Jul 3, 2006 News Wire

Did you assume aural style sheets were little more than a pleasant fiction? It turns out that several client programs do support them (Emacspeak, Fonix SpeakThis, and Opera among them). This article explains the basics.

A nice DHTML timeline control, with a few caveats. I found it a bit challenging to use without detailed instructions. Current implementation requires timeline data come from an XML source, but the API would allow for more accessible options.

Jason Striegel comes up with a very convincing explanation for the huge spike in the ratings of technology sites on Alexa in April 2006. It turns out the catalyst was Digg overtaking Slashdot’s Alexa ranking.

Blake Ross, the co-creator of Firefox, talks about where Firefox is at as it approaches 2.0, what effect IE7 will have on the browser space, and a secret start-up he is working on with Joe Hewitt (of recent FireBug fame).

Emil Stenström points out some of the downsides of microformats (e.g. they don’t use namespaces), and suggests how they might be addressed (e.g. meta tags to declare microformat versions in use).

Callisto, the Eclipse simultaneous release of Eclipse 3.2 final as well as 10 sub projects is now available for download.

A quick history of Eclipse’s Java Development Tools (JDT), followed by a full run-down on what’s new in the Eclipse 3.2 version of JDT.

This latest preview of the “official” framework for PHP web applications (which is actually quite usable if you only use the working bits) includes a number of new components, as well as a manual translated into 10 languages.

Fusebox 5 was publicly released at CFUNITED. This page describes the changes. Although I’m always wary of framework releases with the words “ground-up rewrite” in them, this actually looks rather nice.

Rails 1.1.3 fixed the security bug. Rails 1.1.4 fixes the problem with 1.1.3.

As with any complex platform, .NET comes with a whole stack of “dos” and “don’ts”. This free tool from Microsoft lets you browse the official library of recommended practices and design patterns for ASP.NET and the .NET platform.

The newest upcoming feature in Rails is ActiveResource, which promises to embrace the RESTful model of application development by making it easy to build full web applications around the REST operations.

This is news to me. Windows has command-line task list and kill task tools. This post shows how they can be used to terminate hung ASP.NET processes.

The June pre-release of Microsoft’s Atlas toolkit for AJAX applications is out, with the ability to embed AJAX-updateable page regions within dynamically generated ASP.NET controls.