ReadWriteWeb

Build a better mouse trap, and the world will beat a path to your door. Build a better mouse lock for Web browsers, and you might make browser-based gaming a lot more attractive. Vincent Scheib has been working on a W3C specification and feature for Chrome that will put browsers another step closer to competitive with native games.

This might sound like a little thing, but the lack of the mouse lock feature holds back browser-based games. Here's the problem: Unless you're using a plugin, the way that browser-based games handle the mouse is clunky. Let's say you're trying to play a shooter like Quake III in the browser. Because the game can't "grab" the pointer, when you scroll too far outside the game screen it sends your cursor outside the browser window and disrupts game flow. (And probably gets you fragged.)

It was NCSA Mosaic that introduced the world to the Web. Since that time, the browser has become the principal software-based element in all the world's digital communications and transactions. It is the harbinger of a very powerful new class of dynamic language interpreters, making JavaScript the unlikely, though undisputed, vehicle for conveying interactive functionality. And for some manufacturers, it is the center of an apps ecosystem unto itself.

So the browser is in no danger of disappearing. But as the Web expands into a delivery mechanism for all forms of applications and services, is a stand-alone, exclusive window into the Web, complete with bookmarks and toolbars and add-ons, truly the most sensible usage model for a system that may yet embrace all of computing? This is a question Mozilla began asking last summer, and whose answer remains inconclusive.

Last December, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission called upon leaders in the Web browser industry to develop technological means to enable servers to comply with federal guidelines - which are likely to become laws.

The FTC mandated that they refrain from implementing any kind of behavioral tracking for individuals who explicitly opt out of all tracking. Although lawmakers two years ago envisioned a system where each server asks each user for her explicit permission, the preferable alternative would be for a user who simply never wishes to be tracked, to never be asked.

Last week, Amazon announced its principal format for electronic books distributed to its new Android-based Kindle Fire series of full-color, touchscreen tablets would "support," to borrow Amazon's choice of verbs, HTML5. Kindle Format 8 (KF8) will replace the Mobi 7 format that Amazon acquired through its purchase of Mobipocket in 2005.

"Supporting" HTML5 may have as multifarious a definition as "supporting" the Republican Party. It does automatically hoist the supporter to an exalted plateau in the public eye, alongside Apple, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and Opera Software, all of which have also pledged their undying support for HTML5. But without exception, all of these companies support some unique aspect or concept which, in the absence of a hard standard, may successfully be characterized as HTML5.

From 1962 to present (no, that's not a typo), Vitamin T and An Event Apart have pulled together A Brief History of Web Standards. This infographic has a lot of interesting factoids and information about the evolution of the Web.

Now, when you're thinking "Web standards," you're probably thinking about things like HTML and CSS standards. The graphic touches on those, but pays particular attention to "standards" like typefaces and Godwin's Law (created in 1990, by the way).

Yesterday, Tristan Louis, my friend and colleague (and I reserve that phrase specifically for friends and colleagues, that's not a euphemism) published on his TNL.net blog the results of his own study. Louis - a professional technologist who founded Internet.com and who personally contributed to the RSS specification - looked into the relative states of compliance by the world's most trafficked Web sites with the published standards of those sites' corresponding document types. Fourteen of Alexa's top 25 sites list HTML5 as their doctypes, he noted. Running their home pages through the W3C's Validator, he learned most of them have significant compliance errors, including Amazon.com with 516 errors, and YouTube with 120.

Not one to cast stones lest we be stoned, I ran ReadWriteWeb.com's front page through the Validator. It reported 277 errors and 83 warnings with respect to our own compliance with our stated XHTML 1.0 Strict document type. But what exactly does that mean? Are we truly producing Web pages that browsers can't parse? What is it, specifically, that we've violated, and do we owe any fines?

Tristan Louis is a colleague and insightful analyst. Over the weekend, he took a look at the top 20 sites according to Alexa and ran them through the W3C HTML validator to see who is playing by the rules and who still has some catching up to do.

Surprisingly, MSN.com was the sole site among the top 20 to completely pass, and Amazon had the most page errors - more than 500 of them with more than 100 particular warnings - "showing that dis­regard for standard com­pliance does not seem to have an impact on economic performance," he says in his blog post.

Anyone who has had the task (or, perhaps more insanely, given himself the task) of measuring the relative performance of various Web browsers knows how impossible it is to convince everyone of the validity of his chosen metrics. (Guilty as charged.) Some folks settle for running a Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm in JavaScript; others will call up Google's V8 benchmark page which always seems to give tremendous numbers for Chrome; and still others prefer loading google.com 100 times, averaging the load times, and concluding there's not much to conclude.

Since last June, W3C has taken up the task of creating a uniform specification for all browser manufacturers to adopt. This specification includes a suite of JavaScript APIs that enable browsers to determine how much time certain fundamental tasks may consume - changing the active page, loading a page into memory, downloading any discrete amount of data from a server.

Developers and businesses who want to get involved in the creation of Web standards now have an easier and more efficient way of doing so, thanks to the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) launch of Community and Business Groups today.

The W3C's new Community Groups allow any developer to propose a working group for a proposed standard. As soon as there is some degree of support for the standard among peers, the group, which is free to participate in, can get started.

This is the second half of my thoughts about what enterprise IT folks need to takeaway from attending and speaking at our 2WAY conference this past week. You can find part 1 here.

I'll cover some of the breakout sessions on the second day as well as additional thoughts gleaned from the keynote presentations.