recast it as a solution. MLB.com doesn't have a smartphone game. That's a market void. Here's something to fill it. Bam.

For some reason, it's hard to sit through marketing jargon when the clock on the wall says 4 am. Funny, but at 3 am, the world seemed so effortless. Now all of a sudden, "vertical" is a direction that takes many opposing angles at once. And horizontal is starting to look like the best one of all.

The new jQuery Standards Team says that the broad adoption of jQuery, they say it's used on 50% of the top 10,000 sites on the web, means they have a strong perspective on the needs of developers everywhere. They don't mention it, but they are also people that are widely liked who are responsible for very cool technology. At least that's the way supporters see it; the group isn't without its critics. Perhaps as all things standards related are.

They will also represent Web developers in conversations with Web Browser companies, who often dominate standards organizations, and they will work to help the jQuery project as a whole adopt new standards as appropriate.

The team says its goal is "to give a voice to the millions of web developers interested in contributing to the process, but without an easy way to do so."

Community Reactions

Reactions in the developer community so far have been generally positive so far, but not without some dissent. "When marketing (and that is what jQuery is) controls web standards, there is a problem," said Garrett Smith on Twitter. (See the critique jQeury is for NOOBS, for example. It's said by some that jQuery's primary strength is marketing itself.)

"jQuery and standards - now that is a contradiction in terms," complained Swiss developer Thomas Lahn.

Others voiced hope that the new organization would help counter balance Mozilla's influence in standards and browser discussions; still others said something like this was long overdue.

Update: A Mozilla representative argues that big companies jockeying to dominate the web standards process are a more pressing issue than any concern about the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. That argument seems compelling to me and I defer to their more informed judgement of the details.

Given how long, slow, detailed, political and frustrating formal standards organizations can be, though - Texan Jason Petersen may have offered the most realistic critical perspective this afternoon.

"These are GREAT people to be leading this effort," Petersen tweeted. "Hope they aren't wasted."

He'll continue working on jQuery at Khan, as well as the organization's other Open Source efforts and its forthcoming iPad app. JQuery Mobile was released this Fall; ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez said it "may have a major impact on mobile Web development."

Resig said on Twitter this morning that there is a plan for Khan to add computer programming videos to its offerings in the future. He also said he'll be doing a Question and Answer session on Reddit tomorrow.

Working with JQuery

With Edge, Adobe wants to give interactivity designers the ability to create rich HTML5 experiences based on an open JavaScript framework for animation. Adobe plans to contribute this framework back to the jQuery framework. As Gubbay told us, jQuery's ability to create animations is still very basic, but the new framework should make it easier to create interactive HTML5 experiences. Adobe will talk more about this during tomorrow's MAX keynote where jQuery founder John Resigwill be on stage.

Working with WebKit

These tools, however, as Gubbay told us, are only one part of the equation. The browser itself also plays a fundamental role in ensuring that all of these design are displayed correctly. For digital publishers, however - and especially those who want to bring traditional print material online - most browsers' still can't quite render the complex layouts that these publishers are looking for. With HTML, it is still virtually impossible to wrap text around arbitrary shapes, for example, or to manipulate typefaces. To fix this, Adobe is working closely with Google and the WebKit project to ensure that the controls are available in modern browsers like Safari and Chrome.

Martha Stewart joined Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch on stage during today's MAX keynote and demonstrated an interactive version of her magazine on the iPad, but as Gubbay told us, the company also hopes to be able to help designers to bring their products to the numerous new tablets that will launch before the end of the year. Conde Nast's CTO Joe Simon also announced that the company will use Adobe's told to bring its magazines (including Wired and The New Yorker) to tablets. With SiteCatalyst, Adobe will offer an analytics platform for publishers who want to get a detailed view of how their readers use their digital editions.

Project participant Rey Bango points out on the blog Ajaxian today, "considering the churn rate for open source projects, [jQuery's 3rd birthday] is a monumental achievement."

What does jQuery do? Its tag line is "the write less, do more Javascript library" and it's a favorite of many developers working on cutting edge and visually dazzling designs. Want to see some examples? Check out our coverage of the crowd pleasing blog comment system Encouraged Commentary and Drew Douglas's The 20 Most Practical and Creative Uses of jQuery.

If you're a developer and you haven't tried out jQuery yet - you probably should. As Jennifer Stuart wrote when she finally did this Spring, "Why I didn't jump on this bandwagon sooner, I'm not sure, but I am kicking myself for it."

With the addition of the jQuery code to the nonprofit Software Freedom Conservancy, companies using the code are far more free from fear of lawsuits for using it. For details on that development and a number of new technical additions to jQuery, see the announcement on the jQuery blog.