NovoGeek.com - Krishna's weblog

A more beautiful web was launched few days back! After several platform previews, beta build, release candidate build, community feedback and rigorous testing, the final (RTM) version of Internet Explorer-9 has hit the market. On the first day of its release (Mar 14, 2011) itself IE9 saw 2.35 million downloads, which is 27 downloads/second! If you aren't one among them, you should download IE9 RIGHT NOW from here: www.beautyoftheweb.com (Yes, it is an official, trusted site by Microsoft).

Before going any further, let me confess something. I'm a web developer enjoying modern web technologies. I use IE, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari interchangeably. I used hacks to support older browsers. I want HTML5, CSS/JS support, good debugging tools, cross browser compatibility. I want the web to win, like many of you and hence want to share my excitement about IE9, which I call as a win for the web :)

If you are a newbie to IE9, you can check the top features of IE9. Since there are several resources on the features, I want to concentrate on why web devs should get excited about IE9.

As a web dev, whether you love it or hate it, you need to support all browsers. In most of the cases, IT enterprises and their clients are Microsoft shops and will prefer IE+Windows over any other combination. You may be a Firebug geek (check IE9 developer tools), but your client doesn’t bother about it. He needs his site to work flawlessly in IE primarily and of course support the rest. (This is a well known fact which does not need proofs). With rest of the browsers updating quickly, IE was a little behind the race w.r.t supporting newer web standards. "Better late than never", as the saying goes, IE9 comes as a great boon by supporting most of the modern web standards, easing developer's life. So even if you are a firefox/chrome power user, being a web dev, you need to respect IE9.  I'm sure you would love it if the 'critic' mask is removed.  Now comes the below question.

Is IE9 the most 'modern' browser on earth w.r.t web standards?

The answer to this debatable question depends on your definition of the term 'modern'. If implementing web standards drafted by W3C just a couple of minutes back is what you call 'modern', then IE9 is NOT.  If providing 'site-ready' HTML5/CSS3/JS support which developers and consumers can rely without fear is what you call 'modern', then yes, IE9 is the most modern browser :)

Did you know?

Microsoft started something called HTML5 Labs, where it prototypes early, unstable web standards and features proposed by standards bodies like W3C (Web Sockets, IndexedDB etc.). It offers prototypal implementations for unfinished parts of HTML5 which interested developers can try, but consumers can’t yet rely on.

By clearly separating prototype implementations from main stream browser product, many negative consequences can be avoided.  Implementing latest standards in a rush and rolling them back (e.g., Chrome H.264, Google gears etc) for whatever reason is only a pain for web devs. IE team knows what it's competitors already have but is waiting for stability of standards, so that developers can have peaceful time.

What's hot now?

IE9 now supports WebM video format via WebM components for IE9. You should check this article for further details, where Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President of Internet Explorer, makes a truly valid point by saying "The people who build and use the Web deserve practical and consistent video support rather than ideology."

Resources from my friends, which you should check:

  * Article on few FAQs (myths?) about IE9  by  Harish Ranganathan, Microsoft India

  * Article on History of Internet Explorer from IE to IE9 by Kunal Chowdhury, Microsoft MVP

So, it's time for web devs to rejoice and play with modern (and stable) web standards, widening creative and technical horizons. Keep checking the official IE blog for more updates. Enjoy the beauty of the web :)

NOTE: Microsoft TechEd 2011 is just a few days away. If you are unable to make to it, you may watch TechEd 2011 LIVE and watch the sessions, industry trends for FREE. Dont Miss It!! I'm attending in person. See you there! :)

Tags: ie9, browsers

'Data' is the new currency on the web and there are companies fighting for YOUR data. Facebook blocked Twitter from looking up for friends, Google fought with Facebook over data protectionism and such wars are wide spread across the web. Probably, there are business constraints which are beyond the scope of discussion, but how does this matter to us, the end users or more specifically, the developers?

We log in to many social media sites  and continue registering for even more services every day. We spend a lot of time for this, struggle to maintain so many profiles, send friend requests to people who are already friends in other networks, finally ending up locking our data in stovepipes. What is the value of data which is locked in some data silos? It can't be reused anywhere else and is useful only at a single place, which means, such data isn't much useful. It is YOUR data and it needs to be available quickly, easily and in a way that suits your needs. We have already moved from Web 1.0 era, where applications published data stored in 'private' databases. We are in Web 2.0 era, where open APIs are available and mashups can be made to serve our purpose and share information. Yet, data is locked in private databases and building up mashups remained only as loss of time for developers.  Data on a website can be searched by text matching techniques but cannot be queried. Moreover, we cannot move our content from one place to another or reuse our twitter friends list on flickr.

In the age where data is exploding and number of machines (computers) are competing with number of people, the amount of machine readable data (content that a computer can understand when it drops in at your site) is meager. e.g.,  Data on a webpage does not express the relation between different objects in a way machines can understand. Developing content is expensive and developing another app just to support a new service is not 're-use'. Social networking sites are like independent islands, creating many independent communities of users and data. There is a need to connect these islands, allowing users to move from one place to another, along with their data. This is where semantic web standards peek in.

Semantic web standards help in resolving all the issues listed above by creating rich, standard, machine readable content. They work on 'network effects', which means the more users adopting semantic web standards, the more benefit they can reap. e.g., The benefit of cell phones will be best known if everyone in a community owns one, since communication becomes easier. Did you know that you are already in a part of semantic web? If you are using Facebook or Twitter, you are living in a semantic environment without your ignorance. The working of Facebook's "Like" button is entirely driven by these standards. There are many protocols in place and good work is being done by enterprises as well as open source communities in advocating these concepts. RDFa by W3C, Microformats, Abmeta, Yahoo Search Monkey, Google rich snippets, Facebook Open Graph Protocol, Twitter Annotations, etc., are all the efforts to put more machine readable markup on websites.

Semantic Web, Open Data, Linked Data, Web 3.0, HTML5. Are all these same?

This is a huge topic of confusion, with so many terms lying around and people using them interchangeably. UK government opened up their data to the public and this data refers to 'Open Data'. 'Linked Data' is a way of publishing structured data on the web, based on certain principles outlined by Tim Berners Lee. It is essentially aimed at solving the design issues of semantic web, helping in interlinking different islands of web pages. So, Open Data can still be in isolated island, without being linked to other communities. 'Semantic Web' is a web of structured, machine readable data and it makes sense when data is both open and linked. It is huge tree having linked data, vocabularies (FOAF, SIOC), Ontologies, Rules, Reasoning etc.,  as its branches. 'Web 3.0' is a visionary term, imagining a web where machines can understand, add content and artificial intelligence showing its power in search. It is used synonymously with 'semantic web', but the transition to such a generation is not anywhere in the near future, since there is enormous amount of data to be serialized to machine readable format. HTML5 is one of the many enablers of the vision of semantic web and it's microdata specification is designed to simplify the existing annotation technologies.

The goal of this article is to show why developers should care for semantics, in building the next generation of web applications. Intentionally, it is kept far from deep technical things and subsequent articles would go a bit deeper. Hope this held your interest for sometime

Tags: open web, semantics