h-feed is a simple, open format for publishing a stream or feed of h-entry posts, like complete posts on a home page or archive pages, or summaries or other brief lists of posts. h-feed is one of several open microformat draft standards suitable for embedding data in HTML.

Prior to 2017, all W3C standards were free for anyone to implement, allowing free/open browser developers to create their own rivals to the big companies' offerings. But now, a key W3C standard requires a proprietary component to be functional, and that component is under Google's control, and the company will not authorize free/open source developers to use that component.

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you'll find in Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post— almost any place adhering to Modern Language Association (MLA) or AP guidelines. But in copy-editor-free zones—the Web and emails, student papers, business memos—with increasing frequency, commas and periods find themselves on the outside of quotation marks, looking in. A punctuation paradigm is shifting.

DMARC, which stands for "Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance", is a technical specification created by a group of organizations that want to help reduce the potential for email-based abuse by solving a couple of long-standing operational, deployment, and reporting issues related to email authentication protocols. [...] A DMARC policy allows a sender to indicate that their emails are protected by SPF and/or DKIM, and tells a receiver what to do if neither of those authentication methods passes - such as junk or reject the message. DMARC removes guesswork from the receiver's handling of these failed messages, limiting or eliminating the user's exposure to potentially fraudulent & harmful messages. DMARC also provides a way for the email receiver to report back to the sender about messages that pass and/or fail DMARC evaluation.

The Encrypted Media Extensions (DRM in HTML5) specification does not solve the problem the authors are attempting to solve, which is the protection of content from opportunistic or professional piracy. The HTML WG should not publish First Public Working Drafts that do not effectively address the primary goal of a specification.

At the end of the 1990s, Korea developed its own encryption technology, SEED, with the aim of securing e-commerce. Users must supply a digital certificate, protected by a personal password, for any online transaction in order to prove their identity. For Web sites to be able to verify the certificates, the technology requires users to install a Microsoft ActiveX plug-in.

...

It forced consumers to use Internet Explorer because it was the only browser ActiveX plug-ins were compatible with. By default, Web developers optimized not only banking and shopping Web sites for Internet Explorer, but all Web sites.

Unsurprisingly, this later caused all sorts of problems. And this, kids, is why "standardizing" on a vendor-specific solution, as opposed to an actual open standard, is an idiotic idea.

The reality is that IE9 is 2 years late. Microsoft is glad to come out with the <video> tag, the <canvas> tag, SVG, and some CSS3. Like other vendors did years ago. Firefox 3.5 had the <video> tag, the <canvas> tag, Geolocation, SVG in 2009. Canvas and SVG existed 5 years ago.

Let me sum up. The definition of SOAP is in constant flux, SOAP is anything but simple, and it is no longer meant for accessing objects-even though that’s what all the tools still do.

Enterprises addicted to Microsoft's nine-year-old Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) browser are having a tough time migrating to Windows 7, an analyst said today.

...

Organizations running IE6 have told Gartner that 40% of their custom-built browser-dependent applications won't run on IE8, the version packaged with Windows 7. Thus many companies face a tough decision: Either spend time and money to upgrade those applications so that they work in newer browsers, or stick with Windows XP.

But Windows XP won't live forever. Microsoft will retire Windows XP from all support in April 2014, forcing businesses to abandon it or risk running an operating system vulnerable to attack.

Yeah yeah, it's a ComputerWorld article on a Gartner report, but it's just too funny not to bookmark. Ah, the joys of proprietary, nonstandard software.

OStatus is an open standard for distributed status updates. Our goal is a specification that allows different messaging hubs to route status updates between users in near-real-time.