The Semantic Web

One of my current interests is the semantic web — that is, the push to move from publishing text on the Web to publishing structured data, which can actually be understood by computers (in so far as a computer can truly “understand” anything). By publishing information so that computers can understand it, you make the … Continued

The Great IE8 Meta Tag Climb Down

Yeah, so I know I’m about a week late in mentioning this (I’ve been busy — let’s hope nobody is using this blog as their primary source of news), but the Microsoft Internet Explorer team have backed down on their ridiculous META tag idea. Read about it on IEblog.

The Great IE8 Meta Tag Debacle

So Microsoft, in conjunction with some of the folk at WaSP, has announced its intention to include the quirks mode that beats all quirks modes in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 in an article on A List Apart: Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8. This has proved to be quite a controversial idea. … Continued

Looking Ahead to Perl 6

One of the most important changes in Perl 6 over earlier versions is that it has started out as a written specification, which may end up with several different implementations. In previous versions of Perl, alternative versions had to implement all the quirks of the official Perl interpreter, as the definition of the Perl language … Continued

Looking Ahead to PHP 6

This is my look at what’s planned for the forthcoming revision to the PHP language. Removal of Deprecated Features PHP 6 includes a lot of tidying up, removing features of the language that have caused annoyance, confusion and security headaches. Although these changes are too numerous to list here, and the list will probably change … Continued

The World in 2050?

Large PNG image Scalable SVG image I drew this map and wrote the skeleton of this article in November, but have only recently gotten around to finishing it… Empires The US is occasionally referred to as “the only remaining global superpower”. By 2050, I believe that it will still be a superpower, but that others … Continued