I'm pleased to announce that I'll be speaking at Software Development Best Practices in Boston in September. This will be my first time at this show since it was changed its name and focus from Software Development East. I'll be presenting four sessions:
I'll also be hosting a roundtable on "XForms, Web Forms, or What? The next generation of rich user interfaces". I should stress that, today's quote notwithstanding, I don't have a strong opinion about what the right answer is (or answers are) to the question of what next generation client technology should we be using. I've spent some time looking at XForms myself, but I haven't really explored XUL, XAML, WebForms 2.0, and other possibilities. I do hope, however, that we'll have some strong opinions on the panel from various camps. Anyone interested in particpating as a panelist around that table, should drop me a line. Ideally I'd like to have representatives from the Microsoft, Mozilla, WHAT, and XForms camps.
Opera Software has released version 8.0
of their namesake web browser for Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, and Linux. A Mac version is still in beta.
New XMLish features in 8.0 include
SVG Tiny, XHTML+Voice, and XmlHttpRequest.
Other major new features in 8.0 include speech-enabled browsing, fit-to-window width,
easy retrieval of closed pages and blocked pop-ups.
and
inline error pages.
Opera supports HTML, XML, XHTML, RSS, WML 2.0, and CSS. However, XSLT is still not supported.
Opera is $39 payware.
Linspire has posted the fourth pre-release of NVU (pronounced N-view) 1.0, an open source GUI HTML editor for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows based on Mozilla Composer. The software looks reaosnably slick, but I'm still not ready to give up BBEdit for it. The general flow of using the application is pretty rough. Saving is poorly designed, with an unnecessary distinction between publishing and saving, and lots of confusing dialog boxes. I could figure it out if I really wanted to, but my wife couldn't. If there's any way to check the links in a document, I couldn't find it. Mozilla Composer was never a particualrly a good HTML editor in the first place, and while NVU cleans up some of the more obvious editing problems it's done little to fix the underlying problems. If I'm giving a GUI editor to someone who can't type HTML, I don't expect them to understand FTP or URL syntax either. Here's my test for a useful GUI editor that NVU fluunked massively:
Note what is not involved here:
I could (barely) accept the editor asking for a user name and a password, provided it only asked once and never asked for it if it didn't need it. But that's it. Otherwise, editing a page should be just as easy as editing a file in a word procesor like Word, or even OpenOffice (to lower the bar some). NVU doesn't come close to that standard.
Speaking of OpenOffice, Louis Suarez-Potts writes, "A security vulnerability affecting OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 and earlier, as well as 2.0beta, including the developer builds, was recently detected. It has been fixed and a patch is available for immediate download for all users of OpenOffice.org 1.1.4. Users of earlier releases (1.1.3 and prior) must upgrade. Users of 2.0beta are requested to download the latest beta, OpenOffice.org 1.9.95. It will include the patch and be ready shortly."