From the monthly archives:

October 2008

Firefox 3.1 - accent on development rather than browsing

by alex on October 16, 2008

Firefox - internet browsers’ messiah

Firefox 3.0 was about changing our browsing experience and provide us with the most astonishing features that any browser can offer us. Major developments and improvements have been made on browsing modern and rich internet services:

  • We got enhanced address bar - “awesome bar” - which intellectually offers you website you kind of want to visit
  • We got advanced bookmarks handling engine - based on tags and “smart bookmarks”
  • Incresed performance (I mean, noticable increased performance) and advanced interface design

With the new addition to 3.0 of major update - 3.1 we see accent on developers. We neither get fancy theme updates nor improved browsing experience (except for extended Tab Switching shortcut)

From previous post:

Looks like Firefox developing policy is to eliminate amount of Add-Ons and include the most of features by default. So happened with Ctrl+tab add-on that adds fancy way of switching the tabs. Although it’s current state pre-beta Ctrl+tab feature seems to be completely functional.

Ah, sorry, forgot to mention - Firefox 3.1 beta 1 has been released. And, as usual, developers team surprises as with their vision in browsing experience.

Developers based features

  • <video>, <audio> tags support - now we can play audio and video files (in .ogg format so far) without any single plugin installed! Amazing, just as W3C has prescripted (HTML 5 new features or new specs by W3C)
  • <canvas> - is now officially supported by Mozilla’s product, we can draw in browser without any Java implementation
  • Firefox is making first steps to implement Google-gears like feature that allows browse through web pages while being offline

So, how the video and audio tags look like?

You can embed your video as simple as inserting <video> tag in your source file and defining which file to play.

I’ve got a few crashes using both <video> and <audio> tags, but it’s still early beta and crashes are part of developing and browsing process.

So it’s great to see Firefox team thinking about future trends and new specifications, as for now it seems that it’s the first development team that officially supports new HTML 5 features.

Interface improvements

As has been mentioned before, we got a renewed Ctrl+tab switched, which is almost Vista native look alike.

One more announced feature is that we can move tab from one Firefox window to another!

This feature was implemented soon after Google announced it’s browser Chrome, which allowed to move tabs freely - move aside from main browser’s window (as a completely separate window) and move from one window to another. But in Firefox you cannot create a separate window from a tab.

And again, crucial condition - you still cannot use your favourite add-ons and themes with your beta, you have to wait until add-on’s developers release updated version - the only reason that stops me from using new beta, which is as usual very good development product from Mozilla team.

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If we are about Web 3.0 - we are about SPARQL

by alex on October 3, 2008

Recently we’ve been talking about how it’s complicated to create and implement new standarts - which have no body, no techniques and no practical approach but only a set of rules. So the new HTML version 5 is no exception. But today we are going to talk about something more sophisticated and deep - SPARQL, which is drafted by the same crew - W3C.

Web 3.0 as we see it

I know, the term itself is very subjective - but if we use our imagination a bit - what Web 3.0 would be formed of? There are many visions - 3D applications in browser, operation system in browser and so on, but there’s one more - artificial intelligence. We have to make our machines think someday! What does any intelligent system need? Brains. The most perfect and suitable brain for intellegent network machine is RSS feeds - lots of them. So to unify somehow we have to have one query language for all of them.

One type of query for different types of data

So, SPARQL - imagine all the RSS feeds for blogs / news services/ social networks around the Net. They are all different - different structure, different formats - and now, with one SQL-like query you can fetch the information from all of them. Cool, ha? This is what SPARQL is about.

What makes SPARQL so simple and so intelligent?

Ontologies and prefix. Each SPARQL query is pre-defined with strict ontology or what pattern to use.

Query example from Wikpedia:

PREFIX abc: <http://example.com/exampleOntology#>
SELECT ?capital ?country
WHERE {
  ?x abc:cityname ?capital ;
     abc:isCapitalOf ?y .
  ?y abc:countryname ?country ;
     abc:isInContinent abc:Africa .
}

The query will return all capital cities in Africa.

Primarly there are no released implementations of SPARQL still, but few projects are in development.

This is about vision. Of course it’s still very subjection and the form of the concept called Web 3.0 is about to change completely. But the direction is impressive - we are very close to create A.I. as we’ve seen it in movies - the machine walks, the machine thinks, the machine feels.

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