- The organizers of the Web Directions South conference share their advice for Australian-hosted sites seeking to eliminate their carbon footprint.
- Google has launched the latest in its stable of web-based office applications: Google Presentations. A direct competitor to Microsoft PowerPoint, Presentations is still a simple offering, but may be enough for many less demanding users.
- Facebook will be giving away $10 million to developers who submit worthy proposals for Facebook applications—no strings attached!
- Yahoo! acquires all the coolest companies! The latest (joining Flickr and del.icio.us) is Zimbra, the pioneers of Ajax-powered email. Yahoo! hopes to use Zimbra to break into educational and institutional markets.
- Mozilla is splitting off a new company to focus on the development of Thunderbird, its open-source, cross-platform desktop email client.
- A convincing alternative to the long-promised CSS 3 Advanced Layout module, CSS Grid Positioning has just been released as a public working draft by the W3C. But with critics questioning whether the W3C can finish anything it starts, will it do any good?
- jQuery seems set to continue their unbroken streak of “holy crap!”-impressive releases with jQuery UI, a library for building rich web application user interfaces in JavaScript.
- After two years of being one of the most notorious paid access sites on the Web, the New York Times has stopped charging for access to the bulk of its content. Could this be the death knell for mass market paid content business models on the Web?
- A quick script that demonstrates how to add a “print this page” link to the page dynamically, using JavaScript, in an unobtrusive manner. For users browsing with JavaScript disabled, the link (which requires JavaScript to work) will not appear.
- A clear and concise description of the alt attribute, and how to use it to improve the accessibility of your web site.
- The Accessible Rich Internat Applications (ARIA) spec specifies roles and states for user interface elements that will enable assistive technologies to make RIAs accessible. This article shows how to include these properties in HTML documents today.
- The latest debate to spring up in the HTML 5 Working Group is over the fate of the longdesc attribute, meant to point to a full description of a complex image. The WHAT-WG’s research shows less than 1% of images that use this attribute do so correctly.
- Dojo’s Alex Russell is the latest industry voice to publicly despair at the state of CSS standards development.
- Six Apart, the company behind LiveJournal and Vox, is working with open standards like hCard, XFN, and FOAF to turn the entire Web into an open social network – something the MySpaces and Facebooks of the world are desperately trying to prevent.
- IBM has released Lotus Symphony, an IBM-branded variation of the free, open source OpenOffice.org office suite. Yawn.
- The latest version of this popular, open-source, PHP-based blogging platform is now available. WordPress 2.3 “includes native tagging support, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements, and much more,”
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