Technology

HTML5 splits into two standards

Just when web developers got a little bit of hope, Slashdot reports on the bad news.

Until now the two standards bodies working on HTML5 (WHATWG and W3C ) have cooperated. An announcement by WHATWG makes it clear that this is no longer true. WHATWG is going to work on a living standard for HTML which will continue to evolve as more technologies are added. W3C is going the traditional and much more time consuming route of creating a traditional standard which WHATWG refers to as a ‘snapshot’ of their living standard. Of course now being free of W3C’s slower methods WHATWG can accelerate the pace of introducing new technologies to HTML5. Whatever happens, the future has just become more complicated — now you have to ask yourself ‘Which HTML5?’

Even if it sounds good, it is actually really bad. HTML5 is already complicated enough, and all major browsers support a different subset of it, and even those things which are supported do differ in the way of how. Splitting the standard just complicated things further. The fact that this is not exactly new, doesn’t really matter. Saying that it won’t be harmful, is silly. As is the whole point of a “living standard”. Like a few people mentioned in Slashdot comments, “living standard” is an oxymoron. The whole point of standard is to provide a static point of reference. Splitting is not a solution to the problem. It’s quite the opposite. Consider this xkcd comics for illustration, which is nothing but the truth.

SL4A – scripting layer for Android

Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A) brings scripting languages to Android by allowing you to edit and execute scripts and interactive interpreters directly on the Android device. These scripts have access to many of the APIs available to full-fledged Android applications, but with a greatly simplified interface that makes it easy to get things done.

Scripts can be run interactively in a terminal, in the background, or via Locale. Python, Perl, JRuby, Lua, BeanShell, JavaScript, Tcl, and shell are currently supported, and we’re planning to add more.

The Secret Online Weapons Store That’ll Sell Anyone Anything

The Bushmaster M4 is a 3-foot rifle capable of firing thirty 5.56×45mm NATO rounds, and used by spec ops forces throughout Afghanistan. It’s a serious weapon. But in the Internet’s darkest black market, it’s all yours. Who needs a background check? Nobody.

The Armory began as an offshoot of The Silk Road, notable as the Internet’s foremost open drug bazaar, where anything from heroin and meth to Vicodin and pot can be picked out and purchased like a criminal Amazon.com. It’s virtually impossible to trace, and entirely anonymous. But apparently guns were a little too hot for The Silk Road’s admins, who broke the site off from the main narcotics carnival. Now guns, ammo, explosives, and more have their own shadowy home online, far from the piles of Dutch coke and American meth. But the same rules apply: with nothing more than money and a little online savoir faire, you can buy extremely powerful, deadly weapons—Glocks, Berettas, PPKs, AK-47s, Bushmaster rifles, even a grenade—in secret, shipped anywhere in the world.

Adobe PhoneGap 2.0 Released

We’re excited to announce the following major new features in PhoneGap 2.0:

Cordova WebView – This allows for the integration of PhoneGap, as a view fragment, into a bigger native application.

Command Line Tooling (CLI) (Android, iOS and BlackBerry) – CLI tooling brings a standard nomenclature to common tasks across platforms such as project creation, debugging, and emulation. Normally, these are different incantations for each platform vendor making cross platform development workflow inconsistent and jarring; we’ve fixed that.

Enhanced documentation – Getting-started guides, plugins, migration guides and more to help accelerate the development of mobile applications and make it even easier.

Web Inspector Remote (Weinre) ported to nodejs – The availability of a node module means easy installation using Node Package Manager (NPM).

Cordovajs (Support for unified Javascript across platforms) – We’ve seen dramatic advancements to performance, security, and API symmetry across platforms thanks to the herculean effort of unifying our JS layer.

Transition to Apache Cordova and nearing graduation from incubation

Windows Phone support

Improvement to iOS app creation – We’ve implemented significant changes for the iOS platform. Get a deeper dive into all the changes from Shaz, our PhoneGap iOS lead developer.